Down to Earth Blog

Save Energy on Every Internet Search:  Someone sent me a link today to a cool new version of Google, called Blackle. It's basically Google with a black background and gray text.

The site bills itself as "Energy Saving Search." The idea is that it takes more electricity, and thus energy, for a computer monitor to display a white background as opposed to a black background.

Blackle tells you how many watt hours of electricity it has saved -- right now it reads 123,889 watt hours, which is about 1/86 of the electricity an average U.S. household uses per year.  (I'm using the number 10,656 kilowatt hours per household per year from this Energy Information Adminstration site. The stat is from 2001 data.)

Now the regular Google site can be pretty darn bright, with all that white space and all. Blackle reminds me of an AC/DC album cover.  It's pretty cool, but once you do a search the gray text is hard to read.

Still, every search saves a bit of energy and every little bit counts. I might use it as much as my eyes can stand it. How about you?

Post your comments here.

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• #2 Comment from downtoearthblogEntry Author 
  8/8/07 4:59 PM | Permalink

  I received an e-mail from Toby Heap from Heap Media, the company that built the Blackle.com Web site. He launched the site in February 2007.  I asked him how much energy the black screen saves.  He replied:  "The amount of energy saved depends on the screen that is being used to view the pages. Things that effect this are the screen size and type of screen (very little energy is saved with CCFL backlit LCD screens, quite a bit is saved with CRT screens, LED backlit LCD screens, Plasma screens and OLED screens fall somewhere in between)."
  
  -- Dan Kulpinski
• #1 Comment from forbes82604 
  8/5/07 3:19 PM | Permalink

  Is it really a true version of Google? or a take-off? Does it print all black when you print a page? That would be tough on the world's ink-supply. I think gery-on-black sounds very hard to read. Don't know if I'll gum up my machine by trying this Blackie thing. When I tried Dogpile it really did something wierd to my whole system. I still can't get my visual thesaurus to work because of it. It left some Java-fragment still trying to complete itself. Any other downsides to this new search-engine? Anybody out there have answers? Someone who has already tried Blackie? I'm tempted to try it. Don't know yet if I will.