I was fortunate enough to attend the 2006 TechNet Innovation Summit this morning. Aside from the obvious enjoyment of seeing Bill Gates speak about Microsoft, philanthropy, technology and innovation, and the surprise appearance of Governor Schwarzenegger, there were a couple of other interesting panel discussions.

One I found particularly interesting was a panel on ‘Going Green’ (alternative energy and clean tech). On the panel were John Doerr, Scott McNealy, and KR Sridhar. Two things caught my attention in this panel. The first was a continuation of the apparent contradiction I mentioned (funnily enough) in my previous post. At one point in the conversation John Doerr described himself as a ‘raging capitalist’ – which I would believe given he is one of the most successful VCs in history. However, the bulk of his discussion on the panel centered around government policy, and what the government needs to do to help us ‘go green’. This still strikes me as odd – I would have thought a raging capitalist would consider the involvement of government to be less efficient than the free market with respect to capital flows and investments in clean tech. I was going to bring this up during question time but didn’t get a chance, so I will have to continue to wonder for now…

The second thing that caught my attention in this panel, was an interesting model Scott McNealy talked about (I didn’t realize he was such a proponent of green tech). What he said was along the lines of: it takes the most amount of energy to move atoms (i.e. to build stuff). It takes far less energy to move electrons (electricity). And moving photons takes the least energy of all (optical and wireless networks).

This has lead SUN to work on an initiative that they call the ‘blackbox‘. Essentially it’s a portable data center. Scott describes how they have fitted out a shipping container as a self-contained data center, full of racks of servers. They are able to drop these data centers next to a source of energy (e.g a hydro-electric plant, nuclear power station etc), and thus capture the electricity with little loss (apparently half of the electrical energy is lost in transmission over the grid). Since it’s more efficient to transmit photons, it therefore creates a net benefit by locating the data center remotely and sending network traffic back and forth, rather than having local network traffic and having to (inefficiently) transmit electricity.

Food for thought.