Data centers -- giant server warehouses that centralize the storage and distribution of bits and bytes -- are notorious power hogs, using up to one hundred times the energy per square foot of typical office space. In Northern California, they account for as much as 2.5 percent of all electricity consumption.

At the opening yesterday of its user event CA World 08 in Las Vegas, business software company CA announced plans to focus on ways to reduce power consumption and costs by letting data centers run at higher temperatures, thus reducing the need for cooling. 

"Every data center on average doubles its power consumption every five years, " said Chris Stakutis, vice president of emerging technologies at CA. ". . . You can save five per cent of your cooling costs for every degree warmer you run it. You just need to put in hundreds of wireless thermometers so you are confident you're not exceeding any limits."

IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems have already invaded this market with a vengeance. So have many startups. Santa Clara-based Power Assure won the $100,000 Smart Power category award at the Clean Tech Open in San Francisco on Nov. 6. It specializes in power management software that throttles back unused data center servers, networking equipment and cooling systems to save as much as 50 percent on data center energy bills.

Not to be outdone, Pacific Gas and Electric Company is leading utility industry efforts to promote more energy-efficient data centers, taking advantage of the fact that its revenues are decoupled from electricity sales.

PG&E offers extensive rebates for new data center construction and upgrades that save energy; it also offers rebates all the way down to the desktop, including power management software, premium efficiency PCs, LCD monitors and thin-client systems. The program is on track to save 7 megawatts of electricity this year, and more next.

Last year, PG&E led the formation of a utility IT energy efficiency coalition to focus on improving power management at data centers. It's proven to be a hit.

"We now have almost 40 utilities in the United States and Canada," says Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager in PG&E's Customer Energy Efficiency department. "We are sharing everything we know to get others to copy our programs."

In a much-discussed op-ed column in Monday's New York Times, Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore declared his support for a crash program to modernize the nation's electrical system:

We should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with "smart" features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid -- $400 billion over 10 years -- pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.

Gore's vision sounds surprisingly similar to that expressed by the Bush administration's Department of Energy in its publication, Grid 2030:

The Nation's aging electro-mechanical electric grid cannot keep pace with innovations in the digital information and telecommunications network. Power outages and power quality disturbances cost the economy billions of dollars annually. America needs an electric superhighway to support our information superhighway.

Change of this magnitude requires unprecedented levels of cooperation among the electric power industry's many stakeholders. Hundreds of billions of dollars of investment will be needed over the coming decades to accomplish modernization of the electric system. National leadership is needed to create a shared vision of the future and to build effective public-private partnerships for getting there. Imagine the possibilities: electricity and information flowing together in real time, near-zero economic losses from outages and power quality disturbances, a wider array of customized energy choices, suppliers competing in open markets to provide the world's best electric services, and all of this supported by a new energy infrastructure built on superconductivity, distributed intelligence and resources, clean power, and the hydrogen economy.

But as DOE itself noted, "national leadership is needed" to turn vision into reality. President-elect Barack Obama says he's ready to step up to the plate. Here's what Obama told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on October 30:

One of, I think, the most important infrastructure projects that we need is a whole new electricity grid. Because if we're going to be serious about renewable energy, I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago. And we're going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that's generated from those car batteries, back into the grid. That can create 5 million new jobs, just in new energy.

A roundup of green headlines that caught our eye this week:

• Environmentally-friendly shopping garnered attention at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, with start-ups pitching their companies to the venture capital crowd. The New York Times' Bits blog reports that an Internet start-up named GoodGuide rates more than 60,000 products on environmental, health and social impacts. The company's founder created the site when he learned his daughter's sunscreen contained carcinogenic chemicals. Bits also reports on a solar panel installation company and a video broadcast start-up.
• Green Wombat visited California start-up Cool Earth Solar for a Fortune Magazine story on a novel solar power technology to generate electricity from balloons. A single balloon of thin-film reflective plastic with a photovoltaic cell will generate one kilowatt of power. Put together 10,000 balloons and you can light up a town. Cool Earth is building a prototype plant and says a 1.5-megawatt plant will be built next year near Tracy, Calif.
• The U.S. military is marching ahead on the green energy front. My NEXT100 colleague Jonathan Marshall recently posted on the U.S. Army's energy efficiency and sustainable energy projects. Now Earth2Tech notes that the U.S. Navy has awarded a $3 million contract to Ocean Power Technologies to test the company's PowerBuoy system to generate electricity from ocean waves to power oceanic data and communication systems.

Getting an extra hour of sleep in the fall, thanks to Daylight Saving Time (DST), is one of life's little pleasures. Sadly, according to two UC Santa Barbara scholars, it turns out to be a guilty pleasure--one that increases energy consumption and creates more pollution.

The United States first adopted DST--starting in World Wars I and II--as a means of saving energy, not as a policy to promote agriculture as sometimes assumed. It was expanded most recently in 2007, following the Energy Policy Act of 2005. More than 1.6 billion people in 76 countries now fumble with their clocks twice a year to practice DST.

But does it achieve its goal? Past research has been scant and inconclusive. Sorting out the specific effects of DST on energy use, separate from all other factors, is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

But in a new paper for the UC Energy Institute, researchers Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant take advantage of the fact that for many years some counties in Indiana practiced DST while many others did not. In 2006, following federal law, all counties adopted DST. By comparing energy use over time between counties, with and without DST, they were able to detect the program's real impact.

It turns out that DST increases residential electricity demand, most notably in the fall. The extra bill comes to about $9 million a year for Indiana households. Pollution increases as well. Apparently, by changing the time when people are likely to be at home, any reduction in lighting is more than offset by increased demand for heating and cooling. This effect, the researchers conclude, is likely to be even worse in the southern United States due to widespread use of air conditioning.

The Environmental Protection Agency this month released its fuel efficiency rankings for model year 2009 vehicles--and not surprisingly, the Toyota Prius topped the list of gas misers with 48 miles per gallon (mpg) in city driving and 45 mpg on the highway.

Aside from the Honda Civic Hybrid at 40/45 mpg, mileage ratings dropped quickly into the 30s and below. The Jeep Grand Cherokee 4WD earned a booby prizes with a rating of only 11/14 mpg, not much better than a tank.

But while the world rightly applauds the innovation and performance of the Prius, how quickly we forget some car models going back more than a decade that achieved equal or better fuel efficiency, only to be sidelined by cheap gas prices and customer demand for faster acceleration and roomier interiors.

The 3-cylinder Geo Metro XFI, for example, earned stunning ratings of 53/58 mpg, and the much peppier Honda Civic VX managed 48/55 mpg in 1992. The rating system has changed a bit since then, and safety standards have improved, but those models apparently still sell well on eBay thanks to their oustanding fuel efficiency.

Of course, none of these models holds a candle to a single-passenger vehicle designed at the University of British Columbia, which won the annual SAE competition in 2006 with a record 3,145 miles per gallon!

They say virtue is its own reward--but it's always nice when there's an extra prize thrown in for good behavior. In the case of energy efficiency, the extra bonus for doing right by the environment is more jobs, according to a new study by UC Berkeley economist David Roland-Holst.

Roland-Holst's paper, "Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California," finds that savings from the state's pioneering efficiency measures have allowed California households to spend less on energy and correspondingly more on other goods and services, creating about 1.5 million jobs with a total payroll of $45 billion over the period 1972-2006.

The service sector saw an increase in compensation of nearly $18 billion; wholesale and retail trade enjoyed an increase of just over $11 billion in payrolls, and the financial sector saw an uptick in compensation of more than $7 billion.

At a time when many critics wonder whether the country can afford to fight climate change, the study reminds us to the contrary that "in addition to energy price vulnerability and climate damage, the risks of excessive energy dependence include lower long-term economic growth. A lower carbon future for California is a more prosperous and sustainable future."

Last Friday's Green Inc. blog offered advice on ways to save money and energy while washing clothes, like using cold water and cleaning the dryer's lint trap after every load.

How 20th century.

Coming soon, the greenest way to clean up grease and grime may be with plastic, not water and detergent or dry-cleaning solvents.

You read that white.

Professor Stephen Burkinshaw at Leeds University in England claims that he has invented a method of washing an ordinary load of laundry with only one cup of water--using thousands of reusable plastic chips to scrub away dirt. Clothes emerge all but dry in the process.

A story in the London Independent quotes him as saying, "We've shown that it can remove all sorts of everyday stains including coffee and lipstick while using a tiny fraction of the water used by conventional machines."

Drought-stricken California residents would certainly welcome such a technology. And besides saving millions of gallons of precious water, they would also save huge amounts of energy now used to heat water in traditional washers and driers.

Xeros, Ltd. is commercializing the technology and says it may have a product to market as early as 2009.

With new warnings about the perils of global warming emerging almost daily, most experts agree on the urgency of finding ways to use energy more efficiently in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth.

A new scorecard issued by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) gives California the top prize among all 50 states for energy efficiency, with a total score of 40.5 out of 50 points. Oregon, Connecticut and Vermont were close runners up.

The bottom-ranked state was Wyoming, with a grand total of zero points. Wyoming just barely saved North Dakota and Alabama, with 1.5 points each, from sharing the booby prize.

Califonia's leadership is no accident. The state's Energy Action Plan makes energy efficiency "the resource of first choice for meeting California's energy needs." The California Energy Commission estimates that the state's building and appliance standards alone "have saved consumers more than $56 billion in electricity and natural gas costs since 1978 and averted building 15 large power plants."

PG&E and other utilities have long had programs to help customers save money by saving energy. Since 1976, PG&E's energy efficiency programs have saved an estimated $22 billion and prevented 135 million tons of CO2 emissions. The ACEEE report gives California and Connecticut top marks for providing utilities with incentives to promote energy efficiency.

Joseph Romm, former acting assistant secretary of energy and founder of the non-profit Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, lauded California's record earlier this year in Salon magazine:

While a few states have energy-efficiency strategies, none matches what California has done. In the past three decades, electricity consumption per capita grew 60 percent in the rest of the nation, while it stayed flat in high-tech, fast-growing California. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians currently do, we would cut electricity consumption 40 percent. If the entire nation had California's much cleaner electric grid, we would cut total U.S. global-warming pollution by more than a quarter without raising American electric bills. And if all of America adopted the same energy-efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another polluting power plant.

How did California do it? In part, a smart California Energy Commission has promoted strong building standards and the aggressive deployment of energy-efficient technologies and strategies -- and has done so with support of both Democratic and Republican leadership over three decades. . . .

Significantly, California adopted regulations so that utility company profits are not tied to how much electricity they sell. This is called "decoupling." It also allowed utilities to take a share of any energy savings they help consumers and businesses achieve. The bottom line is that California utilities can make money when their customers save money. That puts energy-efficiency investments on the same competitive playing field as generation from new power plants.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is making another energy play, announcing on the weekend that his MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. will purchase about 10 percent of China's BYD Company Ltd., a maker of rechargeable batteries and automobiles, for $230 million. The move -- Buffett's first strategic investment in China -- follows MidAmerican's announcement earlier this month that it would acquire East Coast utility Constellation Energy Group Inc. for $4.7 billion. 

MidAmerican and BYD will work on new rechargeable battery technologies for vehicles and to store electricity from wind and solar power generation. "The rationale behind this investment is BYD's unique exposure to both lithium-ion batteries as well as its related hybrid electric vehicle business," Merrill Lynch analyst Daniel Kim told Bloomberg News. The "HEV market growth is exploding."

BYD aims to sell gasoline-electric hybrid cars in China later this year and to introduce hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and Europe in 2010. The Big Three U.S. automakers are scrambling to develop hybrids, and they got a boost on the weekend when the Senate approved a spending bill that included $7.5 billion to start a $25 billion low-interest loan program to retool old plants and help the industry develop new fuel-efficient vehicles. The House has already approved the bill.

The ever-growing Oracle OpenWorld descends upon San Francisco today, complete with its full cadre of patrons, partners...and, this year, green techies.

As part of an overarching green focus, leading panelists will discuss topics such as data center efficiency, smart meters and other ways to "green the enterprise."

In fact, PG&E will be one of few accepting Oracle's Empower the Green Enterprise award for our SmartMeter program. Presented to select customers and partners that utilize Oracle's products to take an environmental lead, while reducing costs and improving business efficiencies, the award will be presented to PG&E for managing billing, payments, credit/collections and meter inventory using Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing on an Oracle enterprise grid.

Oracle's OpenWorld will also feature such fodder as laptop-charging stationary bicycles and other interactive tips and tricks for reducing the conference's -- and one's own -- carbon footprint. While many of these displays serve more of an "edu-active" purpose, the need for such large-scale conferences to control their carbon footprint is very real. Check out the numbers, per today's San Francisco Chronicle: 

• 43,000 local and out-of-town attendees, each with a host of chargeable electronic equipment
• 72,000 lunches, complete with disposable packaging and utensils

Then, there's the conference crowds and traffic, likely more of a headache for locals than a significant environmental threat.

With this footprint comes great opportunity for sustainable practices. Oracle's efforts to balance out some of its own environmental footprint have the potential to make a big -- or smaller -- impact compared to that of last year.

Usually met with moans and groans of local SOMA-ites, this year's more sustainable OpenWorld should be welcomed with OpenArms.