Amount of energy used in one Google Search May 31, 2009

An average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

To add some context, below is data about the C02 impact of some everyday activities and items compared to Google searching:

Activity	Google Searches
CO2 emissions of an average daily newspaper (PDF) (100% recycled paper)	850
A glass of orange juice	1,050
A cheeseburger	15,000

Spam is slowly eating the environment May 5, 2009

Key Findings:

• An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
• Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
• The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times
• The average business email user is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related.
• The energy required annually to create, send, receive, store, and view spam adds up to more than 33 billion KWh, approximately equivalent to 4 gigawatts of baseload power generation or the power provided by four large new coal power plants.
• ICF estimates spam-related emissions for all email users at an annual total of 17 million metric tons of CO2
• Users viewing and deleting spam is the largest energy drain associated with spam, almost 18 billion kWh or 52 percent of total spam energy.

Source: McAfee