www.blackle.com

This is an interesting idea I ran across a while ago, and came up again the other day at work. It’s a really simple premise. The idea that for a monitor to make white takes a tiny bit more energy than to make black.

A little screen 101: a screen has rows and rows of clusters of red, green and blue (RGB) lights. You want a red pixel? turn off the green and blue, you want purple? Turn off the green. You want white? Turn them all on. So if you want black? Turn them all off. Do this thousands of times, a bunch of times per second and your monitor is going to pull more energy to have them all on for white than if they were all off for black.

Now, what’s the internet’s most popular website? Google, with somewhere around 135 million unique visitors. What would happen if all those monitors that view google saw black instead of white? The world would save electricity.

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Listening to: Pink Floyd – Pigs (Three Different Ones)