Conclusion: POSSIBLE.
Truth: You can save energy by using a blackened screen if you’re using an old-fashioned CRT (cathode-ray tube) computer monitor—which few Americans have.
Three quarters of the web jockeys on earth have LCD (liquid crystal display) monitors, and these barely see any energy benefit from a black screen, the Wall Street Journal says. To investigate Blackle -- which gives you Google searches with a black background and white print -- the newspaper asked a consulting firm to run a “Blackle versus regular Google” test on a CRT and a LCD. The color on the screen mattered very little for the LCD screen. The CRT screen with Blackle saw savings of between 5 percent and 20 percent.
The folks at Blackle.com put a much more positive spin on blackouts. The website from Heap Media urges you to make Blackle your home page to save energy, “one search at a time.” “A given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen," Blackle says.
The key words, here, are “given monitor.”
That doesn’t mean the concept doesn’t have some merit, of course. The theory is largely based on a January 2007 blog by eco-wonk Mark Ontkush called “Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year.” In a follow-up post to Treehugger, Ontkush explained that a CRT monitor “uses about 74 watts to display an all white web page, but only uses 59 watts to display an all black page.” Plenty of CRTs still exist, particularly in China and Latin America, he wrote. If all the Google searchers on CRTs switched to black, he estimated it would save about $75,000 worth of energy annually.
So if you have a CRT monitor — and your eyes don’t hurt reading white-on-black — going black can be green. If you don’t like Blackle, you could try other sites like Cleanblack. And if you don’t want total blackness, you can try EMERGY-C, which gives you a low-watt palette that isn’t as eye straining. There’s nothing to lose but your hues.
*This eco-myth was submitted by SustainLane user Emily K. Thanks, Emily!
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