Take one slumped economy, add some high travel prices, stir in a healthy dose of climate change anxiety, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for an emerging market: virtual worlds for businesses. According to the new GigaOM Pro report “Virtual Worlds for the Enterprise Market” by Kris Tuttle and Steve Waite of Research 2.0 (subscription required), these factors are driving annual revenues for the space for businesses up to $8-10 billion by 2015.

While I’ve been skeptical about the emissions-reducing potential of virtual meetings in the past, Tuttle and Waite’s report indicates that the growth of enterprise-focused virtual worlds could have some real green benefits, by helping companies eliminate a higher percentage of business-related travel over time. Early adopters of virtual meetings have primarily used them for internal communications between employees. But with better security, enterprise-appropriate branding, and improved interaction/collaboration tools, virtual worlds with a business bent can host a higher percentage of external meetings (those with clients, partners and potential customers) too.

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With the explosion of low-cost chips, from Intel’s Atom processor to low-power Wi-Fi sensors, just about everything is “getting smart” these days. There are known environmental benefits to this kind of cheap-and-easy digital intelligence, many of them heavily promoted by IBM as part of its “Smarter Planet” initiative. There’s the smart grid, of course, which adds data-rich intelligence to the energy system, but there’s also smart water, smart transportation (including rail, electric vehicles and traffic), and even smart garbage. It’s what Intel regularly describes as the “2 Percent, 98 Percent” rule — that operating IT contributes some 2 percent of global carbon emissions, but IT can be used to minimize the other 98 percent.

But there’s a slightly brownish tinge to all this greener-through-IT talk. The widely cited 2 percent figure only looks at the energy impacts of IT equipment as it’s being operated, not as it’s being manufactured. That’s what’s known as embedded, or embodied, energy. And depending on who you ask, manufacturing can be a major piece of the puzzle — between 75 and 85 percent, according to some research. In 2005, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental watchdog group for the high-tech industry, estimated that a single fab could consume as much energy as a 60,000-person city. Which begs the question: Will semiconductor manufacturing outweigh the environmental benefits of the “smarter planet”?

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Carbon management software is like a sophomore on the cleantech campus: it’s been around for awhile, but it’s just now starting to get noticed by the senior class. This month SAP took over Clear Standards, a carbon management startup that raised $4 million last fall, and IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have each recently dipped a toe into the carbon management waters. This morning another young company, Planet Metrics, a San Bruno, Calif.-based carbon management software firm, is looking to attract attention with the launch of its software-as-a-service application into beta with high-profile new customer Method, the San Francisco-based green cleaning products company.

As we explained back in November, when Planet Metrics raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the software helps companies assess energy and carbon use in their business and identify “hot spots” (see screenshot above) — or areas where the biggest emissions reductions can be made. The system connects to other business enterprise software, and taps into several deep databases of information about life-cycle environmental impacts of ingredients, transportation methods and more.

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It wasn’t so long ago that U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced $256 million in stimulus funding for industrial energy-efficiency initiatives, $50 million of which will go to research, development and demonstration projects aimed at helping cut the energy used by information and communication technologies. But just a week later, the Department of Energy released the results of an energy audit of its own IT practices (PDF) — and the picture wasn’t a pretty one.

Auditors noted that the DOE could save more than $23 million annually at the seven facilities surveyed, just by adopting the same technology and policies it recommends to U.S. businesses, the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blog reported Monday. But as anyone who’s tried to diet, quit smoking or exercise more knows, there’s a big difference between knowing what you should do and doing it. So, for the DOE, we offer a few tips for it to lead the way for companies and other government agencies that are ready to take the next steps and break free of their energy addiction.

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Corporate social responsibility reports are often a company’s beachhead effort on sustainability, and most focus on relatively easy-to-achieve metrics, such as employee volunteerism rates, corporate giving and supplier diversity. Advocates say even this kind of transparency can spur companies to further action. That’s the logic behind the Global Reporting Initiative, which provides a framework for companies to evaluate their own CSR reports. The GRI Framework doesn’t give points for good or bad outcomes, however; companies earn points simply for disclosing information.

Sounds easy, right? Wrong. CSR data is notoriously complex. Putting together a report can mean pulling data from environmental health and safety departments, community and education programs, philanthropic giving records, supply chain partners and operations records. Historically, companies have pulled that data into Excel spreadsheets to create new data sets for CSR reports. But as stakeholders — and shareholders — show more interest in sustainability concerns, companies are beginning to eye more sophisticated software to help them manage and report that data. 

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When you’re a networking giant, it’s probably a good idea to develop a strategy for participating in the biggest network build-out of the decade. This morning, Cisco is doing just that, with an announcement of its game plan for becoming a major player in the smart grid, with technology for everything from the utility data center to energy management for the light switches in your home and the VoIP phones in your office.

Cisco estimates that the smart grid communications market represents a $20 billion a year opportunity as the systems are built out over the next five years, and the company is angling to seize a substantial portion of that value. For now, Cisco’s smart grid plan lacks a lot of specific detail, but it demonstrates that the company is making aggressive movement into the space — and signals to some startups that there’s a powerful new competitor (or partner) on the scene. One company in particular should be concerned: Silver Spring Networks. Despite the recent rosy glow surrounding Silver Spring, Cisco’s size and networking experience could put a few clouds on the startup’s horizon.

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By now, you’ve probably heard the following claim: Video conferencing, when done right, can offer companies significant benefits when it comes to travel. By eliminating the need to send employees to on-site meetings, companies can cut both the cost and the nasty carbon emissions bill associated with such journeys.

That’s the message used to help market next-best-thing-to-real-life video conferencing services like Cisco’s TelePresence and HP’s Halo, and even Nortel’s web.alive virtual collaboration service — that virtual meetings can save both money and the planet. But look beyond the headlines and the soundbites, and you’re likely to find a somewhat less verdant tale.

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The announcement this week that Miami could soon be home to the nation’s largest smart grid project brought together some of the biggest companies in the space, GE and Cisco; one of its most promising startups, Silver Spring Networks; and the utility arm of the nation’s largest wind and solar energy generator, Florida Power & Light (FPL). But despite all the stimulus-friendly talk of being “shovel-ready,” the project was first outlined in D.C. at a dinner meeting just six weeks ago, according to Cisco spokeswoman Jennifer Greeson. In other words, there are plenty of details yet to be worked out — including what roles each of the partners will play.

Some things are clear: GE will provide a million smart meters and certain in-grid technology; Silver Spring, which we’ve referred to as the “Cisco of smart grid,” will provide the core networking infrastructure, from the utility substation down to the home, as well as some of the back-end management software. Cisco’s role, meanwhile, is less clear.

As part of the Energy Smart Miami announcement, Cisco CEO John Chambers repeatedly called the smart grid an “instant replay” of the Internet. But while Cisco’s role in the Internet revolution has largely been to provide the workhorse networking tools for large-scale data centers, the company isn’t angling for a major role in FPL’s backend systems, according to the partners, though it will act as an adviser on some key networking issues. Instead, Cisco has its best opportunity yet to leverage some of its recent acquisitions in the consumer space by providing devices and networking that will help FPL’s residential customers manage their energy use.

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As social media has exploded, web startups building social applications are offering users ways to manage that proliferation. Some, such as FriendFeed, provide a central place for users to aggregate different services, while others, like Facebook Connect, offer tools for federation — a single way to access them all. But the dilemma over whether it’s better to aggregate or federate isn’t confined to social media — companies building out the smart grid and related infrastructure technologies are beginning to grapple with this question, too.

When it comes to carbon and energy data, the purchases we make and the resources we use constitute our de facto “profiles” in real-world networks such as utility grids, roadways, financial systems and business supply chains. Energy and carbon management tools integrate information about our total energy use from these profiles in an effort to cut our carbon footprints. As smart technologies provide ever more data for these profiles, a Facebook Connect-like approach that uses federation, rather than aggregation, may be best-positioned to make energy and carbon management tools more effective, without sacrificing user privacy.

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