carbon cost of google dispute

bbc report on google carbon footprint is under debate - i calculated this on the basis that
1. google has to trawl and index the web
2. the web has to be up for google to do this
3. so I count all the machines up in the contribution to the costs

how many thousand searchs are the same
energy consumption as 1 lightbulb for an hour?

This site lists 200 million a day in the USA
http://searchenginewatch.com/2156461

so divide by 24 to get searches per hour:
that is about 10million an hour

these guys list US power consumption at
40 billion KWhours per year
(admittedly a couple of years ago)...

so we need to divide that by 360
gives around so 100 million kilowatts (in an hour)
serves 10 million web searches

which means that 10 watts for an hour is needed for 1 web search

i.e. 1 100 watt lightbulb for about 10 minutes for a single search!!!

Google of course (fairly) say that the actual search itself is highly efficient and runs on well engineered eco-friendly data centers....but the pubic understanding
is pribably gonna favour my type of argument over theirs....

alas