Wednesday, September 29, 2010

How A Simple Change to My Site Design Saves You Energy

Black Hole
There is an interesting posting that I stumbled across recently which posed the question of 'what if all of the most popular web sites used a black background instead of a white background'?


Their basic analysis 3 years ago was that if the top sites (Google, YouTube, Yahoo, MSN, and MySpace) switched to black backgrounds, collectively all users would save $36,000 per hour. Of course, with hundreds of millions of users, that only translates to less than a cent for any individual, but more interestingly, it translates to 300 megawatts of energy per hour saved. To put that into perspective, that is 3 times the amount of power the worlds largest solar photovoltaic plant produces (as of 2009 data). And that 300 megawatts of savings is based on 3 year old internet usage levels and only considers the top sites.

Many people are surprised to learn that monitors and TV's use less power when displaying black (this is the same reason why toning down the contrast and brightness can save a few watts). I've talked previously about this in Four Ways to Reduce Computing Cost by $100 or More A Year and Television Sets and Power Usage - How to Pick a New TV and Optimize It.

As an example, if every page I viewed was primarily black, I'd save 10 watts over an average of 4 hours per day, translating to $2 per year at my slightly higher than average electricity rate. Obviously, not really a noticeable amount, but when multiplied by 100 million online Americans, it begins to become substantial.

No comments:

Post a Comment