Despite some big gains, most high-tech companies still lag on clean power adoption and political advocacy for clean energy policies.

E-commerce giant shares methodology that links specific lines of business to energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The world's leading cloud computing provider has unveiled plans that would result in its giant global data centers being powered entirely by renewable energy. Salesforce, which provides on-demand sales and marketing software to companies such as Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Co., announced last week that it would steadily ramp up its green energy supplies over the coming years, with the goal of sourcing 100 percent of its power from renewables.

By working together to minimize energy consumption in the data center, right size power supply equipment or participate in demand response programs, these pairs can find new ways to tap energy savings.

Apple is doubling the number of fuel cells it will use to power its $1 billion data center in North Carolina, making it the largest non-utility fuel cell installation in the U.S. The company is having 50 fuel cells installed for a total of 10 megawatts (MW) of capacity. 

The Internet is a huge and power-hungry beast, consuming the energy of 30 average nuclear power plants per year. Can energy improvements keep its appetite at bay?

In a series of articles this week, the New York Times refused to pull punches in exposing the dirty secrets of the data center industry as wasteful power users who violate air quality laws and strong-arm overmatched small towns with their might and influence. There's been no shortage of backlash from tech pundits. To highlight a few, here are responses from: Wired, Slate, Triple Pundit, Slashdot, Datacenter Knowledge and even a 5000-word treatise from Diego Doval.

Come the summer of 2013, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will use one of the world's most energy efficient data centers to handle complex renewable energy and energy efficiency research. NREL's High Performance Computer (HPC) center in Golden, Colo., will feature the largest supercomputer dedicated to clean energy research -- one that uses more than 3,200 powerful Intel Xeon microprocessors to run super fast (at peak performance it can crunch more than a thousand trillion floating point operations per second).

The Green Grid has unveiled a new report designed to help green IT executives understand the impact of energy policies on the selection and operation of energy efficient data center technologies. The non-profit organization published "Energy Policy Research & Implications For Data Centers In EMEA," which aims to summarize the key energy policies across 12 countries, including the UK, Spain, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. "As well as exceptionally challenging economic conditions, data center operators also have to contend with a uniquely complicated regulatory environment which is constantly evolving," said Harkeeret Singh, report editor and The Green Grid EMEA technical chairman.

When it comes to data centers and energy efficiency, companies prefer to take their own unique approach. Google has its custom servers and built-in batteries, Facebook has opted for an evaporative cooling and proprietary uninterruptible power supply and Yahoo has selected an outdoor air-cooled "chicken coop" design. Large data center operators have an inherent advantage when implementing energy-efficient strategies as they can shift operations to another facility in the event of a failure or changing circumstances, according to Michael Fluegeman, a principal and engineer with PlanNet Consulting. PlanNet is a Brea, Calif.-based IT consulting firm focused on providing support for critical infrastructure, including data centers.

Data centers represent a skyrocketing component of any enterprise's energy budget, and therefore a major share of operational costs. Best energy management practices can help contain these costs, and simultaneously put IT and facilities teams on an environmentally responsible path that aligns the corporate data centers with EPA energy standards. The Scope of the Problem -- and the Opportunity Surveys of all sizes and types of data centers identify many categories of wasted energy. For example, approximately 10 to 15 percent of all data center servers are idle (i.e., not processing useful work). An average server draws about 400 watts of power, for an annual cost of $800 or more. This adds up to billions of dollars of wasted energy, cooling, and management costs every year in the U.S. alone.

Data centers represent a skyrocketing component of any enterprise's energy budget, and therefore a major share of operational costs. Best energy management practices can help contain these costs, and simultaneously put IT and facilities teams on an environmentally responsible path that aligns the corporate data centers with EPA energy standards.

To keep up with rising data storage demands, tech companies accustomed to thinking about their resources in terabytes are now racing to build data centers by the hundred-thousand square feet. As these companies start owning assets, they face new challenges and opportunities inherent in operating in local communities. Tech companies can learn a lot from their brick-and-mortar peers about the benefits of being good neighbors.

Subsidizing the cloud

So far, companies building data centers have enjoyed warm welcomes. As they have grown their data center assets, Apple, Google, and Amazon have maintained their status as some of the world's most admired companies. Communities looking to revitalize local economies have been rolling out the welcome mat to data centers in the form of incentives.

Air conditioners may soon be a thing of the past, as major companies like Facebook, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) make the switch from mechanical cooling to outside air cooling to regulate the temperature of their IT equipment. EBay is operating its new Phoenix data center with 100 percent free cooling year round, even on 115-degree-Fahrenheit days, while Facebook’s Prineville data center in Washington State was built to use only free cooling. Now, a new set of maps will help other companies follow suit. At a conference in March, The Green Grid, a nonprofit aimed at improving energy efficiency at data centers, unveiled its updated free cooling maps. The maps, based on guidelines from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers, show where in the world and for how many hours per year outside air can be used in place of air conditioners and other ...

How green is the cloud? Reading GreenBiz.com these days, you’d think it was the next big green thing. In recent weeks, for example, we’ve covered companies bringing products to the cloud, research findings on how the cloud is a “game changer” for energy managers, cloud-based tools for designers, even ethical concerns related to cloud computing. As my colleague Matthew Wheeland noted recently: “Everyone is talking about cloud computing as the future of IT, or the future of business, or the future of commerce, or all of the above.”

The Internet has enabled massive dematerialization of traditional brick and mortar industries through the emergence of online services such as shopping, banking, communication and entertainment. However, this success has been accompanied by rapid growth in the Internet’s own environmental impact.Akamai, an integral component of the Internet, is keenly aware of its contribution. 

If you use the Internet for anything – e-commerce, enterprise cloud computing, software downloads, Web marketing or high-definition video – you’ve probably encountered Akamai’s services without even knowing it. Akamai optimizes online experiences, helping businesses securely and reliably connect users to any experience, on any device, anywhere. Our mission is to accelerate innovation in the hyperconnected world and to ensure the best online experience on any device, anywhere.

With more than 100 million eBay users buying and selling $2,000 worth of goods every second, data centers are a big deal to the e-commerce company. And maintaining all that data requires plenty of energy: eBay's data centers consume more than half of all the power used by the company. Power consumption has been a key issue, and a significant cost, for data center operators. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that U.S. data centers' power bills totaled $4.5 billion in 2006 (PDF), and energy use has grown since then. With its newest data center, though, eBay is readying itself for even larger loads while consolidating the equipment it already has and using energy more efficiently, in part by taking advantage of free cooling.

Everyone is talking about cloud computing as the future of IT, or the future of business, or the future of commerce, or all of the above. That may be true, and that shift may lead to a much greener future for IT, but at the moment the data center world is struggling under the weight of unused servers, a need for uptime over efficiency, and a general lack of insight into just how much energy is being wasted within data centers of all sizes. None of these are new problems, and in fact one of the biggest challenges facing green data center proponents is getting beyond tackling the same old problems.

Today, it's not enough for a company to offer a mere one or two services to be a contender in the business of sustainable technology. The leading global firms must offer a range of solutions that go well beyond the initial vision of green IT in the context of data center applications, said David Metcalfe, CEO of the independent analyst firm Verdantix. "There's now really a race on who is going to build the largest practice group globally that delivers the broadest portfolio of sustainability services," Metcalfe told me.

An aggressive effort to eliminate data center waste is now saving Autodesk about $7 million a year, according to the design software company.

The initiative led to the consolidation of 85 percent of the company's servers over the past year and enabled the company to exceed its target to reduce data center energy use, said Lynelle Cameron, Autodesk's director of sustainability.

'We had a goal to reduce our energy use by 50 percent and we're now at 60 percent," she said. "The good news behind that is not just that we've reduced our carbon footprint significantly from our data centers, but also we have $7 million of savings annually as a result of that project."

Greenpeace today released the latest version of its Cool IT Leaderboard, tracking progress among 21 IT companies in embracing green energy for their own operations as well as advocating for policies that promote clean energy use worldwide.

Google came out on top of the rankings this year, scoring 53 points out of a total 100. Cisco moved from first to second with a score of 49, and Ericsson and Fujitsu tied for third place with 48 points earned.

Overall, the latest rankings show a steep decline from the fourth round of scores, which werepublished in December 2010, during the Cancun climate talks. Cisco led the prior round's pack with a score of 70, while Google held down fourth place with a score of 47.