Go noir... save energy!

A friend sent me this e-mail (I am not sure the source). In any case, I think this is a simple way in which YOU can help the environment, without really no sacrifice whatsoever. All you need to do is make your searches in: www.blackgoogle.com. It's the same as google, but with a black bakground.

Benefits? ... reduce eye strain, saves about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year.

An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. Recently a Math was done to see what kind of energy could be saved if Google's search page was black.

Google, 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 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. And at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $300,000, a good amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

Hope this leads you into a neverending journey og having a more sustainable lifestile and preserving the environment. If you feel compelled to do more, I reccommend this site: http://www.earthlab.com/ecp.aspx. Not only it has great information, but also has a carbon emissions calculator that helps you understand your impact in the environment and proposes way to measure and track performance over time... very fun for the measurements driven ;)