High Tech Hippie

I know that there are readers of my blog that have more knowledge than I on this subject, but I thought what I found was interesting so I thought I'd share. Apparently white colors on your computer take more energy to produce than darker colors or black. So there is this website called Blackle.com which is nothing more than Google.com with a black background and gray text. Here is an explanation lifted from Blackle's site :

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

From the 750 Megawatt-hours link above:

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.

If you wanted to take it one step further, here is a website that allows you to darken any website just by opening up a page and then selecting a bookmark and poof the colors are inverted. Just drag the Darken Link into your bookmarks folder and it works from there. Pretty cool.