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Forget cleaning up oil spills, biking to work or recycling. You want to be an eco friendly member of the world? Stop surfing Google. In fact, you’d better shut your browser down right now because my website is an eco-nightmare waiting to happen. What am I talking about? Give me a minute and I’ll tell you.

A few years ago, my little daughter wouldn’t turn off her bedroom light so I told her that every time she left it on, she ran the risk of killing an elf. See, the logic made sense to an eight year old … elves live at the North Pole, her leaving the light on caused global climate change, climate change caused the ice to melt … so now poor Santa’s lost most of the southern facing factories and a couple of the wooden toy shops are closed by Workplace Safety after Blinky fell through the ice.

What’s this got to do with my website or Google for that matter? White baby, white.

It’s a simple concept if you stop to think about it, LCD monitors consume massive volumes of power but just like my daughters light, it really only takes power then the lights are turned on. In the case of computer monitors, black pixels require 59 watts while a white pixel requires 74 watts, a saving of 15 watts of power. That’s actually pretty impressive if you think about it.  Simply by switching to a darker screen, you can save around 20% of the power your monitor is consuming and your monitor consumes about 60% of the power of your computer. My math might be a little off but that’s a lot of power.

So let’s ignore the tree huggers and go straight to the point … money. How much is it costing you to surf my site over a dark site? Well, let’s use the math formula ((watts x hours used) / 1000) * cost per hour. In my case, I’m on the Internet for about seven hours a day plus I have a family who uses the web for at least three hours. So to calculate the extra cost of surfing bright websites my formula looks like this:

((15 x 10)/1000) * 8.3¢ = $0.01245 per day or about $4.54 per year.

I can hear your response already … oh dear no … not $4.54 a year! What are you going to do? How are you going to survive? See, it’s all fun and games until you consider this week’s announcement that the world’s Internet population is now one billion people. Even if they’re only surfing for an average of hour hour per day, that’s a global cost of $454 million dollars a year in power consumption for us to show white pixels over black.

Let’s try looking at this a different way … white pixels cost 15 extra watts per hour to power and the world is having an energy shortage. The world has one billion people surfing the Internet. Let’s assume it’s only for one hour a day. The world is using 15 billion watts of power a day to power excess pixels. 15 billion watts of power is 15 million kilo watts or 15,000 megawatts of power. Iran’s new Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant generates 1,000 mega watts of power … so simply to power the world’s excess white pixels? Iran needs to build 15 new nuclear power plants.

Just something to think about.