The IT Energy Efficiency Coalition met for the first time last week to explore ways the make data centers more energy efficient.

Led by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the company that supplies power to the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, the group is comprised of more than 24 utilities from North America, 19 of which attended the first meeting.

Utilities want customers in their territories to conserve energy so they can avoid the capital expense of building new power plants, ComputerWorld reported. "Encouraging companies to conserve power makes more sense than for us to keep spending to add marginal capacity," said Greg Whiting, energy conservation manager at Seattle City Light.

The company plans to launch a program that will financially offset for companies to offset the cost of installing network-based software to control PC power consumption. The utility will pay $8 per PC, and the software can cost between $11 and $25 per PC, Whiting said.

A similar program from PG&E rewards companies for switching to server virtualization while BC Hydro, serving British Columbia, hopes to soon offer an incentive that pays 60 percent of the cost of consolidating servers by implementing virtualization software.

Across North America, the number of utilities offering similar incentives is low.

Gartner Research Vice President Paul McGuckin said at the meeting that most companies interested in such programs are scared of running out of data center capacity, not because of environmental concerns, which are rarely mentioned except for publicity purposes.