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However, Dr Wissner-Gross did not wish to
single out the Internet giant for any
special criticism.
Speaking to the BBC, he explained: “Google
isn’t any worse than any other data centre
operator. If you want to supply really great
and fast results, then that’s going to take
extra energy to do so.”
Meanwhile, through its official blog, Google
stated that Dr Wissner-Gross’s estimates
were “many times too high”. The company
maintained that, far from creating 7g of
greenhouse gases as indicated by Dr Wissner-Gross
research, in fact the average search only
produced 0.2g of emissions.
Google said it required only 0.0003 kWh of
energy per search, or 1 kJ and it used a
slightly different analogy to illustrate its
own figures, stating: “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.”
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