GroovyGreen.com – Start Today :: Save Tomorrow

There’s a new version of Google on the web that if everyone with a CRT was to start using would save roughly $75K a year in electric costs and the associated emissions. Called Blackle (hey, everyone thought Google sounded strange in the beginning too) it’s a light-hearted effort to reduce the wattage our screens use to bring up the search giant’s website countless times a day. From the article,

“An all white webpage, such as Google, uses about 74 watts to display on a CRT screen (non flat/lcd), while an all black page uses only 59 watts. Assuming each query is displayed for 10 seconds, that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. If using a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts, then that’s a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000.”

As Hippyshopper notes, there’s some issues using the site — since copying and pasting can be a color code nightmare and 75% of the world uses LCD, which do not vary in watts consumed on color changes.

Still, it’s a clever idea and just another example of how small changes can add up to make big differences.