China’s economic boom and rapid urbanization has stretched the nation’s energy resources dangerously thin. It doesn’t help that more than 70 percent of that energy comes from inefficient, pollution belching coal-fired power plants either. And with more and more Chinese migrating to fast rising urban centers, trading their pitch forks and shovels for air conditioners and personal computers, the energy crunch will only get worse. What is needed are some new ideas, sustainable energy alternatives and initiative.

With that in mind, we’re stepping into the fray and doing its part to save energy. From here on out, all web searches undertaken by the crack research team here at China Briefing will be done using energy saving, Earth friendly Blackle. Created by Heap Media, Blackle is an energy efficient Google search engine. Because a monitor requires more energy to project white or light colors on a screen versus darker shades, instead of a stark, harsh white screen, a Blackle searcher is instead presented with a cool, black one.

According to Blackle, in January 2007 a blog post titled “Black Google would save 750 megawatt-hours a year” proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search. The company believes that, while the energy savings are small, they add up.

Now when we need to find the latest quote from Bo Xilai, we will do so in cool blacks and grays,  gone are the all those harsh white screens and energy hogging light colors - just doing our part to add to the 242,376.362 watt hours Blackle claims to have already saved . Blacke is available in several international editions including British, Australian, South African, French, Portuguese and Italian. We wait in anticipation for the Chinese version.

Once final note, since Baidu so strikingly resembles our favorite search engine, how long will it be before we have Heidu?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.