Green Coding for Greener Clouds

I was reading an interesting article on Inhabitat about various large IT companies working to create code auditors that audit for energy efficiency.  Being that server farms are a huge user of energy it makes perfect sense to not only try to use renewable energy sources to power them.  But to go to the source of the issue and insure the code itself is as efficient as possible.  It’s a simple idea but one that to be honest had never crossed my mind.  You could compare it to a house that uses old fashioned everything that is an energy hog and is powered by solar.  So it takes 10 times as many solar panels to run the house which basically cancels out any impact to the environment since the non-renewable energy used to make the solar panels to begin with.  The article also pointed out a Greenpeace campaign called “COOL IT” that gives report cards to big IT companies and their use of renewable energy.  To my surprise Cisco seems to be at the forefront.  The stranger thing was I saw no mention of Amazon, who is one of the biggest cloud providers around now.