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

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.

Moms seem to be one of the largest and most actionable groups on the web from a green perspective, said panelists from startups Carbonrally, GoodGuide and Zerofootprint. They care deeply about health risks for their kids. The best way to resonate with moms is to talk in terms of toxics, not environmental impact, especially considering widespread greenwashed marketing, said GoodGuide CEO Dara O’Rourke, whose company offers information on products’ health and social impact.

Erin Carlson, the director of Yahoo for Good, had more nuance to offer after looking at what green content attracts an audience on Yahoo properties like its main page and portals for cars and jobs. She split out three main profiles within that audience:

• Deep green: 23 percent of audience. Skewed female, metropolitan, in it for the long term
• Trendy: 24 percent. Green to look cool. Skews younger and multicultural. Responds to messages about “everybody’s doing it.”
• Practical: 13 percent. Older, in more rural areas. Doing more, saving time.

“People do not respond to doom and gloom,” said Carlson. “They do not respond to celebrities talking about green.” She described Yahoo’s strategy of grabbing people with a sexy headline — say, a world naked bikeride — that leads to an article about alternative transportation.

Carbonrally founder and president Jason Karas described an emerging demographic to his site’s highly interactive personal impact competitions — young people. After a promotion from Seventeen magazine, some 6,000 young girls have taken to the site to start a social movement. They are rabid users of social web tools, with far more messages and interactions on the site than their older counterparts.

There are plenty of opportunities to put understanding green-leaning users to work. Carlson used her observations of the relatively passive audience at Yahoo to suggest that more interactive products like Zerofootprint and Carbonrally might benefit from not using the term “carbon” quite so prominently. She said, for example, that as a rock climber she’d personally be more motivated by information that was described in terms of impact on rock climbing destinations rather than pounds of carbon.

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.

“We’re talking about two industries that have never had to work together before — that’s the auto industry and the utilities, the grid operators,” said Rolf Schreiber, RechargeIT Engineer from Google. Panelists agreed that standardization is of utmost importance. Plug-in stations need to be interoperable. Customers of one company need to be able to roam onto another’s grid. Electrical interfaces need to sync. Utilities need to make charging cheap and efficient.

“Let’s make the vehicles talk,” said Sven Thesen of Better Place. “Standards work is not complex; it’s tedious and has to be done. The big picture is the technology is there; we don’t need to reinvent, we just need to put it in a different order. We’re talking about slow-moving old industries where change comes slowly.”

The panelists also had one more tiny request — international governmental help. They want federal loans and guarantees on batteries, subsidies for plug-in stations and regulations as added motivation.

It’s a lot to ask, yes. But folks at this conference are thinking big.

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:

• starting tomorrow, 100 meters squared of solar cells would have to be produced every second for the next 25 years.
• also 50 meters squared of solar thermal meters
• 13 -megawatt wind turbine installed every 25 minutes for next 25 years
• 1 full-scale nuclear power plant every week for the next 25 years
• 300 MW worth of steam turbines every day
• 1250 meters squared of algae every second for the next 25 years

Griffith: “That should scare you. But it’s possible.”

He calls this massive hypothetical energy production place “Renewistan” — “a country that doesn’t exist yet, but I hope to be king of.”

On a personal level, Griffith proposed that the current recession could jump-start a decline from a peak of individual energy use in 2008. It takes 67 pounds of oil, 63 pounds of coal, and 12 pounds of gas to produce the 11,400 watts per day Americans use. Meeting the world average of 2255 watts per day would require a humongous lifestyle change, but there’s a lot of things that can be tweaked, like video conferencing in lieu of flying.

With only a smidgen of an attempt to end on a high note, Griffith closed with earlier speaker Jonathan Koomey’s equation for the state of the world’s carbon. “There’s a known and reasonably predictable amount of carbon we can burn before it’s all over.”

“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? Farley and Semmes said there are a lot of things they need fixed. First of all, they want data analysis and processes to analyze the efficiency of everything they do, buy, and operate now. Excel can only do so much, said Semmes. And the state needs help understanding what progress it has made on a number of environmental mandates. Beyond reducing carbon emissions from infrastructure, Farley said the state government is also dedicated to preventing activities that have a negative impact on the environment — so companies have an opportunity to help California know that impact.

Some companies may not even realize what avenues exist for them to get in on government projects, the two men said. Companies with less than $30 million in revenue qualify as small businesses in California, qualifying them for all sorts of opportunities. There are also a lot of smaller projects — $1.5 million and under — that are awarded often.

“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.

Krikorian spoke of his company’s ideas to standardize manufacturing chains labeling and reporting, create ways for users to give access to their data that require intricate permission models, and send power data along with contextual metadata to the cloud directly from outlets — but said these things are far from fruition. In the meantime, public and crowdsourced data and some personal data are a place to start.

Richard Barber, CTO of carbon credit automator Carbon Flow, said the offset business is actually fairly accurate as compared to personal and corporate measurement, and that it’s more constrained by audit processes. But in a market in which international carbon trading was worth $60 billion last year, “As long as you reduce something you’ve made a reduction,” Barber argued.

So what would help get good data out of people and systems? The panel seemed less concerned with standards than you would think. “Standardization is relatively simple in software,” assured Alex Wissner-Gross, co-founder and CTO of CO2Stats, which looks to things like the local energy sources for major geographical sources of traffic to certain web pages in order to measure their emissions.

Jonathan Gay, founder of Greenbox Technology and prior to that a co-creator of Flash, had some words of advice from his past life. He said the most effective standards start as things that work, rather than the formation of committees. Greenbox looks at smart power meters, utility rate plans, weather reports, and user-reported data to try to make homes more efficient via a web interface. So he wants to connect data to actions. “The big deal for us is attribution. Can you get credits for turning off lights?”

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:

• Third-party review to independently analyze CO2 emissions.
• Reducing tailpipe emissions on the city vehicle fleet
• LEED certification for the new Academy of Sciences last Thursday
• Put together the first mapping system for solar installations — on a web page, you locate your roof, drill down to the square footage available for solar, and print out rebate applications on the same page
• Aggressive recycling initiatives — banning plastic bags (lots of attention), banning styrofoam (no attention), trying to ban bottled water (way too much attention!)
• Started real discussions with Shai Agassi and Better Place, and got 10 counties to agree on standardized electric car-charging stations
• Partnered with Cisco on reducing emissions coming from computers and telecommunication equipment — created cheap prototype bus that gives emissions data
• Plan to charge more for parking during peak times
• First commercial wave power project off the end of Ocean Beach started Feb. 27
• Right below the Golden Gate Bridge looking to implement an underwater wind farm — very dense, consistent energy as Bay flushes itself every day. “We’re very close to getting a small pilot there. We may have overpromised but hope not to underdeliver.”

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.

Of course, Better Place flat-out requires that kind of audacity, since its vision — of electric charging stations, battery swap centers, and a re-envisioning of car ownership whereby usage subsidizes the price of the device — requires so much infrastructure.

We also heard from Earth2Tech wonderboy (and Green:Net conference speaker) Saul Griffith, who talked up Makani Power’s method of generating wind power using kites. Within two years, he said, he will put hundreds of kilowatts worth of machines in the sky. Just a paper plane is enough to power a cell phone — larger machines can do much more.

Another Earth2Tech regular, Serious Materials founder Kevin Surace, talked up the company’s first factory production of its EcoRock drywall, which uses no gypsum and requires less energy to produce than normal drywall.

And lastly, one we haven’t written about before: Jon LaGrou, the co-founder of Safeplug, presented a system of power outlets with microprocessors and plugs with memory chips (these can be slid onto existing plugs to retrofit them). LaGrou pointed out that Thomas Edison invented the circuit beaker in 1879, and some 83 percent of home fires start below the circuit breaker safety limit. Safeplug addresses this by detecting overloads at the outlet level. The system also prevents shocks and saves power by only providing power to used outlets. Update: The device can be used to manage some energy consumption, but we want to know more!

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.

Not everything about my car is so useful. Besides the aerodynamic shape already making the it look like an alien car, the Prius’ interior is over-designed, with spring-loaded glove compartments, the MPH readout display practically under the hood, and a wheel-side shifter stump.

But the dashboard consumption screen is actually useful. On the far right, I see my current MPG, from 0 to 99.9 (the maximum computed, apparently). To the left of that I see my scores for the last half hour, in five minute chunks. There’s also some doohicky about how many watt-hours I’ve regenerated (ostensibly one of the key draws of the Prius) in each time period, but it’s too cryptic to motivate me.

But oh boy — when I get good MPG averages, does it make me happy (and you can see from posts on PriusChat that I’m not the only one). Once on a trip back from the mountains, easing up the uphills and shifting to neutral on the downhills, my boyfriend and I earned a full half-hour screen of 99.9 MPG averages. We whooped and pulled out the cellphone cam to capture the historic moment.

I’ve become a huge fan of coasting, whipping my foot off the gas whenever a light ahead turns yellow. And feel it in my gut when the car chugs up the hills of San Francisco — the hybrid is relatively unimpressive on the way up. My fuel efficiency, of course, doesn’t match what’s advertised — I suppose I drive a bit too fast on the freeway — but give me a 47 MPG average and I’ll call it a good tank.

Photo: Liz’s cell phone camera when she got all six bars at 99.9 MPG.