The Green Grid is an association of several high-tech companies, most of which are active in the computer hardware manufacturing segment, that was created as a group that could lay the base for industry wide accepted practices, metrics and technologies that should help improve data center energy efficiency.

Since its conception more than a year ago, the Green Grid grew to have more than 80 members, not only from the computer industry, but from related fields as well. Among its current members, the Green Grid has hardware and software producers like Intel, AMD, and Microsoft, telephony providers like BT and even public utilities companies like PG&E. According to the news site InfoaWorld the Green Grid organization already has a number of tangible achievements like white papers that describe best practices, high level benchmarks and so on.

The Green Grid outlined its road map to the general public just a few days ago, as the association wishes to conduct a series of studies concerning the best practices for extracting the highest performance possible from existing data centers, while at the same time maintaining a low energy consumption. But the association has some opponents that dislike the narrow field that caught the eye of the Green Grid as the data centers are not by far the worst environmental problems. In a paper titled "The Green Grid: A Paler Shade of Green", while the authors are declaring themselves supportive of the main goal of the Green Grid association, they say that at the same time more action should be taken to address other environmental problems like the e-waste.

"In the green space, energy is the 800-pound gorilla. It translates directly to economic savings and greenhouse gas savings. Not that there are other important issues, but if you're looking at what to attack first, go to energy efficiency first," says Mark Monroe, Sun's representative on the Green Grid board, who was cited by InfoWorld. Other board member completely agrees with this statement. While the association's goals are very ambitious, they are related to the problems of the modern day data centers, where energy bills are touching the cellar and the environmental impact is growing on a daily basis.

According to Sun's representative, the Greed Grid's intentions are to provide technical feedback to all organizations that wish to further study the energy efficiency problem. "The Green Grid wants to be viewed as a technical resource for the IT industry and people working on legislation. We're not going to be a lobbying organization, but rather a technical resource for those folks".