Black pixel project

DESCRIPTION

Saving energy needn’t always be about making huge sacrifices, but about lots of people making small changes to their behaviour. Greenpeace has long been fighting climate change, and wanted to find a simple way of empowering people to “do their bit” to help save energy in a way that didn’t really affect their lifestyle in a negative way.

Greenpeace’s solution was to launch an application that allows you to switch off a "pixel" (actually a square patch about a centimetre squared) from your computer monitor. That "pixel" would remain off (with no light being emitted through it) and so would appear black.  On CRT screens and plasma screens, a black pixel uses less energy than any other, so if everyone installed the black pixel, a huge amount of energy could be saved. In fact, Greenpeace claims that 1 million black pixels could save 57,000 watts of energy per hour, which is the same as turning off 1,425 lamps for an hour. Having downloaded the pixel, users can then check how much energy has been saved to date by hovering over it with their cursor. They receive an update of the number of watts saved along with an equivalent in calculation in terms of the number of lamps, TVs or freezers that need that much energy.

The campaign follows the same theory as Blackle, the unofficial black version of Google that claims to reduce the amount of energy used by the computer by having black pixels, created by Heap Media.

Unfortunately, most people use LCD screens these days and there is no discernable energy saving from having a black pixel. But if this is the case, Greenpeace has suggestions on how else you can minimise the energy consumption of your monitor.

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