Goth Google Saves Energy

I just found a related story on digg.com. EcoIron.com claims that a "black Google" would save 3,000 Megawatt-hours a year.

…an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, 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. 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.

His analysis for the energy savings seems like it is only accurate for CRT monitors and not LCD’s, but he does seem to bring up an interesting point. Maybe OmniNerd should go Goth too and help save the world from global warming!