Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in San Francisco has been offering rebates for installation of certain "high-efficiency" servers for about a year, and Roger Duncan, deputy general manager of Austin Energy, said Friday that his company will also offer similar incentives. A "fine tuning" of the utility company incentives is also needed to ensure the assessment process within data centers to meet efficiency criteria for rebates is not too burdensome.

Lorie Wigle, marketing director of server software, technologies and initiatives for Intel Corp., said changing attitudes regarding energy efficiency within technology organizations remains at a very early stage.

"For many, the energy cost is still a shrug," Wigle said. "I don't necessarily see any firestorm of concern. We have to show people from an operational level why they should care about the energy side."

Another goal is to determine a methodology for creating a metric that measures data center efficiency as a product of its computational value, said William Tschudi, project manager of the applications team within the environment energy technologies division at Berkeley National Laboratory. "It would be great to have a 'miles to the gallon' comparison," Tschudi said. "Getting to those kinds of understandings is why we are here, and five years ago we couldn't have even convened a group to consider these issues."

One participant suggested such a metric could establish a baseline that if exceeded by businesses would result in a type of consumption tax. This would encourage efficient infrastructure designs, the participant said, but it was a prospect that none of the government officials present at the roundtable endorsed.