Change Google's Background Color To Save Energy?

i_like_spam writes "Recent commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the background colors used by high-traffic websites such as Google and the NYTimes. A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created. However, other calculations by the Wall Street Journal suggest minimal energy savings."

Comments

It's all about priorities

[ben there...]

Somehow I suspect 116,144.654 is a bit overblown, and the About section amused me because obviously setting Blackle to your homepage only saves energy if you have Google for your homepage in the first place.

Yeah, but setting blackle.com as your homepage earns blackle.com a whole lot of money from Google Custom Search.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: "Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".

Think about how much energy we would have saved if we all didn't read this spamvertising.

Re:WHY IT GOTTA BE BLACK!??!!

[hwojtek]

I belive black would turn down the power usage on a CRT, but LCD running white (no voltage applied to the cells, so no dimming) uses less energy... Or am I wrong?

Re: LCDs consume more power to create black

[DataSpring]

Exactly what I was thinking! (The way LCD's produce black is to energize all the pixels that need to be black, "illuminating" them, which makes them opaque, and "get in the way" of the backlight, which is always on.) So, this would effectively *increase* the power consumption of LCD monitors, which are more prevalent everyday, and probably the majority of monitor sales these days.

Re: LCDs consume MORE power to create black

[arete]

mod parent up, a lot.

The article references a DOE article from decades ago - and clearly before the predominance of LCDs - and another article full of comments about how the tests didn't bear this out on LCDs.

And if you REALLY want to save money on your CRTs, this is small potatoes compared to having a power strip for you monitor so you can cut all power to it at night - modern CRTs have a very substantial residual drain to keep the heater warm.

And you can set your machine to monitor-off earlier than sleeping - and since it wakes up from this fast, there aren't a lot of downsides. (This helps CRTs and LCDs...)

Finally, in many LCDs you can simply turn down the backlight - this is generally the largest power component in an LCD.