Google Uses as Much Energy as 200,000 Homes, It's Still Green

Google has always touted its small energy use and its green conscience, but it has never revealed how much its operations consume, until now. Google uses about 260 MWh of power at any given time, powering its data centers around the world.

If you're not too familiar with energy figures, that's about a quarter of the output of a regular nuclear power plant.

But Google says that, while that may seem like a lot, it actually saves energy, when considering the big picture, incidentally, the name of a new Google Green site that showcases all of the things the company does to stay green.

For example, Google says that, if it weren't for its search engine, people would have to drive to libraries to find out anything.

Which may be true to a degree, but it's hard to imagine that there would be 1 billion trips to libraries around the world each day, since that's how many searches are conducted daily.

Still, Google has been carbon neutral for four years now and runs some of the most efficient data centers in the business. It's also buying a lot of green energy and investing in green energy projects as well.

25 percent of the company's energy use in 2010 came from renewable sources and it aims for 35 percent this year.

"We’ve worked hard to reduce the amount of energy our services use. In fact, to provide you with Google products for a month—not just search, but Google+, Gmail, YouTube and everything else we have to offer—our servers use less energy per user than a light left on for three hours," Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of Technical Infrastructure at Google, writes.

"And, because we’ve been a carbon-neutral company since 2007, even that small amount of energy is offset completely, so the carbon footprint of your life on Google is zero," he explained.