Blackle, worth it or not?

A new website, Blackle.com, claims to save monitor energy by having a black background for the incredibly popular Google search engine. There are many new versions of Google that purport to save energy and therefore reduce greenhouse gas emissions by having a black or colored background. Blackle.com claims it uses 15-watts less than the regular, white screened, Google. However these claims seem rather dubious when you consider the type of monitor that Blackle.com is targeting. The CRT monitors that make up just 25% of the market are the only ones that use more energy to produce white rather than black colors. The LCD and LED type of monitors, however, must use power to produce a black or darkened image, so Blackle.com would wind up using more energy on these machines. The LCD or LED monitors must use energy to block light which would produce a black background, thus being less efficient. CRT monitors operate by cathode ray guns that fire to produce a lighter color. So, for any CRT monitors still out there, Blackle.com would be a worthwhile website to use, but as CRT monitors are rapidly being replaced by the more modern LCD and
LED models, the window for Blackle.com and other Black Google websites seems to be closing. Blackle would actually use more energy and have the opposite affect than the purported claims made by its founder, if used by LEDs and LCDs regularly.

The statistics we used are available here.