[Photo © Tony Avelar, the Associated Press]

Whenever you write about IT and the computing industry, Google is going to play a significant role. The company has unprecedented reach and resources, and as a result can help define the shape of progress.

I interviewed Google's Energy Czar, Bill Weihl, back in 2007 for the launch of GreenerComputing.com, where he talked about some recurring themes in our coverage ever since: energy efficient power supplies, energy management software, and performance per watt.

The first thing is to really ask what is the performance per watt of the IT equipment -- not just what's its price and what's it's performance, but what's its performance per watt. Ask vendors: 'How efficient is the power supply, how efficient is the motherboard and the energy conversion there, what can you tell me about the performance per watt?'

In a recent interview with Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, Weihl talks a bit more big-picture about the state of energy efficiency and what Google and other companies can do to pick up speed in the greening of IT:

[One of the reasons Google started the Climate Savers Computing Initiative is] to get manufacturers to agree on efficiency standards, and to get purchasers to commit to buying high-efficiency systems. And the assumption, which I think is a reasonable one, is that will drive down the price premium to the point where there won't be an advantage to building and buying a less efficient system. That's a voluntary thing, though. In other [industries], there have been times when governments have stepped in to regulate.

And on what Google itself is doing on the green front:

When we started six or seven years ago, we were leasing space in other people's data centres. As our engineers started to look at building our own, they concluded that the typical data centre is very energy-inefficient. There's a metric called power usage effectiveness, or PUE.
It's the ratio of total power going into the facility divided by the energy going to the actual equipment. So a PUE of 1 means that the facility itself consumes no energy other than what it delivers to the computers. Typical data centres built today have a PUE of 2, which means that for every watt going to the computers, there's an additional watt consumed by the facility. We have six purpose-built facilities around the world that have a PUE of 1.2. And it wasn't rocket science. […]

We've invested $45-million in startup companies. We also have a small group of engineers doing our own internal R&D, free from the constraints of, "We actually have to build a business and show our investors a return in three years." … The goal is to think very big. And if we're successful, we may actually make a significant return from doing this. Because anybody who figures out how to produce clean energy at scale and at a cost that competes well with coal is gonna make a lot of money.

You can read Bill Weihl's full interview with Dawn Calleja at The Globe and Mail's website.