MSNBC.com has an article about growth in green industries. As some political friends have said 2009 will be a year there will be a US president whether Republican or Democrat who will drive changes for a greener energy.

When a Republican candidate for president starts talking about limiting greenhouse gases during a speech at a wind turbine plant you know there’s an environmental wave going on.

All the presidential candidates, including John McCain who spoke about climate change at a  wind energy facility in Oregon this month, have green initiatives on their agendas, and states across the country are embarking on initiatives to cut pollution and a reliance on fossil fuels. Not to mention homeowners who don’t want to be at the mercy of electric and oil companies.

Solar, wind and biofuels are all growing alternatives, and these fairly young industries will need people — people to produce, install and sell their products.

The Economist had an article about how difficult it is to find the right people for green start-ups.

A talent shortage hits green start-ups

ON MAY 1st applications closed for the first intake of a novel kind of executive-education programme. Set up by a bunch of venture-capital firms and other companies in New England, the three-month course will teach its “fellows” about renewable energy. To qualify for a fellowship, applicants must be successful entrepreneurs from other industries, such as IT or health care, and be zealous about profiting from greenery.

“A lack of talent, especially entrepreneurial talent, was one of the biggest bottlenecks to growth we identified in the clean-tech industry,” says Peter Rothstein of Flagship Ventures, a venture-capital firm that is one of the programme's founders. That bottleneck worries investors, who have been pouring cash into everything from solar energy to hybrid electric cars: last year global investment in renewable-energy businesses alone rose by 60%, to $148.4 billion, according to New Energy Finance (NEF), a research firm.

Although the prospect of minting money while helping to save the planet has attracted a stream of executives from other industries to clean-tech start-ups, few of them have much experience of their new field. In a recent global survey of 75 senior executives involved in clean-tech firms conducted by NEF and Heidrick & Struggles, a headhunter, over 90% cited top-level recruitment as a serious concern.

WSJ has front page article "Rockefeller Rebellion Turns up Heat on Exxon", where the Rockefeller family is driving for changes to address global warming, renewable energy, and a more sustainable future for the company beyond oil and gas.

Rockefeller Rebellion
Turns Up Heat on Exxon

John D.'s Heirs Seek Change -- and Respect

By LESLIE EATON and RUSSELL GOLD
May 24, 2008; Page A1

Two decades ago, Neva Goodwin Rockefeller grew so tired of all the baggage that came with her fabled family name that she changed it and became plain Neva Goodwin.

But now, Ms. Goodwin, 63 years old, is embracing the powerful Rockefeller name as she publicly challenges the management of Exxon Mobil Corp., successor to the oil company founded by her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. As Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, she has marshaled four generations of Rockefellers to join her in a campaign to force major changes at one of the most profitable companies in the world. The battle will come to a head at Exxon's annual meeting Wednesday in Dallas.

Some members of the family joined the fight out of a passionate belief in the threat of global warming; others were concerned that Exxon is overlooking business opportunities or risks. Many seem offended that the company appears impervious to the wishes of its shareholders, including those named Rockefeller.

Also in the WSJ, details are given as to what is on the agenda for the May 29 shareholders meeting.

Most activists believe governments will soon mandate carbon-emissions constraints in order to curb global warming. This will lead to the swift rise of nonfossil fuels such as wind, solar, nuclear and biomass.

Exxon faces a raft of shareholder resolutions aimed at both steering the company toward a greener future and forcing change at the top by appointing an independent chairman.

These votes have been gathering momentum. In 2003, a proxy resolution to split the chairman and chief executives roles received 22% of the vote. Last year, it got 40%. Another proposal, to require Exxon to set specific goals limiting greenhouse-gas emissions, was favored by 31% of shareholders last year. Both are back on Wednesday's ballot. A new proposal would require Exxon to take a hard look at sustainable-energy technologies.

Offering vocal support to all three measures are descendants of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Exxon-forerunner Standard Oil. Not only are they using their name to draw attention to the resolutions, the family and its retinue have been on the road in recent weeks urging institutional investors to cast their shares in favor of change. Exxon management opposes these resolutions, arguing that its record speaks to its ability to adroitly handle complex energy markets.

These resolutions are non-binding. If one attracts a majority of votes, Exxon could simply ignore it. But precedence and good corporate governance suggest otherwise. Two years ago, a shareholder resolution calling for the resignation of any Exxon director who doesn't get a majority of votes passed and was subsequently adopted by the board.

It will be interesting to watch how the battle between the Rockefellers and Exxon management plays out. This battle reminds me of potential ones between those who want to green their data centers and those that are defending the status quo.

The Google News search turned up 590 articles on "Exxon Rockefeller."

I am thinking of starting a new category for Greenwashing claims.

One I just saw is Compression Could Reduce Data Center Energy Use by 95%.

U.S. business servers and data centers suck up the energy equivalent of all the electricity consumed by color televisions. The industry uses about the same amount of electricity as 5.8 million average American households. How to green such a massive sector? Start with better data compression technologies, which is already widely used in backup and secondary storage to decrease the capacity needed for these functions.

Broaden out that concept and apply compression to primary data, such as application servers, email or databases and that will radically reduce data center energy usage. Storwize Inc., a San Jose, CA tech company, has a process to reduce data center energy usage up to 95 per cent.  This means on a 100 TB database, Storwize can compress that to less than 10 TB of physical disk.

Real-time data compression reduces the amount of data written to storage devices and thus reduces CPU, disk, memory and network utlilization on the storage system. It can do this through its patent-pending algorithms that allow write and read operations from any location within the file while avoiding the need to decompress the whole file.

Compressed data doesn't just save energy use, it reduces the real estate required to house the data centres, the energy needed to cool down the space and all the other trappings of physical space that adds up to a heavier footprint on the environment.

I can't believe someone would claim 95% energy savings. What if you have encrypted data (which will not compress well)?

Maybe the problem is this content was on www.ecogeek.org, and the company is creating traffic to drive its ad revenue.

Google just had its ribbon cutting ceremony for its new data center in Lenoir, NC. Data Center Knowledge reports on how tight security was.

Google held a ceremony yesterday to mark the official opening of its $600 million data center project in Lenoir, North Carolina. The band played Ted Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" and curious local residents dined on barbecue, beans, hushpuppies and cole slaw. North Carolina Governor Mike Easley joined local officials and Google managers for a ribbon cutting.

But there was no tour of the facility, as Google continued its practice of tight information control about its data center facilities. The Charlotte Observer reported that guests attending the event had to pass through seven separate security guard checks.

Clint Boulton of eWeek's Google Watch blog, who was apparently the only reporter from a technology publication invited to attend, also noted the tight security. "On the drive in, I was stopped, in this order, by: 1) a Google security guard 2) a state trooper 3) another Google security guard 4) yet another Google security guard and 5) if you guess it, you get the prize," Clint writes.

And, on the same day. TechNet Edge posts another interview with Mike Manos on Microosft's Chicago Data Center using containers, showing an animated inside tour.

Mike Manos on Data Centers

Posted By: Adam Bomb | May 21st @ 12:01 AM

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Mike-Manos-on-Data-Centers/

Every time I talk with Mike, I come away with a new appreciation for what it means to manage a big data center.  I used to think a 20,000 machine installation was big, but Mike can add that many servers in a month.  Mike's been busy on the conference circuit lately talking about green datacenters, and he's been vocal about the recent move Microsoft made to container-based data centers.  In our Chicago facility, a truck drives up and drops off a 40' shipping container, preloaded with 2000 servers.  The container is plugged in to Ethernet, power, and cooling and is ready to power on and go.  Mike has a nice animated tour of the facility that he shows around the 10 minute mark.  He also talks about the challenges of measuring efficiency in the data center and deciding when is the right time to virtualize workloads.  You can keep up with Mike's adventures in data center on his blog.

Could there be any more opposite data center communication events on the same day?

IBM has a press release which outlines IBM's plan for a Greener World enabled by software.

Introduced today, IBM "Software for a Greener World" is an expansion of Project Big Green and includes new and existing offerings that help organizations optimize their infrastructure, workloads and people for energy efficiency. Key new capabilities being announced are:

• Tivoli software products that help organizations manage energy consumption in the data center and enable IT managers to manage power usage to reduce costs and control carbon emissions. These benefits are delivered through new products including Tivoli Monitoring and enhancements to IBM Maximo Asset Management, Maximi Spatial and IBM Active Energy Manager.

• WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, which provides application infrastructure virtualization capabilities that lower operational and energy costs required to create, run, and manage enterprise applications and SOA environments.

• Lotus Technologies, including Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime unified communications platform and Lotus Connections social networking software offer green benefits for people at work and information technology departments by enabling significant reductions in travel and commuting. In addition, Lotus Domino 8.5, available in beta next month, will introduce significant capabilites to further improve disk space savings and reduce resource usage.
  

• WebSphere Portal 6.1 with improved performance monitoring infrastructure.

• Lotus ActiveInsight 6.1 with integration with Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for real-time energy dashboards.

• Rational Team Concert, which enables in-context collaboration for multi-site software development and collaboration, reducing CO2 emissions.

• Information Management capabilities available with IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control that enables organizations to achieve, sustain, and prove compliance with increasing environmental regulatory requirements while reducing cost, complexity, and risk.

IBM is getting its company behind the Green IT theme. But, as much Green Data Center content as IBM cranks out with entries like www.ibm.com/press/greendatacenter.  I am happy to claim I still beat them in Google Search with my TechNet article and blog.