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An hour for the Earth
March 27, 2009
Cities around the world will participate in
Earth Hour
on Saturday, turning off their lights to raise awareness for energy conservation.
You might remember that
last year
we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage during Earth Hour to symbolize our own
commitment to sustainability
. We won’t be turning out the lights on our homepage again this year. Our users come first, and while we received lots of enthusiastic feedback last year, some found an all-black Google.com to be a little confusing. (Also, darkened screens don’t actually save energy — modern displays use the same amount of power
regardless of what they display
.) We are actively supporting this year's
Vote Earth
, an Earth Hour 2009 initiative to gather one billion words to present at the
United Nations Climate Change Conference
in Copenhagen in December of this year. Participants can share their opinions about climate change through the
Earth Connect
social platform which incorporates Google tools including
Google Maps
,
App Engine
,
Friend Connect
,
Google Translate
,
Blogger
and
Feedburner
.
After all, Earth Hour is about more than dimming lights; it’s about making a commitment to reduce energy consumption throughout the year. At Google, we take this commitment seriously and over the past twelve months we’ve worked hard to reduce Google’s own power use and to help others reduce theirs:
We remodeled our San Francisco office to achieve a
Gold rating
by the
U.S. Green Building Council's
LEED Green Building Rating System
Our engineers are working on a tool called
Google PowerMeter
that will show consumers home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer
We’ve designed the
most efficient data centers
possible and are sharing some of our best practices with industry peers
In the fall we compiled tips and tricks to
help our users save energy
(and money)
Our
summit on plug-in vehicles
in Washington was standing room only, with policy, technology, and energy experts all discussing an electric vehicle future
Google will continue to work hard this year to be as green as possible as a company, and we encourage others to take an hour on Saturday and commit to the Earth too. For some great ideas on ways you can save energy every hour of every day through computing efficiency, check out
Climate Savers Computing Initiative
and their recent video challenge: “
Power Down for the Planet
.”
Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar
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