"People forget that we are actually a pretty young company. And for example, although our internal energy programme goes back 5-7 years, the company's focus on this problem is only about 2-2.5 years old.

And until recently our organisation wasn't fully built to really do the right thing and be able to go out there and say "hey, look at here's what we are doing, what we really care about".

And we kind of have a tradition of not pre-announcing stuff that we don't have. We want to be there and say "here's what we are doing". And so, give us a little bit of time", said Urs Hölzle, a Google Fellow.

Is Google looking to build data centers next to power sources?

Not necessarily. Ultimately we are a power consumer and it doesn't matter so much where you are. Because ultimately we are putting demand on the grid. And the hydro power that you are not using, someone else would have used it. So you haven't improve anything. It's a grid right? It's all connected, It goes somewhere else. And so to some extent, we're always be using more or less the sum of the power of the supplies in the various countries. So in the US, it's primarily coal. We're going to Belgium, and it'll be a mix of nuclear probably, natural gas and hydro.

No. The power market depends on how they are regulated. There's only one supplier in the Bay Area. If it's deregulated like in the EU and the market is working pretty well then it doesn't matter necessarily where you are that much. We went to Belgium not because of the power plant. We could have gone to France or the Netherlands for example.

Because it's sort of one of the very few tangible things about what you are looking at that you can actually see. Data centers are one visible component. And I think that's appealing because you can visualise it.

For our first year, we'll adopt the new Energy Star guideline which is also coming into effect this July. So during the first year, it's the same standard and therefore vendors have already worked to meet that standard. So you buy today PCs that are Energy Star 4.0 compliant. And that's the only reason why we can start quickly. What we are focusing is let's not just let that standard stand there because that's relatively easy to get to. And next July, get to the next level, and so on. And really in these 4 steps get to a much better standard.

They're a government agency and I can't tell what is there thinking, but that will be ideal. But it's hard to align things, and so we have our own logo, and I think definitely if there are differences next year and if the consumer interest is there and our vendors will want to go and brand their products with the logo to tell the consumers that their machines are energy efficient. We will definitely looking for a premium kind of products, in a sense this is the best in the market today in terms of energy efficiency. It's kind of the Energy Star 3.0 that almost everyone now fulfills. And as you saw from the numbers, that's not very ambitious. But at the time when it came out, it was a pretty ambitious, it was improvement from what we had before, but they get revised relatively rarely and so it's a very slow trajectory.

A good of our blade components are compliant with our 2009 goal. We have an internal engineering group that are power engineers.