After the Black Google post, many folks said that I should redesign my site to make it more energy efficient. I did that, but took it one step farther by designing an energy efficient palette too. Starting with the EnergyStar wattage ratings for different colors, Jon Doucette of Jonathan Design came up with the six colors at top. On average, this palette uses only about 3 or 4 watts more than a completely black screen. White is included as an accent color.
The hex codes are as follows:
#822007 (rusty red)
#000000 (black)
#b2bbc0 (blue grey)
#19472a (forest green)
#3d414c (cobalt)
#ffffff (white) What can you use it for? Any application that is displayed on a device that uses CRT, Plasma, or OLED technology. Any device where white costs money - handheld units, web sites, TV. Enjoy.
As noted, 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 [on a CRT monitor! mjo] 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. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.
[ed. This got Dugg. The link to the wattage for different colors is from EnergyStar.]
[ed. There's a follow up as well.]
[ed. And now there's a FAQ too! 7/28/2007.]
[ed. OK seriously, this is the definitive piece on this, very long Wiki-esque post that covers everything to date. 8/6/2007]
After the Black Google post, many folks said that I should redesign my site to make it more energy efficient. I did that, but took it one step farther by designing an energy efficient palette too. Starting with the EnergyStar wattage ratings for different colors, Jon Doucette of Jonathan Design came up with the six colors at top. On average, this palette uses only about 3 or 4 watts more than a completely black screen. White is included as an accent color.