Posted by Samuel Cheung, Regional Lead, Asia-Pacific, Google Apps Supporting Programs for EDU

Rolling green hills, a skyline of trees and no traffic in sight. Yes, this is Thailand. Today in partnership with the prestigious Mae Fah Luang University, we’re supporting an educational institution famous for its breathtaking natural environment in their vision to become a Green University by going Google.

Through the Google Apps for Education Support Program, 14,000 teachers, students and staff from Mae Fah Luang University will now use Google’s collection of free email and open collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google+, Docs, Calendar and Groups, and be the first educational institution in northern Thailand to go Google.

Being cloud enabled means students and teachers can take full advantage of the web and collaborate wherever they are. No matter if they are on a bus, at home, or enjoying one of the many beautiful gardens on the Mae Fah Luang University campus. Leading-edge technologies, like cloud computing and collaborative tools, have a vital role to play in helping equip future generations with the skills they need to thrive in the workforce of today and tomorrow.

Why is going Google greener?
In addition to supporting learning, the move to the cloud will also help Mae Fah Luang achieve their sustainability goals. Our energy efficiency efforts mean our cloud is greener, ensuring that colleges, universities and businesses that use our cloud based tools, such as Gmail and Google Apps, are greener too. Our analysis suggests that a typical organization can achieve substantial energy and carbon savings—ranging from 65 to 85 percent—by migrating to Google Apps and that an organization using Gmail can decrease its environmental impact by up to 98 percent.

Just 9 months ago, we were excited to announce the first university in Thailand to go Google in Khon Kaen province. Today 13 educational institutions and more than 300,000 students, teachers and academics in Thailand have gone Google, and that’s just the beginning.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure

(Cross-posted on the Google Green Blog.)

At Google, we’re obsessed with building energy efficient data centers that enable cloud computing. Besides helping you be more productive, cloud-based services like Google Apps can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year, we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to 80 times more energy-efficient than running traditional in-house email. We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole—documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications—stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our results show that a typical organization can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps.

Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organizations. That’s what happened at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which recently switched approximately 17,000 employees to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction.

How is the cloud so energy efficient? It’s all about reducing energy use for servers and server cooling. Here’s how it works:

A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilized. And our data centers use equipment and software specially designed to minimize energy use. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.

In fact, according to a study by the Carbon Disclosure Project, by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020:

• US companies could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2
• UK companies would save £1.2 billion and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
• French companies could save nearly €700 million and 1.2 million metric tonnes of CO2

We’ve built efficient data centers all over the world, even designing them in ways that make the best use of the natural environment, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.

Posted by Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and the Google Green Blog.)

For the last year, our data center team has been working on a project to bring our facilities to even higher standards for environmental management and workforce safety. Recently we got the good news that our work paid off.

All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. We’re the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers.



In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you’re going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part’s up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we’ve followed through on them.

Here’s an example of the kind of improvements we’ve implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we’ve done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we’ve managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent.

A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly.

These are just two elements of what ultimately adds up to a comprehensive system of policies that our data center teams follow in their day-to-day operations. We do this because we want to be the gold standard in environmental and workforce safety, and because we care about the communities where we live and work. This is one more reason you can feel confident that when you're using our products, you're making an environmentally responsible choice.

Our data centers in the following U.S. locations have received this dual certification. We plan to pursue certification in our European data centers as well.

• The Dalles, Ore.


• Council Bluffs, Iowa


• Mayes County, Okla.


• Lenoir, N.C.


• Monck’s Corner, S.C.


• Douglas County, Ga.