Ever noticed how pulling up
www.google.com will make a dark room light up at night?
An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. A blogger has recently done the math to see what kind of energy could be saved if Google changed it's website from white to a black format.
Google, 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. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. And at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $300,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.
I wonder what the chances are of Google ever offering a secondary version of their site that offers a black shell, wouldn't it be as easy as setting up an alternative style sheet for the layout, text and ads? I for one would definitely use it.
www.google.com has burned my eyes more than a few times.
