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Blackle: Energy Saving Version of Google

An all white screen, uses around 74 watts to display, an all black screen uses only around 59 watts. Imagine how much energy would be saved if high traffic sites changed their color schemes. Case in point, Google.

Mark Ontkush wrote about this in his blog entry entitled: “Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year”. Mark stated Google, gets about 200 million queries a day, assuming each query is displayed an average of 10 seconds, Google would be running an equivalent of around 550,000 hours every day on one desktop. Shifting to the black background would save around 15 (74-59) watts, running into global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Moreover, at 10 cents per Kilowatt-hour, a whopping $75,000 worth of energy can be saved.

Mark posted this blog in January, a few months and color schemes later, Blackle was born. Even more interesting is Blackle’s watt hour savings counter, tracking how much energy is saved using this version over the all white background. Congratulations to Mark, and Google for paying attention!

Click here to view Mark Ontkush’s blog entry.

Click here to go to Blackle.

Click here to comment to this blog.

Posted by Sean on 07/25

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