Black Google
 

Blogger ecoIron has stirred up a little dust by claiming, if Google changed their pages from white to black, collectively, we would save 750 Megawatt-hours each year. Now that's one hell of a lot of electricity....doesn't seem possible.

Using information from GoldStar (US Dept Energy), a black screen burns 59 watts vs a white screen at 74 watts.

Then he took Google's 200 million queries/day, displayed for about 10 seconds each, gives 550,000 hours/day total, Google's on PCs.

So, a shift from white to black saves 15 watts or 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year, for the World.

But, you say, I've got a fancy schmancy LCD screen. Gotcha covered, about 25% of the screens are CRTs, that's why only 750 Megawatt-hours. But at an average of 10 cents a Kilowatt-hour, that's still $75,000.

Of course CRTs are disappearing but look at all the oil and coal that could be saved, all the pollution that could be avoided, and we won't even get into Global Warming.

This is what GoldStar claims for color costs.

Very interesting. If true, it shows that there are lots of little ways to save energy without impacting our lives much at all.

Do you guys want a power-saving Cellar color scheme?

I suppose all these Green people should be switching to 12" monochrome CRTs....imagine how much *that* would save.

Or Tandy 100's powered by potato batteries and composted methane.

I'd rather see Google fund Bussard and his Whiffleball fusion reactor then playing "paper or plastic" games with color schemes.

If you are bored and have nothing better to do, I'd play with it and might even switch to it if it was easy to read. But it hardly seems worth your effort with the two or three people who might use it in the Cellar.

Haw haw! That's hilarious! I got a good one, too: how about we outlaw wasteful standby mode on consumer electronics? :lol2:

Can you make it look like a Command Prompt? That would be the best way for me to pretend I'm working on computer-guy stuff.

Ooh, I do.
:)

Does the color not matter for LCD? I'd think that a white pixel would have red, green, and blue all "on" (or "off", I'm not sure what the mechanism is). It wouldn't be nearly as much of an effect, as the majority of the power use would be the always-on-everywhere backight, but there should be some sort of effect.

careful......once you go black.....

Time better spent with the paypal link. ;)

As of today, i've recolored my DMS screen to black in order to save energy .

The problem is, for most people, light text on a dark background is a lot more taxing on the eyes than the reverse, and I remember reading the results of a study that indicated people reading light text on a dark background were slower and more likely to make errors. Can't remember the name of the author or even if it was published, but it makes sense to me -white/yellow/green on black makes my eyes water. Mind you, that could just be the memories of days spent in the undergrad computer dungeon.

I think a dark screen makes the reflections on the surface glass more apparent, too. ;)

How about we quit making stupid laws? Nah...that'll never work.