The Google story touches on one very important issue – screens. A goodly amount of a computer’s power is spent making the screen bright enough to read. Same for gadgets – I’ve recently discovered that my turning the brightness down on my smartphone’s screen, I can extend the battery life by hours.

My day job is at a University, and in the evening I walk past rooms filled with banks of computers with many glowing screens – yes, the screensavers are running, but they’re still lit, presumably because they’ve recently been used.

The person who invents an energy-effective way of turning a screen on and off will do wonders for greening up IT. Perhaps screens could be designed to instantly turn themselves off when you’ve finished with them – maybe based on proximity to the computer. Want to turn the screen off? Just back away. That would stop monitors and TFTs blazing away while people are having their tea-breaks, lunches and all the other activities that interrupt a day at the computer. It would take some getting used to, but the energy saving would surely be colossal….