My last post was about Google and electricity. The news headlines were focusing on Google.org's electric cars initiative (the RechargeIt initiative). Last night, I talked to an investment banker who was involved in taking public humongous Web companies (Amazon, Ebay, Netscape,...), and was now involved in biotechs. I talked about my idea that Google is about to shift from search engine specialist to power provider. He nodded, saying that ten years from now, electricity and Internet providers are going to converge as a whole.
I want to take this idea a step forward. On Martin Varsavsky's blog, an investor in Web 2.0 companies, the blogger recalls a dinner party he spent with Larry Page at the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC in September 2005 (2 months after their $100-million investment in BPL), where the search engine founder explained to the investor that the limits to Google's development is AC/DC. Page explained that his company is one of the biggest energy-consuming work oranization in the world.
The Internet is not a green activity. It is very energy-consuming, therefore a great pollution factor. That same month of September 2005, Luiz André Barroso explained the challenges that Google is facing with its energy-consuming business.
Barroso smoothly describes how to break down the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a large-scale computing cluster into four main components: price of the hardware, power (recurring and initial data-center investment), recurring data-center operations costs, and cost of the software infrastructure.
He concludes that solutions have to be found in order to cut power operating costs. A few months after that, a Google engineer has warned that if the performance per watt of today's computers doesn't improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag. Barroso encouraged right then to turn CMP into an industry standard.
The problem lies somewhere else too: Apparently "50 percent of the power delivered from a wall socket to a PC never actually performs any work," says Urs Hölzle, Google fellow and senior vice president of operations. "Half the energy gets converted to heat or is dissipated in some other manner in the AC-to-DC conversion. Around 30 percent of the power delivered to the average server gets lost."
Once again, solutions have been developped to save on PC power. A new Web site, Blackle, aims to act as a starting point for eco-conscious Web searchers. The site, which serves as a front end for Google searches, reverses the color schemes of search-result pages so users see light-colored text on a black background.
With a black screen, Google could actually save 750 megawatt-hours a year. That works if everybody had a cathode-ray tube monitor, because the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor.
This is not an exhaustive list of why Google needs to focus on electricity matters. In 2006, the current power demand of our major search engines was roughly equal to the amount of electricity burned by Las Vegas, a number that was meant to keep growing. For cheap electricity, Google is acquiring land next to the Dalles Dam in Oregon to build a data center, fueled by the dam and cooled down by the water.
Google is at the dawn of a new economic era where the Internet leads the energy economy. Today, with its solar panels, Google produces 9,902 kilowatt-hours of electricity everyday. This number is only a personal experiment on Google's corporate parc. In my next post, I will push forward into Google's solutions for handling the new electricity situation. Since then, don't hesitate to comment to correct any false info or to lead me to more insightful ones.
Next: The "G" word - What is lying behind Google's secrecy?
