There has been a recent spate of articles, events and people talking about ‘green computing’. Venture capitalists in India are also reportedly looking for clean tech investments. After going through portfolios of all major VCs operating in India, I could find only a handful of investments in this category which is very aptly captured by Khosla Ventures here. Falling mainly under energy generation, energy storage, energy management, new materials and applications categories, clean tech investments in India include Orient Green Power (a joint venture company with Shriram EPC dealing with micro-turbines) by Bessemer Venture Partners, Attero Recycling (waste recycling) by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Praj Industries (bio-fuels and waste waster processing) by Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures.
Interestingly, none of the above clean tech investments have got anything to do with IT and ‘green computing’. HeadStart and Compute 2009, the annual conference coming up in January 2009 has Dr Chandrakant Patel from HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab delivering a keynote on ‘green computing’ which can be defined as technologies and products that make IT systems more energy efficient and environment friendly. According to the US Department of Energy, 6000 data centers in the USA alone consumed 61 billion KwH of energy in 2006 which represented 1.5% of the total energy consumption in the US and $4.5 billion in energy consumption expenditure. This is projected to grow at 12% per year to over 100 billion KwH in 2011. Dr Patel’s work at HP on dynamic cooling systems for datacenters based on their heat loads and other such initiatives at Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are targeted to bring down energy consumption by 10% by 2011.
In comes Virident Systems, a US/India based venture focussed on green datacenters that I noticed last year that has been working under the radar in Bangalore itself. 
Virident‘s product is called EcoRAM (based on its Green Gateway platform) which is essentially a Flash based RAM product that will push down energy consumption by upto 80%. What this means is that applications no longer need to be memory constrained and users can also afford to quad their server memory capacities without necessarily having to pay for more servers which will lead to cost savings and lesser energy consumption. EcoRAM delivers substantial improvements in memory density and power efficiency (QPS/Watt) without requiring any changes to sockets, motherboards, servers or software.
The company has a tie up with Spansion that is in the flash memory business and EcoRAM is aligned with its flash-as-DRAM product strategy. Founded by a team comprising of a CTO of Sun Microsystems and others from SGI and Google, Virident is a very good example of how ‘green computing’ is actually relevant from a practical business standpoint. I do see such ventures and products being driven more by pragmatic business requirements than by academic pursuits or by sudden whims of investors who take a fancy to green computing.