Google claims that organizations can achieve energy savings of 65% to 85% by migrating to Google Apps. The company, citing numbers from a Carbon Disclosure Project study, says companies with over $1 billion in revenues could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2 by 2020, simply by migrating to the cloud (which doesn’t necessarily mean Google Apps, of course).

“A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing,” writes Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google. “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.”

Google shared the following diagram:

Google 6 minutes ago

Cloud computing is so energy efficient that a typical organization can save 65%-85% on energy costs by migrating to Google Apps. Check out the diagram below to learn about why the cloud is so efficient, or you can read more on the Official Google Blog: http://goo.gl/8kUg4 52    5 Powered by socialditto

Google says the U.S. General Services Administration was able to reduce server energy consumption by 90% and carbon emissions by 85% by “going Google”. The organization will save $285,000 annually on energy costs, Google says.

Google is working on making its own Data Centers more efficient. In March, the company announced some improvements, and claimed that its data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center.

Google has data centers in South Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Carolina, Oregon, Finland, Belgium, Hong Kong and Singapore.