Page 224 -

196 • Green Project Management

google
When we think of Google, we think first of a search engine but shortly
realize that it is more than that. But even thinking of it as “only” a search
engine, the question comes to mind, how can that be green? First of all,
Google—founded in 1998 by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, and headquartered in Mountain View, California—is a business jug-
gernaut with first-quarter revenues in 2010 at almost $7 billion. They have
offices around the world developing a variety of applications including pat-
ent searches, news, maps, trends, instant messaging, and YouTube, among
others. So with all of this technology (some of which, such as providing
directions and maps, clearly has a green impact of its own) what else are
they doing to be green?
One of the applications that could be of immediate use to project man-
agers is Google’s PowerMeter application. It is a free electrical monitoring
application that can utilize information from a “smart meter” or con-
sumer-owned electricity management device and provides visual informa-
tion about electrical usage directly to the consumer’s personalized Google
home page. Consumers will have access to this personal-use data to better
be able to manage, monitor, and control their electrical usage. Using these
data, project managers can help to lead projects to more effectively and
efficiently use electricity, a limited resource.
Another initiative (we’ll call it a project) Google has undertaken is “effi-
cient computing”:

In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer
will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query. (We [at
Google] care about that too, and in 2007 co-founded the Climate Savers
Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to making all
computers more energy efficient.) 11

Google is obviously computer intensive, like many of us have come to be,
except on a much, much larger scale. However, we can use lessons learned
from their efforts and apply them, with scalability, to our efforts. Google
is using a five-step approach to their “initiative”: (1) making their servers
more efficient, (2) making their data centers more efficient, (3) managing
their water usage, (4) retiring their servers in a sustainable manner, and
(5) working with other members of their community for an “efficient and
clean energy future.”