LONDON, United Kingdom — Imagine powering your refrigerator with the same amount of energy it currently takes to light up a red LED on your smartphone. Or imagine running your data center for three years for the same cost as it takes to power it for one day.

That's the goal set by a new coalition spearheaded by Bell Labs. The group, called the Green Touch initiative, brings together industry, academic and governmental IT leaders with the target of making the world's networks a thousand times more energy efficient in the next five years.

The short timeline for such an ambitious goal is due in large part to the urgency of the problem, according to Gee Rittenhouse, the head of research at Bell Labs. Globally, network communications are responsible for 300 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, and that number will grow rapidly as more people do more online activities more often.

"In the next decade, we can expect to see a tremendous growth of emissions," Rittenhouse said during a live press event announcing the partnership. "At best we will hold things steady. So we have to ask if we can do better, if there is a better way."

Green Touch came about in the past six months, when research scientists got together to think about what is possible in the range of reductions for energy used by networks. After several months of work, they determined that, in an ideal scenario, networks could be 10,000 times more efficient than they currently are.

But in a non-theoretical world, such reductions are years away, so the Green Touch partnership was formed to achieve a still-ambitious but more practical goal: Make global networks 1,000 times more efficient in five years.

The partnership is constructed around three principles: simplicity, transparency, and feasibility. The technologies developed will be open-source, available to all groups alike; ideas and innovations will be shared in a similarly open environment; and the group must make progress -- "This is a very pressing problem for the industry," Rittenhouse said, "we have to make progress."

Green Touch has launched with 13 industrial, academic and governmental partners, and members are actively seeking out additional partners from the IT sector. The members include:

• Industrial Labs: Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Freescale Semiconductor
• Service Providers: China Mobile, SwissCom, Telefonica;
• Academic Research Labs: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), Stanford University's Wireless Systems Lab (WSL), the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES)
• Government and Nonprofit Research Institutions: The CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics (Grenoble, France), Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (Leuven, Belgium), The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)

 The group's first meeting will happen in February and focus on establishing the five-year plan, as well as its deliverables after the first year and the roles and responsibilities of its members.

"If you are willing to embrace open collaboration, if you're willing to embrace the best brains in the world, and bring them together and let them work together on an issue that seems insurmountable," said Ben Verwaayen, the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, during a webcast announcing the partnership, "then spectactular things can happen."

More details about the Green Touch initiative are online at GreenTouch.org.