Subodh Bapat, who heads up computing giant Sun Microsystem’s energy efficiency charge, advocates the notion of “energy-proportional computing.” While most data centers today use basically a constant amount of power regardless of workload, engineers and data center designers are working on making servers use the equivalent amount of energy for how much work they do.

With energy prices, and computing demands, on the rise, the trend makes sense. Companies across the board, from Sun to Google to Advanced Data Centers to International Data Security, are innovating on a variety of ways to make data centers more efficient. But sometimes it’s the simplest steps that can do the most good. While we’re all waiting for energy-scaling data centers, Sun’s Bapat offers three simple suggestions for companies looking to get the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to cutting data center energy:

1) Refresh: Identify which servers are being used efficiently and which servers aren’t. Older servers tend to be energy hogs, while newer hardware like Sun’s CoolThreads server line can conserve energy and lower electricity bills.

2) Virtualize: Invest in technology like virtualization to consolidate work loads onto less machines. Less servers mean less rack space and less costs for cooling.

3) Assess: This is the age of transparency, so why not use the power of software and energy auditors to know for sure how efficient your data centers are? Assessments can help prompt changes to the basic architecture of the data center, among them placement of heated and cooled hardware (don’t mix ‘em).

If the V-P candidates’ lukewarm responses on climate change last week failed to satisfy your hunger for a serious energy debate, perhaps an opportunity to join T. Boone Pickens in an online forum about energy issues during Tuesday’s face-off will. Pickens and Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, will co-host a live “e-rally” at the end of the debate where they will discuss the candidates’ responses on energy issues, answer live questions and allow viewers to sound off on energy and the election. Tune into PickensPlan.com at 10:00 pm EDT on Tuesday to see Pickens and Pope live from the Pickens Plan HQ in Dallas.

Reps of the Pickens Plan say they’ve already received 40,000 RSVPs for the so-called e-rally, and have racked up more than 1,000 questions. Following the discussion, all of the questions and comments will be presented to both campaigns on behalf of the Pickens Plan. The former oilman’s plan is aimed at fighting U.S. dependence on foreign oil by using domestic natural gas as a transportation fuel and increasing wind energy on the national grid.

Pickens, historically a stalwart Republican booster and financier, has worked hard to keep partisanship out of his proposed energy plan. The oil tycoon has met with both presidential candidates to pitch his plan and has adroitly dodged many questions about his political leaning during this election. Just last week he sat down with Sarah Palin, a self-proclaimed expert on energy, to discuss his plan.

Solar power isn’t all about the panel. Inverters, the electronic devices that regulate the flow of power from solar panels to the electrical grid, are also gaining interest from investors. Among them is Apollo Solar, a Bethel, Conn.-based manufacturer of electronics for renewable energy devices, which said today it has raised $4.5 million in a private offering.

The funding will be used to expand manufacturing and marketing for its inverters, charge controllers and display devices for solar arrays. Apollo didn’t disclose which investors participated in the offering, but we’ve got a call in to the company and will update when we find out more.

Distributed solar energy could be a significant energy resource as new power-generating technologies hit the market and prices drop. But connecting those resources to the grid in a way that helps utilities make use of them requires better, smarter components. That means inverters and the other electronic components that tie solar panels into our electrical wires and networks are gaining importance and investor interest.

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For researchers at the University of Illinois, the key to a good solar panel is all in how you slice the silicon. John Rogers and his team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have figured out how to slice monocrystalline solar wafers thin enough to be flexible and partially transparent but still maintain their high solar efficiency. The findings were published this weekend in Nature Materials. The slender silicon slices are then imprinted onto a substrate using Rogers’ patented microtransfer printing process, the technological process that is the basis for his startup Semprius.

Durham, N.C.-based Semprius, founded in 2005, is working on applying that microtransfer printing process to the manufacture of a number of electronics including LCDs, OLEDs, radio devices and large sensors. The company has also been developing a multijunction gallium arsenide cell for a concentrator module for the past year and a half, Semprius’s VP of Photovoltaics, Bob Connor, tells Earth2Tech. The company’s patent portfolio, as licensed from the University of Illinois, does include the possible use of monocrystalline silicon, but Rogers tells us that there are no immediate plans to commercialize his research in silicon. However, Rogers says he has already seen interest from larger solar players, and Semprius could license the monocrystalline silicon application to a third-party developer.

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New Jersey is one step closer to bringing an offshore wind farm to the coasts of the U.S. Garden State Offshore Energy (GSOE), a joint venture between utility Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) Renewable Generation and Deepwater Wind, was selected by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities today to build an offshore wind farm far off the Jersey coastline. The proposed 350-megawatt wind farm would consist of 96 turbines nearly 20 miles offshore. GSOE will receive a $4 million state grant to help cover permitting costs and spur project financing though the final project, to be completed by 2012, will likely cost well over $1 billion, according to the state.

This is the second large offshore wind contract Deepwater Wind has won. Just last week Deepwater was chosen by the Rhode Island Governor for a $2 billion offshore wind project. The New Jersey-based firm is backed by First Wind, DE Shaw & Co. and Ospraie Management.

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PetroSun, a company that has been building an algae-to-fuel farm in Texas, said this week that it plans to establish an algae farm in China that will produce algae to be converted into biofuels. The company says it has an agreement with the Shanghai Jun Ya Yan Technology Development Co., which will commit $40 million to fund the initial construction of the farm. The profits of the venture will be split between PetroSun’s China subsidiary and Shanghai Jun Ya Yan Tech.

PetroSun’s algae farm in Texas is building out 1,100 acres of ponds that it hopes will produce 4.4 million gallons of algal oil and 110 million pounds of biomass per year. We’re not sure how big the operations in China will be, but $40 million can create a sizable farm.

Algae is the next-generation biofuel for which everyone has been waiting. Its advocates say it can be more sustainable and more efficient than the first generation of biofuels being created now, which are based on corn and soybeans. Algae fuel is also getting a ton of investment — in the third quarter the sector brought in a record $95 million. About half of that went to Sapphire Energy and half to Solazyme.

So neither of the vice presidential candidates hit a homerun nor failed miserably in the first and only vice presidential debate, but at one point the candidates plainly stated their positions on what they thought is the cause of climate change. Obama’s VP pick Joe Biden emphasized that he believes climate change is caused by man, while McCain’s VP pick Sarah Palin said, once again, that she doesn’t fully attribute global warming to man.

Palin said: “I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.”

Biden said: “Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. And, look, this probably explains the biggest fundamental difference between John McCain and Barack Obama and Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. . . . If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade.”

The solar market is booming — plans like Google’s to wean the U.S. off fossil fuels over the next two decades involve massive investments in installing solar technology. According to a report from Lux Research the global solar market will reach $100 billion in revenues by 2013, with an almost five-fold increase in installations over the next five years. That $100 billion figure includes revenues from the modules as well as installation and system costs for five solar technologies: standard silicon photovoltaics (PV), concentrating photovoltaic systems, thin-film solar, organic PV and solar thermal.

But if you’re a solar supplier getting ready to kick back and wait for the cash to flow in, think again. Lux says that starting next year the market could start to get a lot more difficult for companies to make a profit. In 2009 the supply of solar modules is expected to overtake demand, and the resulting price drop will mean “an industry shakeout, with the weakest players being acquired or failing,” writes Ted Sullivan, senior analyst at Lux Research. As Lux has put it before, the solar bubble is about to burst and it could take many incumbent solar players down with it.

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Formalizing the plan that CEO Eric Schmidt discussed in September, Google has officially unveiled a very detailed proposal to help the U.S. kick its fossil fuel habit by 2030. Dubbed ‘Clean Energy 2030,’ the proposal calls for almost all of U.S. electricity to come from renewables by 2030 and almost all of new car sales by 2030 to be plug-ins. The search engine giant says while this plan will cost $4.4 trillion (in undiscounted 2008 dollars), it will ultimately save $5.4 trillion, delivering a net savings of $1 trillion over the life of the plan.

No wonder Google was recently declared the second most active cleantech investor for the third quarter. The plan is similar to Al Gore’s in calling for almost 100 percent of U.S. electricity to come from clean sources, but is more pragmatic in that it tacks on another 10 years to accomplish this very difficult goal. Google says we need to focus on three things to meet the proposal’s ambitious goals:

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There are 1,700 operating landfills in the U.S., and according to the the EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program, they contain enough natural gas to produce 2,643 megawatts of electricity. As part of its previously announced goal of developing 60 landfill gas-to-energy (LFGTE) projects by 2012, Waste Management, one of the largest landfill operators in the country, said today it plans to partner with private and municipal landfill owners to tap those trash-based resources.

Landfill gas from rotting garbage is roughly half methane and half carbon dioxide. The methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, is usually vented and burned off on site, but as natural gas prices have soared over the last few years, capturing that gas now has the potential to make landfill operators stinking rich. There are LGFTE projects in operation at 455 landfills across the U.S., producing 1,383 megawatts of power, but the EPA has identified another 535 sites as promising candidates that could produce an additional 1,260 megawatts.

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