Black Google Would Save 3,000 Megawatts a Year

All white web page use about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. See what happens when you do the math on Google's home page

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.