Last year, Nest launched its Rush Hour Rewards that offered rebate checks of up to $60 to owners of the Google-owned thermostat system in exchange for a reduction of their air conditioning use. Today, the company announced that the program was a success, managing to cut energy use by 55 percent during peak hours in the summer of 2013.
Ad-supported apps in Android smartphones are an immense energy suck.
According to a Purdue University study (PDF), which—interestingly enough—Microsoft helped research, third-party advertising in free Android apps deplete 65 percent to 75 percent of an app’s energy. The study said more than 50 percent of energy used for serving ads occurs during the “3G Tail.” In other words, energy continues to dole out after the process requiring power completes.
The researchers analyzed the energy squandering of 21 Android and Windows Mobile apps over a 3G connection, but the study only highlighted five Android apps (Angry Birds, the Android default browser, Chess Free, MapQuest, and The New York Times).
More information is available below.
Google has just published a study entitled “Google’s Green Computing: Efficiency at Scale” comparing traditional business email solutions with Gmail. The results? Gmail is “almost 80 times” more energy efficient than conventional in-house software. This takes into account all Google infrastructure necessary to support the service.
A report from the Official Google Blog explains:
“…cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.”
To help put it all in perspective (kind of), Google offers the comparison presented in the graphic below showing one year of Gmail is comparable to drinking a bottle of wine, stuffing a letter inside, and throwing it in the ocean. Google also put YouTube to the test and discovered that 1 minute of video consumes approximately 0.0002 kWh of energy. Thus, 72 hours of video would be equivalent to one packaged and delivered DVD.
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