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Ransom Riggs
Black Google could save watts aplenty
by Ransom Riggs - February 7, 2007 - 9:16 AM

googledark.jpgMaybe not 1.21 gigawatts, the energy needed to power Doc Brown’s fabled Flux Capacitor — but nearly 750 megawatts, according to the folks at EcoIron. The back-of-napkin math behind the idea is this: white pixels take more wattage to display than black pixels. Something like 200 million queries come Google’s way each day. Google is white. That means Google is being displayed about 550,000 hours per day, cumulatively.

Assuming most people display the page full-screen, on both CRT and LCD monitors, changing the Google homepage background to black would save about 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or 3,000 per year. At 10 cents per Kilowatt-hour, that works out to approximately $75,000/year in energy savings — all from changing just a few lines of HTML code.

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Comments (10)

  1. Which is why everyone should use www.ninja.com

    posted by Cory on 2-7-2007 at 10:04 am

  2. Does anyone actually go to their website anymore? I haven’t seen www.google.com in months. I use either the search bar in my browser or just type something in my address bar.

    posted by Drew Lanning on 2-7-2007 at 10:59 am

  3. i live on google. i email on google. i work on google. i work in GIS and every day I look at all the imagery to compile the data for my job.

    posted by nick on 2-7-2007 at 11:21 am

  4. I use google images a lot. It’s a great resource for art students. Just type in “forest ground cover” for example and, voila, loads of examples to refer to.

    posted by Milica on 2-7-2007 at 11:27 am

  5. Would that work? I think LCD screens have florescent bulbs backlighting the screen, and the color of the pixels just determines what color light can pass through–not the intensity of the bulb or how much power is consumed.

    posted by Rob S on 2-7-2007 at 12:40 pm

  6. Actually, this just isn’t true. While it would save some small amount of electricity on CRT monitors, you would more than lose that savings because displaying black on an LCD monitor takes MORE energy. LCDs use backlights, which are white–the color comes from crystals that block some of the light when electricity is introduced. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lcd for more info.

    posted by Sam on 2-7-2007 at 12:53 pm

  7. At the very least, doing this will be easier on the eyes.

    posted by Sillstaw on 2-7-2007 at 1:32 pm

  8. This definitely doesn’t apply to LCD monitor which use the same amount of electricity regardless of the color they’re displaying. I imagine CRTs no longer be commonly used in a few years anyway.

    posted by Raffy on 2-7-2007 at 3:39 pm

  9. It’s all retro-evolving back to DOS, I tell ya!

    posted by Nat on 2-8-2007 at 2:34 pm

  10. See blacklys.com - The Black Google that i have ever seen

    They have a firefox Search Extension too.. Interesting..

    More over, You can rename the main display to anything you like. Cool huh?

    posted by 1David on 7-6-2007 at 8:40 am

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