Google, Our Other Common World Brain, uses 260 MW electricity that would power 200k homes.

Google data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant

via nytimes.com

Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries.

But when it calculates that average energy consumption on the level of a typical user the amount is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours.

Google says that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels in 2010, and estimates that figure will reach 30 percent in 2011.

Google’s estimate of more than a billion searches a day, the figure yields a somewhat surprising result: about 12.5 million watts of Google’s 260-million-watt total can be accounted for by searches, the company’s bread-and-butter service

Google also released an estimate that an average search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity,