Electronics and liquids don’t mix, unless you’re Iceotope. At this week’s Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore., the 3-year-old startup from Sheffield, UK is demonstrating a liquid-cooled server setup that has the potential to cut data center cooling costs by up to 93 percent. The firm just came out of stealth mode, 18 months after a round of financing in early 2008 from EV Group. Plans call for Iceotope to begin manufacturing this year with an eye toward getting the system to early access participants by Q1 2010, general availability sometime in the second half of 2010.

Considering that cooling IT systems is responsible for 40-60 percent of a typical data center’s yearly spending on electricity, the company is clearly betting that the energy savings alone will be enough to drum up business. Instead of supplying rack doors with chilled water to cool servers like IBM, or affixing “water blocks” to processors and other heat-generating components of a server to siphon off heat, Iceotope dunks entire server motherboards into modules that are filled with an “inert liquid” that doesn’t short out the delicate electronics.

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Rupert Murdoch’s got a new partner with a Silicon Valley pedigree to help his company News Corp go carbon neutral by 2010: Hara. The media giant plans to announce on Thursday that’s it’s using Hara’s software to track and reduce energy and carbon emissions.

While we all know News Corp — with its vast network of film studios, TV networks, web sites and newspapers — Hara needs an intro for many. Two-year-old Hara only came out of stealth in May of this year with backing from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and follow-on funding from JAFCO Ventures and Nth Power. Hara’s software-as-a-service product gives companies and municipalities the ability to itemize and track all of the inputs (water, electricity, chemicals) and outputs (the product, greenhouse gases, wastewater) that make up their business processes.

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It’s official: New TVs sold in California will be more energy efficient in coming years. The hotly debated state energy efficiency standards for televisions — the first of their kind in the nation — have just been approved by the California Energy Commission (hat tip our friends at sister site NewTeeVee). The standards say that new TVs sold in 2011 (58 inches and smaller) need to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent by 2011 and 49 percent by 2013.

Many TV makers have opposed the rules, while the state’s utilities support it. Groups like the Consumer Electronics Association say that the efficiency standards will result in higher prices of TVs in California, closings of stores that sell TVs in California (because those customers will go online or out of state to buy TVs), and unhappy customers who won’t be able to find certain popular TV models in California because they won’t be economic to produce there. The CEA says that the industry has been getting more energy efficient on its own and doesn’t need regulation, which will lead to “decreased industry competition and less innovation.”

But as Amy Westervelt pointed out over on Solve Climate earlier this week, the ruling could lead to a boost in sales in the state for manufacturers that specialize in energy-efficient screens, using LCDs backlit with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and next generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED). Consumer electronics giants from Sony to LG to Samsung are working on OLED TVs and the technology is supposed to be more widely deployed by 2012 — just in time to meet Cali’s new green TV rule.

While the debate over how — or if — consumers will want to manage their home energy consumption makes a lot of headlines, commercial buildings suck up 18 percent of the total energy consumption in the U.S. and represent one of the biggest opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and carbon reduction. According to Pike Research, the market for energy management systems — stuff like wireless sensor networks, lighting controls, and heating and cooling management in buildings — will turn into a $6.8 billion-a-year market by 2020 and will generate investment of $67.6 billion between 2010 and 2020.

Startups know those metrics pretty well already. Lucid Design Group, for example, has been selling its energy management system for years to the commercial sector, as well as governments and universities. But while the company has always discussed plans to eventually work in the residential market, Lucid Design has yet to make a big push into homes. As Michael Murray, Lucid Design’s CEO, has maintained in conversations with me over the past couple of years, the energy management market for large commercial buildings is much more accessible compared to energy management in homes.

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If diplomats headed to Copenhagen this December are able to negotiate a new global climate treaty, how will the world know these countries are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they claim? Michael Woelk, the chief executive of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Picarro, believes he has an answer: build a network of monitoring sites equipped with his company’s sensors that can detect carbon dioxide and other GHGs down to single-digit parts per billion. Woelk’s grand vision got one, albeit small, step closer to reality today with the announcement that the World Meteorological Organization will be using Picarro’s sensors to verify measurements taken from hundreds of GHG-monitoring stations around the world. Picarro will lend one of its $50,000 gas analyzers to a Swiss-based research lab that conducts audits for the WMO. Woelk, in a statement, described the selection of Picarro’s technology as a “technical validation.”

Woelk told us that the deal will bring “terrific exposure” to his company’s analyzers, but the chief executive has bigger aspirations than the WMO’s program. He says the current methods used by governments (and companies) to calculate GHG emissions are often based on the amount of fuel consumed and can thus be inaccurate. Governments and companies could also be tempted to provide fraudulent data about their reductions, especially as carbon credit trading becomes a bigger and more lucrative business. Woelk think his sensors can help bring more transparency to carbon emissions calculations.

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Data center managers aren’t the only ones suddenly charmed by solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing storage needs. A growing number of VCs are also warming to the green, high-performance potential of the storage technology (GigaOM Pro Research, subscription required).

With no moving parts to speak of, a solid-state drive is far and away more energy efficient than its disk-based counterpart, the hard drive. Generally speaking, it also delivers better performance, resulting in a combination that’s proving increasingly attractive to data center operators. That edge helps IT shops overlook storage capacities that fall short of hard drives and helps justify the lofty price tags attached to SSD-based storage systems. It’s also an edge that’s attracting VC investment.

The latest news comes from XtremIO. This week the company announced that it had scored a Series A funding of an undisclosed amount from two Israeli venture firms, Giza and JVP. Heading up this early-stage storage player is CEO Rokach Ehud, with over a decade of experience in the telecommunications industry, including a stint as the CEO of Corrigent Systems, a carrier Ethernet switching provider. Details are scarce (the companies web site says it’s in stealth), but the company’s announcement makes clear that XtremIO has enterprise IT ambitions for its storage systems.

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Want to transform urban transit? Take a cue from Google, and invent a better algorithm. Service-based transportation networks offer a key for cities to address urban traffic congestion, encourage adoption of alternative transit and slash greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, says Ryan Chin, a PhD candidate in the Smart Cities research group at MIT. And it will likely be the company with the best algorithm for managing fleets of cars, bicycles, scooters and other transit options, and up to millions of users, that finds a way to cash in on the “Mobility on Demand” trend.

As Chin explained to me for an article on GigaOM Pro this week (our subscription-based research service), the MoD concept involves a comprehensive system in which city residents would be able to rent an electric car, scooter or bicycle when and where they need it in order to bridge the “last mile” gap in many public transit systems (e.g. getting between the subway station and your final destination).

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At this point, the number of creative ways that companies have developed to help home owners monitor and manage their energy consumption, seems to far surpass the volume of consumer interest. That’s OK, though, because the home energy management market is so new, and it’s still unclear which services and technologies will be the most successful. Here’s another new startup which had some funding news this morning: PowerHouse Dynamics, a year-old Newton, Mass.-based company, which has built the energy management tool “eMonitor.”

According to VentureWire, which chatted with the CEO Martin Flusberg at the GreenBuild conference this week, the company is in the process of raising $2 million from undisclosed investors. PowerHouse Chairman and CMO Dan Kaplan confirmed the planned funding with us this morning, and according to a regulatory filing, the company has already raised $225,000 out of a planned $750,000 round.

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On Friday Microsoft plans to announce that its energy management online tool Hohm is now live and available to utility Xcel Energy’s 3.4 million customers. Troy Batterberry, Microsoft’s product unit manager of its Energy Management & Home Automation division, plans to break the news at an event tomorrow at the Microsoft Fargo campus, which is supposed to host the likes of North Dakota Governor John Hoeven, U.S. Congressman Earl Pomeroy, North Dakota Public Service Commissioner Tony Clark, and Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker.

While Microsoft announced that Xcel Energy was one of its utility partners — in addition to Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, and a “half a dozen” utilities in the queue — back when Hohm was revealed in June, the fact that the utility’s large customer footprint can now test out Hohm is a big step for the computing company’s energy tool. The news is also important because it shows how companies are building ways for customers to start monitoring and managing energy consumption before smart meters get installed in larger numbers.

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Despite attempts by companies and industry groups to paint the wireless standard Wi-Fi (the one commonly used within buildings for Internet connections) as a winner for smart grid rollouts, it’s looking like Wi-Fi will end up taking a back seat for the next generation of the digital power grid. This morning the trade group the Wi-Fi Alliance looked to drum up attention for the use of Wi-Fi for the smart grid, and announced the publication of a white paper called “Wi-Fi for the Smart Grid.

While the paper provides interesting information for potential Wi-Fi power grid communication applications, here’s five reasons why Wi-Fi will play a lesser roll for the smart grid, both within the home and further out on the power grid.

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