Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Meet Blackle - (not to be outdone by Crapple)

Meet Blackle (I'm sure they love me giving them free press) - an energy saving google search engine.

According to their website

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."

also

Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year

Wow that's impressive. Nice work. Their webpage currently has them at saving 112,427.811 Watt hours. So they've saved just over a tenth of a megawatt. Good stuff.

So what does this all mean?

Well 0.11 megawatts or 112 kilowatts saved, means that they have stopped the release of about 48kg or 0.048 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Incredible.

Given that the world puts about 27,500,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year - if every single person in the world uses Blackle instead of Google, we will reduce green house gas emissions by 0.00000000192%

If we assume that 100% of greenhouse gases cause the raise in temperature that we are currently observing (very unlikely), then if everyone uses blackle we will save the warming of the planet by approximately:

0.0000000000001152 degrees per year.

Wow! I wonder if the climate scientists have allocated a variable in their climate models for this?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn! I have an LCD monitor and the lights stay on behind the screen even when it's black! I'll have to switch back to my old power-hungry monitor just so I can save some power at Blackle.....NOT!

Anonymous said...

I think they might want to deblacken it a little. I couldn't find the place to enter my search text initially.

John Nicklin said...

But in a few hundred million years, that could really add up.

John Nicklin said...

Must be part of Al Gore's influence as a Google board member. If there was another search engine of the same quality, I'd leave Google for good.