Velcroed together, stacked in racks, and lined up in back-to-back rows, the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, and Google leads the field in squeezing more servers into less space. Based on projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot in 2011, the Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity–enough to power 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington.”

– Keyword: Evil, Harper’s Magazine, March 2008

You can make money without doing evil. You can also make it without using so much fossil fuel. That’s the word from Google, which today unveiled a $4.4 trillion plan it says will reduce the nation’s dependence on coal and oil.

Google’s “Clean Energy 2030” plan as its described by Jeffery Greenblatt, Google.org’s climate and energy-technology manager, proposes to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 by relying on power from wind, nuclear and geothermal sources instead. It also calls for raising the standard car fuel efficiency from 31 mpg to 45 mpg and increasing usage of plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars.

It’s an ambitious plan, to say the least. Expensive too–a jaw-dropping $4.4 trillion dollars. But Google (GOOG) believes it could generate net savings of $1 trillion over its 22-year span. It might even save our children’s grandchildren from a world in which they rove post-apocalyptic desert wastelands scavenging for food and gasoline, terrorized by marauding biker gangs. And who could place a monetary value on that, eh?

“We see a huge opportunity for the nation to confront our energy challenges,” Greenblatt explained. “In the process we will stimulate investment, create jobs, empower consumers and, by the way, help address climate change.”

And lest we think Google is hiding its own self interest (Read: Lower data center electric bills) behind a $4.4 trillion dollar mask of altruism, consider this remark from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at an event in San Francisco Wednesday evening: “We’re going to likely consume more energy,” he said. “We’d like the prices to go down … We save a lot of money when prices go down. It’s good for shareholders, good for earnings.”

And in the end, what’s wrong with approaching clean energy from a capitalist position? We certainly approach dirty energy in that way.

Now that venture capitalists are so taken with green tech, perhaps they can push some VC dollars toward the development of a greener data center. Because according to consultancy McKinsey, data centers are fast becoming the Superfund sites of the tech industry. McKinsey found that data centers are responsible for 0.3% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. That’s about half of what the airline industry generates–and by 2020 it will surpass it.

“The more you look, the more you find that the entirety of the IT stack, from the CPU up, is very inefficient,” said William Forrest, the associate principal for IT at McKinsey. “Data centers are becoming a major business issue. We think it’s going to become a regulatory concern that will drive scrutiny not just in (corporate) boardrooms but with regulators as well.”

So what’s to be done? McKinsey proposes that corporations at least double the efficiency of their data centers by 2012 and adopt its Corporate Average Data Efficiency metric, a sort of fuel efficiency standard for IT. Said Forrest, “It’s miles per gallon for data centers.“

The future of renewable energy is anaerobic manure digestion? That statement sounds like a bunch of BS (sorry, had to), but according to utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG) and BioEnergy Solutions, it’s anything but.

Soon California will be lighting and heating its homes with power derived from cow dung. Yesterday PG&E and BioEnergy Solutions announced the Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, which will see BioEnergy Solutions passing gas (again, sorry) generated at its manure-to-gas facility (see photo above) in Fresno, Calif., to PG&E’s power plants.

The companies hope the effort will produce enough cow dung biogas to power 1,200 homes a day. That may sound like a cow-pie-in-the-sky aspiration (enough already, I know, I know), but BioEnergy Solutions founder David Albers thinks it’s a reasonable goal. “When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile of manure,” he said. “We saw it as an opportunity for farmers, for utilities and for California.”

No word yet on how the project will impact global warming. Cow flatulence is over 200 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of absorbing the infrared radiation that contributes significantly to global warming.

Doesn’t make much of a presidential campaign slogan, either. But then it doesn’t need to. Because former Vice President Al Gore doesn’t expect to be a candidate for the presidency in 2008. But he is joining venture capitalist John Doerr as a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a storied venture capital firm that has backed some of the biggest names in technology.

Gore, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize this year for bringing attention to the issue of global warming, will quarterback Kleiner Perkins’s green-technology investments. “There is a flood of money coming into this area,” Gore told the Los Angeles Times. “A lot of it is undisciplined. When you open the hood and look inside, you see people shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do.’ “

And that’s where Gore and Kleiner Perkins come in, using green–the Federal Reserve kind–to make green–the sustainable energy kind. Said Gore: “What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally. It’d be promising too much to say we can do it on our own, but we intend to do our part.”

While refining a radio-frequency cancer therapy he’d developed, Kanzius noticed that the treatment, which uses high-energy radio waves to destroy cancer cells that have been “tagged” with nano particles, had another unexpected application as an alternative energy source. Turns out if you point the Kanzius “Non-Invasive Radio Wave Treatment” at a bit of saltwater, it will burst into flame–one whose temperature reportedly exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Apparently, Kanzius’s invention–which uses just 200 watts of directed radio waves, not quite enough electricity to light three 75-watt light bulbs–breaks down the hydrogen-oxygen bond in the water, igniting the hydrogen.

“This was an experiment to see if I could heat saltwater, and instead of heat, I got fire,” Kanzius told WPBF. “You could take plain saltwater out of the sea, put it in containers and produce a violent flame that could heat generators that make electricity, or provide other forms of energy. If I were to be bold enough, I think one day you could power an automobile with this, eventually.”

What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy. The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates, it provides a constant stream of clean energy.”

–Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy

If Steorn’s perpetual motion effort is anything like its e-commerce venture (and by all accounts things do seem to be going that way), the only thing in its future is insolvency. After claiming to have developed a means of producing free, clean and limitless energy out of thin air, the Irish tech firm canceled the mercilessly hyped first demonstration of its Orbo free energy device, citing technical difficulties.

Ah, undone by “technical difficulties”–the bugbear of all misunderstood inventors. Of course. And so the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, will have to be broken another day.

“It’s too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything we do. The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn’t real. This is as big a claim as you can possibly make in the world of technology and science,” said Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy. “Five years ago, if I was watching this story from a distance, I would be thinking it was complete bull.”

Hey, you said it. Not me.