The technology we use is accounting for more and more of the energy we consume. And we need to know just how much.
The next time you want to search for something on the web, try going to
Blackle - Energy Saving Search instead of your usual search engine.
The page you get looks remarkably like Google, and queries are fed through to Google, but there's one obvious difference.
Instead of the generous amount of white space which has characterised Google's home page since its 1998 launch, the page is mostly black.
Heap Media, the Australian company behind Blackle, claims black pixels take less power than white and so using its search saves energy. It believes that small things matter when it comes to reducing our energy use, limiting our CO2 output and reducing the likely extent of global warming as a result of human activity.
Whether or not turning off a few million white pixels makes a measurable difference is debatable, and Google has challenged the assumptions behind Blackle, especially when it comes to LCD screens.
The author of the excellent 'High Performance Web Sites', has taken the debate a stage further by looking at the power consumption implications of poorly-designed web pages.
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