We’ve been talking about energy saving web design for the last week around here. While that seems like a bit strange to promote black backgrounds on websites, there is a quantifiable savings. From a blog entry,

“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 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.”

One such site is Blackle. But it’s great to consider different color palettes — when appropriate, of course. The other way? Optimize your site for mobile devices. Your celly takes WAY less energy to power than the average laptop or desktop with LCD or CRT. Every little bit counts!

Image from Starry Night Lights.