When it comes to the smart grid, utility executives seem willing to embrace the dumb pipe status that their cousins in the telecommunications world are so leery of. That’s because the history of heavy regulation — and near-monopoly — has created an environment where competition and innovation aren’t commonly baked into the utility business model. At a panel discussion held at the Clean Energy Venture Summit in Austin, Texas today, utility executives debated the idea of whether utilities should focus on adding value-added services on top of the power network (like phone companies have rushed to do on their data networks) or if utilities should remain content to provide the basic energy pipes.

Mark Rose, general manager and CEO of Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, was perhaps the most vocal on the subject, saying that he believes a utility’s role was to provide a service, and an open platform upon which consumers and businesses can track their energy from end to end in whatever way they want. But when it came to providing new applications and services that could be built on top of that service, he questioned if the utility was the right entity to provide that.

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The venture capital panel at today’s at the Green:Net conference here in San Francisco was a mess of contradictions. The panelists debated the role of government in cleantech before finally coming to the conclusion that while government will have to play a role in their cleantech investments, it would be stupid to rely on t for subsidies that would unsustainably boost a business model. “Subsidies are good, they are like icing on the cake, but businesses need to have real economic models,” says Navin Chaddha managing director of Mayfield.

Paul Holland, general partner with Foundation Capital, also warned that the stimulus package won’t have a lot of money for startups because it’s designed to generate jobs today rather than in the distant future. Steve Westly, managing partner at The Westly Group and an investor in Tesla, which is seeking government subsidies, argued that the government has a role to play in cleantech, not just for subsidies but also for regulatory mandates and standards.

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If a company wants to improve energy efficiency, it needs to think about how it can affect its products and its suppliers rather than merely what it can do internally, says Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist at Microsoft speaking today at the Green:Net Conference in San Francisco. “We have a massive problem and a massive challenge and a massive opportunity,” said Bernard.

He outlined how Microsoft is empowering its employees to think about environmental impact: An employee-suggested switch from Styrofoam cups to compostable dishware cut Microsoft’s annual waste stream by 50 percent. On the IT side, Bernard said Microsoft is focusing on the 2 percent of the world’s energy consumed by data centers and bringing Moore’s Law to them. Utilization of servers is one aspect of that, as well as offering IT professionals metrics to measure their progress with energy consumption. Bernard said only 15 percent of IT staffers have even seen their utility bills.

Taking the role of IT beyond data centers and into building management will also improve efficiency of buildings by about 30 percent Bernard said. About 37 percent of greenhouse gases come from buildings — something the Obama administration is hoping to address. In addition to bigger role for IT, Bernard talked about Microsoft’s efforts to help scientists gather data from a wide variety of sources and mash that up into a usable set of numbers so scientists can study larger issues, such as the widescale affects of climate change on water systems.

Data center operators at various large companies talked at the GreenNet conference today in San Francisco about how they’re making their data centers more energy efficient. It boils down to metrics, utilization and awareness. But first they outlined the problem: Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute, explains how computers are primarily in these vast over air-conditioned rooms filled with computers running all the time, blowing hot air. Historically, the computer industry never paid attention to the power consumption of its servers and data centers, but now that is changing.

Albert Esser, V-P at Dell, trumpeted the computer giant’s ability to become carbon-neutral and explained that it’s difficult to become green, but it will improve your bottom line by saving on costs. Esser’s focus was on increasing utilization to lower electricity demand. He said newer facilities are 40 percent more efficient but if a company focuses on its utilization of servers, they can increase efficiency by more than 200 percent. Rich Lechner, V-P of Energy and Environment at IBM, echoed the focus on utilization, both internally and also with IBM customers, for which IBM builds data centers. He also took it a step further and encouraged  virtualizaiton of networking, storage and desktops.

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We need a two-way communication between our utilities and our homes that can be delivered via a smart grid, according to a panel of experts speaking today at the Green:Net conference today in San Francisco. Andrew Tang of PG&E, highlighted the issue facing the utilities by noting that in the past power companies got their energy from a few generators. “In the past supply just happened,” Tang said. “In this brave new world, we have tens of thousands of generators to control but we still have to keep this balanced system [of supply and demand.]“

Tang brought up the difficulty utilities have when it comes to managing intermittent renewable power, and increasing resource loads from devices such as electric cars. Those problems and others will drive the need for a smart grid. The panelists agreed that when it comes to communications on the smart grid, there are some huge problems to surmount. Utilities cover a huge area, need communications that are more reliable than a cellular network, and have to do it cheaply. Whatever communications are used on a smart grid also need to also be open and standards-based, secure and future proofed — a utility cannot switch out its meters each time the technology changes. Eric Miller, chief solutions officer of Trilliant, claims the grid will require multiple communications technologies, and will require a mesh networking structure.

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Jonathan Koomey, project scientist and professor with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University called for data center operators to focus on the overall costs of their computing in terms of finances and energy today at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco. He offers cloud computing as a way to cut those costs and realign incentives around reducing the total cost of ownership of a data center. He said the cloud is responsible for 1-2 percent of today’s global electricity use, but it’s also driving productivity higher while being more energy efficient.

Koomey’s big story isn’t about electricity use in the data center but how IT affects efficiency in the broader society. One effect is that we’re becoming smarter about how we use resources; the other is dematerialization. “Moving electrons is less environmentally damaging than moving atoms,” Koomey says. Essentially the idea is that it is more efficient to send a PDF rather than a piece of paper. As part of getting smarter, he calls for the electric grid to be modeled on the dynamic data center management software that can track and monitor electricity delivery in real time.

Bob Metcalfe, general partner with Polaris Ventures and the inventor of Ethernet, got on stage today at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco to call for “a squanderable abundance of cheap and clean energy,” that will crib from the development of the Internet. Among his points:

Don’t let things harden into categories: In the early days of the Internet, the consumer devices (phones) and the network were controlled by the same company.  There were divisions in regulatory environments with computers controlled by the Department of Justice and communications regulated by the Federal Communications Commission and divisions between video, voice and data that are now meaningless. So when it comes to energy we need to avoid the same hard categories, such as thinking our focus on corn-based ethanol won’t disrupt our food production.

We used the Internet to build the Internet, and we can use the Internet to build the Enernet: The web can reduce energy consumption in a variety of ways, partially by serving as a proxy for  for travel, as well a backbone of the smart grid. Taking advantage of Silicon Valley for company creation is also important. “It’s easy to teach energy to the entrepreneurs than to teach entrepreneurship to the energy industry,” Metcalfe said.

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Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE, a web services platform that helps track and measure carbon consumption, scared the heck out of the audience this morning at the Green:Net conference here in San Francisco. He started off by pointing out that a 2.5-kilogram MacBook costs the equivalent of 460 kilograms of carbon dioxide, then painted a picture of drastic population decreases, the potential for war and refugees in a warming world and called for a carbon tax rather than a carbon cap.

The solution in Stark’s talk begins with the understanding of each person’s energy use, the creation of what he calls an “energy identity.” To create such an identity there are open standards that should be created (AMEE is trying) as well as privacy concerns that must be addressed, given the granularity of the information that will be shared. Such information could include your purchases, your energy consumption habits such as when you watch TV and what time you turn out the lights and go to bed. Securing such data will be key as well.

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Applied Materials is taking its solar equipment manufacturing expertise and moving it indoors. The company plans to focus on solid-state lighting as a line of business, said Annette Finsterbusch, a partner with Applied Ventures, speaking at the Rice Alliance Energy and Clean Technology Venture Forum in Houston on Thursday. Finsterbusch, who works for the corporate venture arm of Applied Materials, said the semiconductor and solar equipment maker, “is moving toward a third tier of business which is lighting — solid state lighting.”

When asked for details, a spokesman for Applied said, “While we haven’t officially announced any products, our EES (Energy and Environment Solutions) group is looking at various ways we might participate in the solid state lighting area. Nothing to talk about really yet, other than it shares the same dynamic as many an emerging markets: huge potential, currently too costly for consumers and looking for a technology solution that involves Applied’s thin-films expertise.”

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Fossil fuels aren’t going away anytime soon emphasized Stephen Brand, senior vice-president of oil and natural gas giant ConocoPhillips, who spoke before a full house at the Energy and Clean Technology Venture Forum in Houston on Thursday. Brand stressed the continuing importance of fossil fuels, which he says will make up 2/3 of the total energy production at least until 2030, and in particular said we need more legislation and new technologies that can make the drilling and refining of fossil fuels more efficient and cheaper.

Brand spent all but two minutes of the 30-minute speech highlighting how technology — from supercomputers to biotech — will aid in the capture and refinement of fossil fuels at a commercially acceptable price. Of course it’s no surprise that Brand would focus on how to bring down the cost of using fossil fuels for power — ConocoPhillips is the second-largest oil and natural gas refiner in the U.S. and the fifth-largest non-governmental controlled refiner in the world.

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