Under the terms of the deal, Cisco will pay about $107 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of JouleX.

“JouleX’s technology will strengthen Cisco Services’ Smart Offerings and complements our evolving services strategy. It extends our ‘Internet of Things’ capabilities and is a good alignment to Cisco EnergyWise,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president, Industry Solutions. “With network-enabled devices increasing exponentially, our partners and customers are asking for this solution today to operationalize their energy management capabilities in the network and reduce cost. JouleX’s cloud-enabled, agent-less architecture will allow our partners and customers to quickly deploy this solution at scale in addressing their IT energy management needs.”

Cisco VP and Head of Business Development, Hilton Romanski had this to say on in a blog post:

IT energy consumption is one of the largest unmanaged expenses and as a result organizations are seeking effective solutions to measure usage, improve optimization, and produce sustainability reports. Up to 50 billion objects are predicted to be connected to the Internet or interconnected machine to machine by 2020 as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology transition. Many of those devices will be in constrained environments, where space, bandwidth and power will be at a premium. Cisco networks are differentiated by how we securely scale this type of environment and power consumption will be a key attribute of that differentiation in the future. JouleX is a natural extension of IoT, one of the many technology transitions that make up the Internet of Everything.

The acquisition of JouleX exemplifies Cisco’s innovation framework and supports Cisco’s five foundational priorities by enhancing our service offering across all customer segments and advancing our business and technology architecture. The JouleX acquisition is aligned to Cisco’s goals of developing and delivering innovative energy management solutions that streamline data and work flow across a unified network.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.

Specifically, the grant will focus on electricity rates, access to electricity markets, and open data policies. The aim is for consumers to make more efficient use of their electricity, by shifting their use to times when its cheaper and producing their own on-site energy. They also want to see access for consumers and businesses so they can be compensated for cutting energy use at key times. Finally, with policy reforms, they want to see consumers given access to their own energy data for their own use and sharing with third parties of their choosing.

“These policy reforms, coupled with the new technologies now being deployed on a large scale, can empower consumers to make smarter energy choices, improve real-time management of the electricity grid, and help facilitate more renewable energy all while lowering overall costs,” said Michael Terrell, Senior Policy Counsel, Engergy & Sustainability on the Google.org blog.

“We hope this grant will help catalyze change and look forward to seeing progress in the years to come,” he adds.

Last week, Google announced a $200 million investment into a wind farm in Texas, which the company says generates enough energy to power over 60,000 average U.S. homes.

“Spinning Spur Wind Project is located in Oldham County, a wide open, windy section of the Texas Panhandle located about 35 miles from Amarillo,” explains Google Corporate Finance Senior Manager Kojo Ako-Asare. “The 161 megawatt facility was built by renewable energy developer EDF Renewable Energy, a veteran in the industry that has overseen more than 50 other clean energy projects. Spinning Spur’s 70 2.3 MW Siemens turbines started spinning full time just before the end of the year, and the energy they create has been contracted to SPS, a utility that primarily serves Texas and New Mexico.”

“We look for projects like Spinning Spur because, in addition to creating more renewable energy and strengthening the local economy, they also make for smart investments: they offer attractive returns relative to the risks and allow us to invest in a broad range of assets,” adds Ako-Asare. “We’re also proud to be the first investor in an EDF Renewable Energy project that is not a financial institution, as we believe that corporations can be an important new source of capital for the renewable energy sector.”

The company also put out this infographic about its investments in clean energy:

Google has made over 10 renewable energy investments since 2010. In September, the company announced an agreement with the Grand River Damn Authority to green the energy supply to its Oklahoma data center, including 48 MW of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project in Oklahoma.

“We’ve been working with GRDA, our local utility, to procure additional renewable energy since we ‘plugged in’ our data center in 2011, and in February of 2012, GRDA approached us about purchasing power from Canadian Hills,” explains Gary Demasi, director of Google’s Global Infrastructure team. “In conjunction with the electricity GRDA already supplies Google to operate its data center, Google will pay GRDA a premium to purchase renewable energy generated by Canadian Hills. This brings the total amount of renewable energy for which Google has contracted to over 260 MW.”

“This agreement is a milestone for GRDA because it’s their first-ever wind energy project,” adds Demasi. “It’s also a milestone for Google because it’s a little different from the previous Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) we’ve signed, where we agreed to buy the energy directly from the developer who built the wind farm. This agreement, by contrast, marks the first time we’ve partnered with a utility provider to increase the amount of renewable energy powering one of our data centers.”

Google’s Oklahoma data center happens to be the same one where it has a one-eyed security dog.

Earlier this year, Google outlined some other ways its data centers are getting more energy efficient. More on that here.

“A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing,” writes Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google. “Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilized. And our data centers use equipment and software specially designed to minimize energy use. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.”

Google shared the following diagram:

Google 6 minutes ago

Cloud computing is so energy efficient that a typical organization can save 65%-85% on energy costs by migrating to Google Apps. Check out the diagram below to learn about why the cloud is so efficient, or you can read more on the Official Google Blog: http://goo.gl/8kUg4 52    5 Powered by socialditto

Google says the U.S. General Services Administration was able to reduce server energy consumption by 90% and carbon emissions by 85% by “going Google”. The organization will save $285,000 annually on energy costs, Google says.

Google is working on making its own Data Centers more efficient. In March, the company announced some improvements, and claimed that its data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center.

Google has data centers in South Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Carolina, Oregon, Finland, Belgium, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Did you know that exercise can have a great impact on how you function both physically and mentally? Of course you do, but you refuse to exercise anyway. Recent research suggests that people who exercise can experience improved concentration and motivation. They can also cope with stress, deadlines, socializing, and prioritizing better. So that sounds like something worth looking into, doesn’t it?

If that stuff really doesn’t interest you, think about this: Not exercising or eating healthy can lead to you being an unproductive, sluggish, and underpaid worker. That sounds worse. If you care about yourself, you should take a look at this next infographic, it gives you all kinds of strategies on how to be healthy, productive, and possibly wealthier.

Take a look:

Green Power Resources include clean and renewable energy sources like solar, geothermal, biomass, wind and hydro power. The EPA ranks them in order of the number of kilowatt hours of green power they consume, so the larger the company, the bigger chance they have of making the list.

Larger companies also have more money to spend on partnerships with the EPA. These companies do not necessarily have to generate or buy electric power for themselves, but rather buy energy certificates from companies selling “Green Power”. According to ZDNet, many companies do this just for the sake of building their green energy portfolio.

Intel has topped the list since 2008, using 2.5 billion kilwatt hours of biomass, geothermal, hydro, solar and wind power. The amount of green power they consume compared to the total number of power consumption is high at 88 percent.

Other top green power tech companies include Cisco Systems, Sprint, Dell, Google, and Xerox. These companies consume a lot of green energy, but their percentages are nowhere near Intel’s 88 percent.

• Microsoft – 1.12 billion kW – biomass, small-hydro, wind – 46%
• Cisco Systems – 268.6 million kWh – wind – 27%
• Sprint – 176 million kWh – solar, wind – 5%
• Dell – 119.4 million kWh – biogas, solar, wind – 29%
• Google – 103 million kWh – biogas, biomass, small-hydro, solar, wind – 5%
• Xerox – 101.4 million kWh – wind – 18%

The alarming thing is the amount of non-renewable energy being consumed by these large companies who make the list of top green power consumers, but only use green power as a small percentage of their total power consumption. Sprint, for instance, uses or sponsors 176 million kWh hours of green energy. But when you take into account their percentage, they are using 3.5 billion kWh hours of energy from other, non-environmentally friendly sources.

Perhaps a more telling list is EPA’s list of companies using on-site generators. This shows the companies that are taking a direct risk in investing large amounts of money to back alternative energy. Of tech companies, only Google makes the list, for investing in on-site biogas and solar projects.

[Sources: ZDNet, EPA]

The app, OPOWER analyzes your energy use based on your house and its features and compares that to similar homes in the area, as well as your Facebook friends. From Facebook:

Today we’re announcing a new social energy app, developed in partnership with the National Resources Defense Council and OPOWER. With an initial reach of 20 million households, the app allows people to quickly and easily start benchmarking their home’s energy use against similar homes. People can also compare their energy use with friends, enter energy-saving competitions and share tips on becoming more energy efficient.

Once you allow OPOWER to connect to Facebook, you create your “home profile.” That includes answering questions about your residence like location, sq. footage, type of A/C system, amount of fireplaces, etc. They take all of this and compare it against your monthly bills.

From this, you’re given a little mini report about your energy consumption compared to all similar homes in your area and with homes that qualify as “efficient.”

The app also has tips for ways to save, like replacing an old refrigerator or avoiding over-drying clothes.

All of this can be done without any connection to Facebook, really. But the social aspect of the app of course requires Facebook. OPOWER lets you see how you rank compared to all your Facebook friends that also use the app. You can also share “accomplishment” to Facebook, for instance if your energy consumption went down 5% from March to April.

If your local utility company is supported by OPOWER, you can link it, which makes tracking your energy-saving progress a little bit easier.

I guess the idea is that turning the energy conservation into a social experience will help people get into it even more. Do you think that a little bit of gamification can help people remember to flip off their lights when they leave? Let us know in the comments.

Incredibly, this map was built based on the heat demand in England and did not use any information from meter readings or energy bills, meaning all of the information on the site won’t be revealing personal information about residencies. “For both residential and non-residential models,” the agency’s site says, “heat demand was first estimated at address level using a range of data sources.”

You can toggle different layers of the heat map so as to see different aspects, such as total heat density, the heat density of public buildings only, commercial heat density, and so on. Additionally, you an adjust the opacity of the heat map overlay in case you want to be able to still see the satellite images underneath the map. For instance, here’s a zoomed out image of London’s commercial heat density.

Changed to reflect the residential heat density, you can see a greater intensity towards the center of London (the deeper the red, the higher the density).

It’s interesting to compare this heat map with another, different type of heat map that we featured earlier this week that creates such a layout on Google Earth based on the number of pictures that have been uploaded to Panoramioa, a photo-sharing site that emphasizes geo-tagging.

Comparing the two, you can almost correlate levels of photo-sharing with heat usage across the country, but then again those two variable are probably just reflective of the population density across the region.

[Via Guardian.]

“In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center,” writes Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations at Google.

One of the key metrics Google uses to track efficiency is power usage effectiveness or PUE, which Kava describes as a ratio of the total power used to run a data center to the amount used to power the servers. “For instance, if a data center has a PUE of 2.0, that means that for every watt of energy that powers the servers, another watt powers the cooling, lighting and other systems. An ideal PUE would be 1.0,” he explains.

To make a long story short, Google has improved its PUE from 1.16 in 2010 to 1.14 in 2011. It was as high as 1.20 back in 2008, when Google started publishing the number (it does so on a quarterly basis now).

The quarterly PUE was even better for Q4 2011 than it was for the year. Google posted its best quarterly PUE number to date at 1.

Measuring PUE is one of five best practices Google lists for its data centers. The others are: managing airflow, adjusting the thermostat, using free cooling and optimizing power distribution.

The company recently brought attention to how it users river water to cool its Georgia data center:

Google has data centers in South Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Carolina, Oregon, Finland, Belgium, Hong Kong and Singapore. On average, a user’s search query travels 1,500 miles.