June 13, 2007
Fighting the Valley’s power addiction
Sun chairman Scott McNealy is fond of wearing his family’s automaking roots in Detroit as a badge of working class honour. Most technology execs, though, would rather run a mile than risk being compared to such an environmentally unfriendly industry.
Yet Silicon Valley’s image-makers face the same PR problem as Detroit’s finest when it comes to addressing the issue of global warming. The harder they work to paint themselves as environmentally aware, the more they draw attention to the rampant inefficiency of many of their existing products. The lastest case in point: today’s announcement of an initiative by Google and Intel to boost the power-conversion effectiveness of PCs and servers.
This is clearly a laudable aim. But how green can the Valley claim to be when the inefficiency of some of its products seems to rival that of Detroit’s famous gas-guzzlers? The power supply equipment in a PC (the unit that converts mains AC power to direct current and regulates the voltage that flows through to the CPU) turns only half of the power it receives into useable energy. Server power supplies waste a third of the electricity they suck off the grid.
This once again draws attention to the broader environmental damage caused by the sort of massive server farms built by Google and powered by Intel chips. Just how many searches per gallon does Google achieve, anyway?
Challenged to disclose Intel’s carbon footprint, Pat Gelsinger fluffed, saying the information was disclosed today in a "white paper" (PR-speak for a one-sided analysis of a subject) on Intel’s website. But that report discloses nothing of the sort. Meanwhile Urs Holzle, the man charged with running Google’s datacenters, stuck rigidly to Google’s famous secrecy about the scale of its own massive computing base. He said Google would shortly announce a string of new energy-saving iniatitives, but stopped short of promising that it would disclose it’s overall impact on the environment.
Four years ago, it was widely rumoured that Google ran 500,000 servers in its datacenters. Since then it has grown from a neat little search engine into a global internet power. Larry Page and Sergey Brin may be in line to be among the first customers for the all-electric Tesla sports car, but that shouldn’t detract from the wider environmental impact of the company they created.
