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After opening presentations from the leaders of the event, Om Malik from the GigaOM Network and Katie Fehrenbacher of Earth2Tech, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took the stage to lay out the possibilities for success that he has seen take hold in San Francisco -- everything from plug-in hybrids to biofuel vehicles to green building standards.
But what really set the tone for the morning were panels on measuring and managing carbon and developing the smart grid. Two of the companies represented on the panel, WattzOn and CO2Stats, are looking ahead at ways to track emissions from just about every aspect of your daily lives -- whether how much power your laptop is using when it's plugged in or how much carbon is embedded in the products you're buying with your credit card.
Along with concerns about security and privacy of that data -- security especially being a recurring theme this morning -- standardization looms as one of the challenges facing green IT ahead. Alex Wissner-Gross the CTO of CO2Stats, however, said that standardization is easy: "Standardization is the easiest problem to solve -- software is the essence of standardization," he said.
What he said was most needed is to let the marketplace draw the boundaries around what emissions get measured -- are the emissions from the spotlights at today's conference part of my footprint or part of Green:Net's? "Once you do that, the rest is up to software, and that's easy," Wissner-Gross said.
Following the measuring and managing panel was a rousing speech by Bob Metcalfe, a general partner at Polaris Ventures Partners. Metcalfe applied the history of the internet to solving the energy problem, and started out by saying he would "attack the word green -- blue is the new green," Metcalfe said.
While laying out the promises of the "enertech" revolution -- energy technology, or clean technology -- Metcalfe said repeatedly that the goal of enertech is to "provide squanderably abundant clean and cheap energy in the coming decades."
In order to achieve that goal, the three challenges that are most pressing to overcome are the same problems that faced the internet in recent years, and to large extent still do:
"Lack of security, lack of quality of service and lack of economics," Metcalfe explained, noting that no one put sufficient money into the internet, and that it's currently run by advertising. "Those are the three big bugs of the internet. When we build the enernet it'll have these same bugs in it if were not careful."
In a short, hyper-dense but highly useful presentation, Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on data center energy use, highlighted a promising trend in IT power consumption: the electricity used per gigabyte of data delivered has actually been dropping about 30 percent per year for the last several years. As technologies like virtualization and cloud computing further drive down energy consumption, this number could continue to improve, although there are a host of other factors that are driving up IT energy use -- namely higher demand for web services, online shopping, smart devices, and so on.
The two challenges Koomey highlighted in his presentation are how do we become smarter in how we use resources and operate our systems, and how to we move toward more pervasive dematerialization -- using data rather than paper for document sharing, for example.
"Moving electrons is always less environmentally damaging than moving atoms," Koomey said.
Stay tuned for more coverage from Green:Net on GreenerComputing.com later today. Some promising panels this afternoon include Microsoft's Rob Bernard on "IT Solutions for a Low Carbon Economy," and a panel on "Green Data Centers: Low Carbon Diets for Your Data Center."
If you're on Twitter, you can get my occasional updates from the show @greenbizmatt, and Earth2Tech is also liveblogging the event (and Tweeting it on @greennet).
