Carbon cost of google search 1000 times less than boiling a kettle

A few days ago, the BBC new website published this article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7823387.stm

which states that 2 searches on google uses “as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle”. Now I’m pretty sure this is a load of cobblers, it doesn’t make sense and is disputed by google who say a search only uses 1/35 of this amount.

Firstly I have a problem with the recognition that this study is getting by being front page technology news on BBC.  Its been reposted all over the internet and taken as the truth.  We all like to trust the BBC implicitly so I find reporting an article which is obviously hocum as a bona fide study causes all kinds of trust issues.

Secondly I think some basic calculations using my own electricity monitor could prove that the study by US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross is flawed.  The article suggests that a good proportion of the energy use in the search is by the use of a standard home computer for the search.  My home computer draws 96W of power and a search takes 0.24 secs.  So the energy use for a typical search on my computer is 0.0000064KWh.  As a rough estimate I will calculate the total energy use for a search as twice this – to allow for the power needed in google’s data centres (using big power hungry servers for a tiny fraction of a second).  So I have a grand total of 0.0000256KWh as the total energy use for 2 google searches.

Compare this to  boiling my kettle with the minimum amount of water (about 1 cup).  Power use is 2.007KW while boiling and the time taken to boil the kettle is 55 seconds.  So total energy used in boiling the kettle for one cup of tea is 0.0307KWh.  Final results are that boiling a kettle takes rougly 1000 times more energy than doing 2 google searches.

Now I know that this may not be the perfect calculation but I think my sums are relatively sound.  Obviously where I am missing information is on how much power is used at google’s end.  Even allowing for my calculation to be out by several factors I could not get anywhere near the result suggested.  Now I am not a physicist but i was once a mathematician, but I’m pretty sure my ‘study’ won’t get the same recognition as Alex Wissner-Gross!