More bad news on the security front for the Smart Grid: The Wall Street Journal reports that the electric utility industry is negotiating with a defense contractor to determine whether spies from China and elsewhere have already hacked into the U.S. power grid.

Certain principles can be broadly applied across industries. Take the principle of load diversity and full capacity utilization. This principle is used to great effect in the power sector, data centers -- and in some instances, buildings.

HERNDON, Va. -- A new report from CDW Government finds that although awareness of virtualization's cost and environmental benefits is widespread in government agencies, only 20 percent are actually putting the technology to good use.

There's been plenty of hype about the Smart Grid -- some justified and some not. But the gold award for Smart Grid hype has to go to Cisco, whose spokesperson last month said that the grid could end up being up to 1,000 times the size of the Internet.

In this response to an earlier blog post by editor Preston Gralla, the coordinator of Greenpeace's Cool IT Challenge explains how the campaign is trying to push companies on the policy front to influence the global climate debate for the better.

ZURICH, -- In partnership with ETH Zurich, IBM has unveiled a new kind of high-performance computer that cuts energy use by 40 percent and CO2 emissions by 85 percent.

The Smart Grid is the hottest thing in Green IT these days, attracting not just lots of press, but attention from heavyweights like Cisco, IBM, Intel, and Google -- but there's some evidence that the Smart Grid may be the next tech bubble to burst.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A new report from Forrester Research outlines the 15 "Green IT 1.0" technologies that are helping IT managers clearly define and achieve business and environmental benefits through smart technology management.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The Santa Clara, Calif.-based data center has become the first building in the city to earn a LEED-Gold certification.

Think that solar power can't power data centers? Think again. i/o Data Centers, an IT infrastructure provider in Phoenix is in the process of deploying a massive array of solar panels that will generate up to 4.5 megawatts of electricity to help power its giant data center.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- An audit by U.S. Department Energy's Office of the Inspector General of seven facilities, including DOE headquarters, concluded that better management of IT resources could have saved at least $1.6 million in energy costs in fiscal year 2008.

Think virtualization in a data center, and you most likely think of the latest generation of multi-core chips, such as Intel's recently released Nehalem-EX processor, which comes with eight cores a a whopping 2,300,000,000 transistors. But the future of green data centers may be in the opposite end of the spectrum, with server clusters built using many small, power-efficient processors.

HOLYOKE, Mass. -- The city of Holyoke, with its ready source of cheap, relatively clean hydroelectic power, will host a new, energy efficient data center that will bring innovation and jobs to the city.