We’re here at the beautiful Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, where our first-ever Green:Net conference is going on all day. Check back for blog posts and photos from each session.

Live-blogging posts:

• San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: San Francisco Is Your Laboratory
• Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE
• In Order to Manage It, You Need to Measure It
• Bob Metcalfe’s Search for the Enernet
• Jonathan Koomey on Green Cloud Computing
• Power Grid 2.0
• State of CA Open for Green Business
• Saul Griffith on the Reality of Carbon Responsibility
• The New Networked Car
• Greening the Data Center
• Green:Net Keynote: IT Solutions for a Low-carbon Economy
• IT Solutions for a Low-carbon Economy
• The Green Web Effect
• From Dotcom to Greenboom
• Launch Pad

And don’t forget:

Twitter hashtag: #greennet Flickr tag: GreenNet

The green movement is bigger than your crunchy granola friends from college. And the web is a tool to meet, inform and motivate people who want to make the world a better place. At our afternoon web panel at Green:Net, participants shared captivating observations about how their audiences and members are taking green action online.

Moderator Alexis Madrigal of Wired.com started the panel on a rich vein: “The Internet can spread knowledge, but can it get people to do something?” The panelists replied that that they’ve found different emerging interest groups that can be motivated in different ways.

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The networked car requires a complete inversion of the way we think about owning and operating a vehicle. A viable infrastructure for widespread electric car adoption doesn’t come along by just swapping in some plug-ins at your neighborhood dealership. But if this world were to come true — and through companies like Better Place and Coulomb Technologies, it already is — it would be a magical place.

Revising concepts of car ownership and power isn’t something a startup can do on its own. The concept requires revamping legacy industries and incentivizing consumer change, said a panel of auto innovators at Green:Net today. So basically, they are promising to change the world but asking for a whole lot of help and handouts and cooperation to do so. Technological innovation is only a small slice of their proposed reality.

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Saul Griffith was the bearer of bad news at our Green:Net conference today. A nicer way to put it would be to say he gave us a reality check — and you have to admit his pretty charts and loads of data were tremendously informative and practical. I’d recommend checking out the video when it comes out.

Griffith tasked himself with laying out the global carbon emission problem and giving clear and precise (and completely insane!) descriptions for how to turn things around.

If you look at the world’s capability to produce energy, there are some pretty big mismatches, Griffith pointed out. Even taking all of the wave energy of every wave in the world would amount to only one-fifth or sixth of humanity’s power needs, he said. Whereas there’s 85,000 TW of surface solar potential and 3,600 TW of winds.

Griffith’s target is 12 TW in renewable carbon energy by 2033. But to get to that total would require immense and immediate effort, including:

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California might be broke, but it still spends $2 billion on IT (not including salaries) each year. If cleantech companies can find ways to both save money and reduce emissions, they may have a golden opportunity to help the state government, said two State of California program directors in an on-stage interview at Green:Net.

“Saving money in this environment is the greenest green,” said Adrian Farley, chief deputy director for policy and program management for the State of California. But in the long term, he added, a double bottom line is best.

Another benefit to having the state as a customer is exposure, said Will Semmes, chief deputy director of the California Department of General Services. “In aggregate, local governments can do about 10 times the business that states do in a lot of different areas. Being on a state contract could open up interest from municipalities.”

So how can startups get their ideas in front of a cash-strapped government?

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A panel of energy measurement entrepreneurs speaking at Green:Net had surprisingly fuzzy thoughts towards terms like accuracy, precision, and standards. It wasn’t that they think perfect measurement is impossible, just that they have a very nuanced view of what’s currently possible.

“We have to look at data in a relative way because it may be imperfect overall,” said Jeremy Jaech, CEO of Verdiem Corp., which provides enterprise software to monitor the devices connected to IT networks.

Raffi Krikorian, co-founder of WattzOn, which measures personal energy use, added, “We need to be consistent in measuring our users so we can match them relatively.” Krikorian and Jaech agreed heartily that consistency is more important than true accuracy.

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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom welcomed a full house of Green IT entrepreneurs at GigaOM’s first-ever Green:Net conference by proclaiming: “If you have an idea, let me know. We are a laboratory for innovation.”

Newsom said his first environmental initiatives were fairly easy. “It didn’t take much more than a piece of paper and a pen and executive orders,” he said, to lower city emissions 6 percent below 1990 levels by last September. Now, things have gotten harder and more ambitious.

Newsom offered an impassioned rundown of San Francisco environmental accomplishments and projects since he took office:

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In addition to the new Aptera specs and the debut of the new Mission One electric motorcycle, the 2009 TED Conference has had plenty of cleantech entrepreneurs up on stage this week.

Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place, spoke yesterday, throwing out the audacious claim that there could be 100 million electric cars on the road by 2016, up from 100,000 in 1011. While Earth2Tech readers may be familiar with his schtick, it produced one of the biggest standing ovations of the conference so far.

Agassi compared using oil as energy to the immoral use of slave labor, and urged a dismissal of “little 20-percent growth” targets in favor of ambition. He also rejected the idea that these changes can only happen in the distant future, predicting that oil costs will go right back up again as soon as our economy recovers.

When solving big questions, the two important numbers are zero — zero oil — and infinity — scaling this to infinity. Not little 20 percent growth…If we don’t change this, we’ll lose our economy right after we lose our morality.

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When newcomers get in my Prius, they always ask how it works. I show them the “energy” display screen, illustrating the interplay between the battery, the engine, and the electric motor. It’s a helpful diagram, showing what happens in real time when I start the car up, accelerate, and pause at a stop sign.

But when the newbies leave I switch back to my addiction, the “consumption” display. It’s not just the fact that my car’s a hybrid that makes it more fuel efficient, it’s that it shows me my current and average MPG, sparking my competitive side to get better mileage readouts and inspiring me to last longer before my next fill-up.

If my habits are at all indicative, instantaneous feedback is an effective way to inspire conservation — and hybridity has nothing to do with it. It’s been suggested to me that a real-time usage readout on my shower or thermostat might have a similar effect, and I believe it.

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