Google Won't Go Dark to Go Green

(page 2 of 2)

Ontkush has revamped his own blog, ecoIron, using a dark green, rust red, and black color palette created by Jonathan Doucette, a graphic designer at Woodard & Curran, an environmental engineering company in Portland, Me. Doucette chose the shades because they took less energy to display than the white and bright hues common on so many Web sites, but were not as boring as some of the dark grayish shades that consumed the least amount of energy. He named the color group "emergy-c" for embodied energy color. "We just wanted to make people aware that there were little things you could do to save energy, especially if you spend a lot of time online on your Web site," says Doucette.

Energy Star Color Ratings

Doucette tested various color palettes with a wattage meter. He found a white screen with black text uses about 74 watts per hour on a CRT monitor. A black screen on a CRT monitor only uses 59 watts. His color palette uses about 60 watts.

Doucette's energy readings were identical to those from the federal Energy Dept. According to the DOE's Energy Star Web site, white and bright background colors use up to 20% more power than black or dark colors. Silver, for example, uses 67 watts compared to gray which only uses 62 watts. Colors that use less than 65 watts include lime green, gray, olive, purple, teal, green, maroon, navy and, of course, black.

The idea of emergy-c appears to have taken off with many Web site designers despite the fact that it only saves power with CRT monitors. A search for emergy-c reveals more than 16,400 links. Many of the sites are in Spanish and Portuguese. Doucette says that he has spoken with press in Brazil, where CRT monitors are still common.

For Best Results, Unplug Your Computer

For computer users with an LCD screen, the Environmental Protection Agency has some advice to reduce energy consumption, besides simply dimming the monitor's brightness. They recommend shutting off the power to computers not in use instead of simply turning devices off or letting them hibernate—both states in which devices draw small amounts of power (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/14/07, "It's Not Easy Buying Green").

The EPA also recommends using Energy Star-rated computer monitors. HP's Gray says that reducing the brightness on monitors can also save a considerable amount of energy, as well as avoid eye problems. Often monitors are set to very bright settings in the stores to stand out, and are shipped at near-maximum brightness, he explained (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/14/07, Slide Show: "The Greenest PCs").

Even if going dark doesn't save much energy on most computers, Web designers have another reason to go black: It looks cool. "Black gives an elegance," says Canadian Web designer Jonathan Henriksen, whose Web pages seem to be influenced by the emergy-c palette but in fact are built that way simply for style. "Black is classy."

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.