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Measuring the environmental impact of the Web

Tony Chan | January 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

With 1.5 billion people logging onto the Internet on a regular basis, it is no surprise that someone would start looking at the environmental impact of simply browsing the Web pages or accessing the Internet from a home PC.

The latest attempt, Google, the biggest Internet company around, is put under the spotlight. According to a report in the UK’s Sunday Times, every time you do a search on Google, you will be generating 7 grams of carbon emissions because you are accessing Google’s servers and infrastructure, which must use energy to serve your request.

The report, based on various estimated by academics, researchers and experts, says that conducting two such searches is like boiling a kettle for tea, which generates 15 grams of carbon.

Due to some misreading of the original story, which followed the carbon impact claim of Google searches with a quote from Harvard University physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, subsequent pick ups from news agencies and blogs, wrongly attributed the data to Wissner-Gross.

Actually, the 7 gram per Google query figure comes from a quote much later in the story from Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, who makes the assertion based on an estimate of CO2 from 15 minutes of PC usage.

Google refuted the Times report a day later with its own data. Wissner-Gross spent most of Monday setting the record straight, saying that he never did mentioned Google by name, but was simply talking about the impact of general Web activity, which he says, generates about 0.02 grams of CO2 per second to view a typical Web page, and 0.2 grams for media rich sites.

Google argued on its blog that a typical search takes less than 0.2 seconds and that average queries take ‘a few thousandths of a second’ of work on its servers, hence the equivalent CO2 emission is closer to 0.2 grams per search.

How Google and Wissner-Gross came up with their figures remains unclear and is not defined by any of the reports. What is interesting is the amount of discussion that the Times report generated on the topic of the Web’s environmental impact and how the world can actually go about measuring the data.

There’s very little information on how the Wissner-Gross study came up with the figures for the web page views, or how Google estimated its own energy usage for each query.

Google points specifically at the energy consumed by its servers, as well as its infrastructure for indexing the data. What it doesn’t reference is the network and servers that are needed for making all the data available – so it can be searched in the first place. Likewise, Wissner-Gross’ estimates seem to be based strictly on the energy consumed by the processing power that is required to render Web pages from the server and on the PC.

Perhaps the only fact that is categorically true is that the Web uses up a lot of energy. One very interesting fact is provided by Google’s blog, which says that every 1000 searches would equal driving a car for one kilometre.

With an estimated 200 million Web searches (Google and other search engines combined) taking place very day, the amount of CO2 from just people looking for information would equal driving a car for 200,000 km.

Presumably, this would only equal the emissions from the search engine companies’ infrastructure, and does not include the servers that are hosting the actual sites, the PCs that are used to access the Internet, the network equipment that needs to be turned on all the time to ensure connectivity, nor the storage, the cooling, and other passive infrastructure that needs to be keep the Web going.

At the end of the day, the whole episode highlights the challenges of measuring the environmental impact of the Web in any meaningful way. That’s not to say people should not keep trying. With the Web getting more interactive, more mobile, its environmental profile will only get bigger.

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