The Evil that Google Doesn't

A slogan of Google, Inc is "do no evil". They are getting grief for some of their actions, and I'm not here to defend them. We should judge a person or corporation by their actions, no so much by what they say. PR people often pay a lot of lip service to their company being moral which may or may not be true, but instead of listening to what they claim, pay attention to their actions.

One such small action that google did today is blacken their page for energy consumption. They are already aware that a black webpage will not save any energy when displayed on the currently dominant type of monitor in use.

The blacking of the webpage does draw attention at Earth Hour, which can save a noticeable amount of electricity. I'm going to throw some numbers at this based on the following assumptions and see where it gets us:

• the average home turning off its lights, tvs, etc, saves 500W of power for one hour
• only one home in 100 might do this
• apply this to only the USA and Canada (about 330 million people)
• about 2.5 people per home

This comes out to (1 hr)*(500 W)* (1 home does it/100 homes)*( 1 home/2.5 people)*(330 million people) = 660 million W-hrs = 660, 000 kW-hr.

Still, this number might not mean much to most people. Instead, I'll translate this number into money. In this region of the world power is extremely cheap at about 0.06 $ per kilowatt-hour. 660, 000 kW-hr of this extremely cheap power would cost about 39.6 thousand dollars.

If we were generating 660,000 kW-hr of energy continuously over a full year, this savings would represent elminating the need for a 75.3 kW generator. That's not the size of even a moderate power generation facility, but it's not nothing. Keep in mind that this speculative estimate was only for Canada the United States of America. The worlds a lot bigger than that.

This is a token amount. It won't save the world, but shows how we can make a difference in our world power requirements if we are simply slightly more frugal. Every Watt counts.

It's a small good, but it's a good. Google, keep trying to do good. Thinking about implementing clean technology like this.

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com