Black Google Saves Energy

Did you know that a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor uses about 74 watts to display an all white web page, but only uses 59 watts to display an all black page?

Take at look at Google, for instance, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts.

Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's about $75,000/year. That would be a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

But maybe that's not so good idea. As we go towards wider implementation of LCD and similar technologies that rely on masking the light source, we'll actually be using more energy on black. LCD masks used in most displays and projectors are transparent when no electricity is passed through them. Regardless of how small the amount of power is needed to make the mask turn opaque.

Whether a black screen with white text saves energy is evidently debatable. However, I wonder what the chances are of Google releasing a secondary version of their site that offers a black shell.

Now go and learn some search and powerful tricks.

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| Exploit Google's Search Power | Skype founders are launching net TV | Save the Internet | Who invented the Popcorn Machine? | Clean up your bad web reputation |

Sat, Oct 26 2007

Austin Storm says:

Oof, can you say penny wise?

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