The Internet Savvy Environmentalist

What does a person concerned about the levels of power consumption do when they're faced with the need to surf the internet?

They use Blackle, naturally.

What is Blackle? Blackle is the spawn of a curious blog post that pointed out that if Google used a black background, then the world would consume ~8.3 Megawatt-hours less per day, or roughly $75,000 saved per year.

Apparently this doesn't apply to LCD displays though... so unless you run a CRT you can't end the world's energy crisis. Tough luck for you.

Taken from http://www.blackle.com/about/:

How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

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.