Alcides Fonseca

Disclaimer: My father owns a company that produces and sells Solar Panels, so I know pretty much what I am talking about.

Via Luís Silva’s Blog I found out that Dell and Lenovo are adding solar powered adapters for their laptops. This is not a bad news, since the system is quite efficient since the energy produced by the cell as DC, is not converted to AC as usual.

But one thing most people don’t know is that solar cells are not ecological as everyone thinks. The energy that takes to build one solar cell (even in mass-production) is higher than the energy that that cell produces in its whole life. So why it is produced? Well, there are distant places where it is cheaper to use solar cells than to pay for electric companies to connect it to the electrical network. If you have a country house far from towns, and you only need to power some bulbs, a refrigerator and a small television, you should choose this solution. Otherwise you should use the traditional cable electricity.

I should mention another use for the Solar Energy that is high efficient: Solar Panels. This are the ones that my father produces and are truly ecological. They just use the sun rays to heat the water. It has a initial investment that pays for itself in 1–3 three years (depending on the use). If you want to help the environment and reduce some bills, this is the right choice for you.

Following LiveEarth’s spirit, I will talk about the environment friendly search engine. No it’s not a completely new revolutionary search engine with complex algorithms, It’s just google washed up!

A monitor spends 74 watts average to display a white page while only 59 watts are spent to show a black page. Following this principle, Mark Ontkush posted that a Black Google would save 750 Megawatt-hours a year.

So go ahead, save our beautiful planet, just by changing your default homepage/search engine to Blackle

(note: I already suggested them to add OpenSearch so it could be easier for people to add it to their browser)