Filed under: Rumors, Google (GOOG)

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is a leader when it comes to being a “green” kind of company. It shuttles employees from the Bay Area to its Mountain View headquarters in biodiesel vans, has what is considered the be the largest solar array in corporate America and uses alternative energy in its operations, unlike most of the business world.

But what about all the actual electricity the company consumes? It has huge data centers all over the world that power its search and web product network, and these campuses consume gobs of electricity off the global grid. So, does Google purchase electricity for these data centers from electric cooperatives that generate all that juice with standard coal-fired electricity generation plants? Hard to tell, because the company won’t say.

Sure, electric consumption is a competitive secret of sorts, even though RechargeIT.org — under Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org — is focused on hybrid and alternative transportation methodologies. So, why is Google so mum when it comes to the amount of electricity it consumes on a global basis?

Is the company afraid someone will reverse engineer those power figures and figure out just how many servers and data centers the company has? Is that competitive advantage to anyone? Perhaps, perhaps not. Google, though, probably does not want the world to know of the massive consumption of electricity that powers the company’s services while it breathes, eats and lives the word “green” on the other side of the table.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Employment opportunities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.