Stung by accusations its business harms the planet

NEW YORK — Stung by concerns that using Google is bad for the planet, the Internet search giant has revealed specifically how much electricity the company uses and how much greenhouse gases it produces in an effort to show its business model is environmentally friendly.

Rick Needham, Director of Green Business Operations at Google said in an interview that Google will continue to release this data periodically so the company's progress can be publically tracked. "It holds our own feet to the fire," he said.

Also, Google is trying to prove that its business model is far greener than the alternative. Even if data centers use lots of power, using them to run a search on, say, the legend of Atlantis, uses far less energy than driving to a library and looking through an encyclopedia for the information.

Google, Microsoft and others in the information research industry are pushing business clients to shift to centralized data centers packed with thousands of computers to store and process data and run software.

Using this model, called cloud computing, is far more efficient and cheaper for companies than running their own servers, email programs and other software in in-house information research departments, according to Jonathan Koomey a consulting Professor at Stanford University who studies data center efficiency.

Other companies that rely on cloud computing, just as the business software company Salesforce.com, have as well conducted studies that show cloud computing is more efficient.

Typical data center

And for every kilowatt-hour used for computing in a typical data center, near a whole additional kilowatt-hour is used for running cooling and heating systems.

Google says its data centers are about twice as efficient as typical data centers as measured by a score it publically reveals each quarter that measures how much power is used directly for computing compared with power used for heating and cooling.

Horowitz hopes Google's disclosure prompts other big data center operators just as Apple, Amazon.com and the U.S. Government to as well reveal data center efficiency and work to improve it.