The fact is that computers use electricity, and there are about 650,000,000 of them out there, humming quietly in offices and suburban basements. There will soon be a lot more, and every new generation of processor uses more power than the one it replaces. In other words, energy demand from computers is going to continue to rise. The cost of running a computer is quickly overtaking the cost of buying it.

In itself, this is not a promising model. But it’s even worse to consider that a huge part of the cost is allocated to have your computer do nothing.

Let’s put it this way: the electricity required to power all the idle computers in the world right now is enough to supply power to the Czech Republic for an entire year. And have enough left over to charge an electric car to drive around the globe 379,000 times.

Let’s put it another way. There are over 600 million computers in the world, many of which never get turned off. For the sake of argument, let’s say their screen savers are running around the clock.

That’s 60,000 MegaWatts an hour. Just to keep shapes bouncing around a screen.

Just to put that in perspective, the largest wind turbines out there are rated at 10 MW.

A large coal-fired plant generates about 300 MW.

Even China’s Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, which is so huge that filling its reservoir actually made the Earth wobble on its axis, is rated at 30,000 MW.

Imagine—it takes twice as much power as a generator of this monstrous scale can produce, just to avoid letting our screens go dark. It’s absurd.

And let’s not overlook the environmental cost. Idle computers contribute about 45 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. That’s enough of the greenhouse gas to fill 810 billion birthday balloons.

All this to accomplish nothing.

Is it difficult to imagine 810 000 000 000 balloons? It should be easier to imagine doing something about the problem.

We know that others have recognized this colossal waste of electricity and unnecessary pollution before we did. Zerofootprint didn’t just figure this out. But we’ll take up the challenge. That’s what we’re imagining right now. We want to make all the computers in the world smarter.

After all, it’s not a huge problem. If an idle computer is wasting electricity, shut it down. Your idle computer is like a 600-hp Porsche inching through downtown traffic. The car is not deploying all its power—why should your desktop? We need to find a way tom get it to do its background processing and other non-critical tasks at a much-diminished speed. The same goes for network capacity. And servers.

Imagine an open-source project that allowed people to come together to write software, so that all computer systems in the world could figure out when to take a rest. Think of the billions of dollars saved. Think of the tons of carbon saved, and the power plants that wouldn’t have to be built.

One of the things that’s so enticing about the prospect of building software to make computers more efficient is that everybody wins. Users save money, a burden is lifted from the environment, and we will have, in effect, generated megawatts of electricity for next to nothing. That is, not using all that electricity is the same as contributing it to the grid. That amounts to generating electricity with a good idea and some smart programming.

Zerofootprint is committed to helping make this happen. Let’s make desktops as efficient as laptops. Let’s get our computers to do more with less. Let’s stop assuming that our computers are clean and that the electricity they consume has no environmental impact. If you’re ready to lend a hand, let us know.

To read our blogs on the DarkGreenPC, please click here, here, and here.

To see a presentation on the DarkGreenPC, click here.

UPDATE: Collaborator Austin Hill recently launched DarkGreenPC at the Mesh conference, Canada’s foremost tech and entrepreneurial gathering. To see a video explaining the initiative (and recruiting for a project manager), please have a look.