Salon has another example of tech companies investing in renewable energy to power their data centres - Microsoft invests in Texas wind power project.

How important can it be when giant companies that consume vast amounts of energy commit to buying renewables?

Well, the 110-megawatt Keechi wind power project in Texas, which Microsoft on Monday said it would get behind through a power purchase agreement, “would not have happened otherwise,” according to Susan Reilly, president and CEO of project developer RES Americas.

This is an interesting project for a variety of reasons. First, for the Microsofties it moves them beyond greening their energy profile through the purchase of renewable energy credits, according to company chief environmental strategist Rob Bernard, “to actually investing directly in green energy.”

CNet has an article from Martin LaMonica on Microsoft's "Hohm" energy usage meter - Microsoft Hohm connects to home power monitor.

If you're cranking the air conditioner a lot this summer, a product bundle using Microsoft Hohm will tell you a lot about your upcoming energy bills--maybe even more than you want to know.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it has tied its Hohm Web home energy-efficiency application to an electricity monitor called PowerCost Monitor. The combination, which uses a home broadband connection, lets people view home electricity from the Web or from the tabletop electricity monitor.

Whole-home electricity monitors show you how much electricity a house is using at a given moment and how much it's costing you--sort of like a dashboard with a home speedometer and cost per mile.

Linking Hohm to the monitor allows people to see that same real-time information from a Web-enabled device, such as a PC or smartphone. Significantly, it lets people dig a little deeper in the data to track electricity use for the whole day, or compare one period to another.

For Microsoft, it's the first deal it has struck to bring energy data via an electricity monitor into Hohm, the company's foray into consumer energy efficiency. Microsoft hopes to have Hohm act as a software hub for managing everything from home efficiency improvements to scheduling electric-vehicle charging. Google, too, has already signed on a couple of device makers to connect its PowerMeter application to home electricity monitors.

For consumers eager to get more than just a monthly utility bill, it's a sign that some of the benefits touted by smart-grid advocates, namely more detailed information to drive efficiency, can be achieved without having utilities install smart meters.

Business Green reports that Microsoft is about to launch a power usage meter of its own as it tries to compete with Google on another front - Microsoft to bring energy savings Hohm.

Microsoft is moving into the energy use-recording business, with a new application designed to tell consumers how much electricity they are using.

Microsoft Hohm uses technology licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. The free online application, which has not yet been made officially available, will take data from consumers where available and use it to help them assess their energy use. Such data will include house features, electricity usage patterns and appliances. Where the information is unavailable, it will use local and national averages.

The system will use this data to make practical recommendations to consumers, including placing new caulking on windows or installing a programmable thermostat, said the company in a statement.

The system is designed to integrate with energy meters so that it can gather data from customers transparently. To this end, the software giant is working with four utilities: Xcel Energy, Puget Sound Energy, Seattle City Light and Sacramento Municipal Utility District. It will create a software development kit for utilities to work with.

Significantly, the software giant says that Hohm will use the Microsoft advertising platform, indicating that there may be a commercial element to the system. It will also take advantage of its recently launched Bing search engine.

The move comes just weeks after Google announced its own set of partnerships around a similar system, called Google Power Meter. It, too, is publishing a set of APIs designed to enable utilities to look into its own systems, feeding data back to its servers, and enabling consumers to monitor their own power use.

Technology Review has an interesting article on research at Microsoft into reducing energy consumption in data centres.

Data centers are an increasingly significant source of energy consumption. A recent EPA report to Congress estimated that U.S. servers and data centers used about 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006, or 1.5 percent of the total electricity used in the country that year. (See also "Data Centers' Growing Power Demands.") Concern about the amount of energy eaten up by data centers has led to a slew of research in the area, including new work from Microsoft Research's Networked Embedded Computing group, which was showcased last week in Redmond, WA, at Microsoft's TechFest 2008. The work attacks the energy-consumption problem in two ways: new algorithms make it possible to free up servers and put them into sleep mode, and sensors identify which servers would be best to shut down based on the environmental conditions in different parts of the server room. By eliminating hot spots and minimizing the number of active servers, Microsoft researchers say that the system could produce as much as 30 percent in energy savings in data centers.

The sensors, says Feng Zhao, principal researcher and manager of the group, are sensitive to both heat and humidity. They're Web-enabled and can be networked and made compatible with Web services. Zhao says that he envisions the sensors, which are still in prototype form, as "a new kind of scientific instrument" that could be used in a variety of projects. In a data center, the idiosyncrasies of a building and individual servers can have a big effect on how the cooling system functions, and therefore on energy consumption. Cooling, Zhao notes, accounts for about half the energy used in data centers. (He believes that the sensors, which he says could sell for $5 to $10 apiece, could be used in homes as well as in data centers, where they could work in tandem with a Web-based energy-savings application.)

Another aspect of the research, explains Lin Xiao, a researcher with the group, is new algorithms designed to manage loads on the servers in a more energy-efficient way. Traditionally, load-balancing algorithms are used to keep traffic evenly distributed over a set of servers. The Microsoft system, in contrast, distributes the load to free up servers during off-peak times so that those servers can be put into sleep mode.