September 2007 Archives

Leah Dickey by submitting the nice little graphic to the right called Earth Point and garnering the most votes in Yahoo's Green Icon Challenge. $20,000 is going to Green Street Project as a result.

Runner up Monica Chong will see $5,000 go to Polar Bears International as a result of her submission called Yahoo! Leaf. Meanwhile, Kristian Mohl is weighing which nonprofit gets the other $5,000 for his Green Yahoo! Tree Mod, which looks pretty neat.

Congrats to all! More details here.

[via TreeHugger]

Compact fluorescents last long, but not forever. And if you're like me, when they do finally kick the bucket, you're paralyzed by what to do about the old bulb. You can't just toss them in the regular trash or in the recycling bin (they contain mercury).

Eventually your kitchen drawer is home to a tribe of sad, worthless CFLs. Let’s not even think about how offices get rid of them.

So what do you do?

Lighter Footstep's Chris Baskind put together a handy guide that lays out the CFL disposal options. Some of the tips take a little leg work, but it's better than letting toxic chemicals leech into the ground or our waterways.

That was a non-sarcastic title by the way, honest. It's hard to tell online, you know. Sarchasm is even worse - so awkward.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

As much as we all enjoy fluffy, feel-good tips on conservation, what good is it if it goes in one ear (eyeball in this case) and out the other? That's why it's important to find real-world examples of businesses that are enjoying the benefits of a greener corporate lifestyle.

Today, it's Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises (think Cox Communications, Television, Radio, AutoTrader.com...), which launched a new site called Cox Conserves. Informed, in part, by the conservation efforts of its own 80,000-strong workforce, the slick, Flash-rich site supplies case studies as well as tips for the home and office.

So what exactly did they manage to accomplish?

Since 2000, Cox Enterprises has reduced its energy consumption by 10 percent while growing at nearly 12 percent a year. Building on this success, the goal of Cox Conserves is to reduce its energy consumption by an additional 20 percent by 2017.

The site goes on to explain that their efforts are expected to keep 172,000 tons of greenhouse gases out of the air, or the equivalent of the pollution generated by powering 26,000 homes (presumably by coal and gas).

Be warned though, while many of their "What We've Done" bullet points are interesting and informative (LED lighting on radio towers, low emission/hybrid news fleet cars, GPS for intelligent routing), some fall into the information overload category. Overall, nice stuff. But hold the phone...

<rant>

CoxConserves.com carries the whiff of a public relations exercise.

Why?

Now that businesses are scrambling out of their Wall Street gray and into green hippy chic duds, everyone is building a green site/microsite -- nicely tucked away but kept handy when called for.

Rather saddening because there's little doubt that they have made great environmental strides. So why not flaunt it?! This content deserves prominent placement, or at least a link, on Cox.com, AutoTrader.com and its media sites. These are the sites where their broadband customers and the majority of their Web audience interact with the company. Who's going to think to go to CoxConserves.com?

</rant>

Still, it's a step in the right direction. And if it provokes others to conserve, then it's PR money well spent.

So you pay for storage that's just sitting there, waiting for your apps make use of it. What a waste! Not only did you pay upfront but your arrays are sitting idle, blatantly running up your electric bill.

Luckily, there is another way...

Drew Robb gives us the details on DataCore and it's thin provisioning software. Essentially, it manages capacity on an as-needed basis, regardless of how much space your apps demand.

Deferring storage purchases will make the finance guys happy, but the eco-crowd will enjoy the following calculations:

Typical disk drive draws 25-35 watts for power, cooling draws roughly the same 25-35 watts for a total of around 60 watts on average. Over a year = 1 disk x 60 watts x 1 KW/1000 watts x 8760 Hours/year = 525 KW hours/year per disk. Assuming 10 cents per KW hour you get a rough $52.50 per year per disk savings. That doesn’t include the cost of the disks and arrays themselves, assuming that 60 percent less will be required.

Everybody wins!

Yes, I am plugging the mother ship without shame or scruples. Do stop by and say hello. But please don't upload cooky space code, Jeff Goldblum style.

By all accounts, data centers are supposed to grow by leaps and bounds in the next couple of years. Unfortunately, the power required to keep them humming will come with astronomical costs, to speak nothing of the tons of carbon pumped into our skies.

Accenture's Steve Nunn thinks there's one approach data center operators can use to meet the challenge.

Instead of having engineers and facilities teams working apart from the IT department, closer integration between these functions would help to ensure that energy is not wasted as a result of poor cabling and poor IT cooling.

At the same time, these companies and the hardware vendors that supply them need to be planning ahead. Today's new equipment can soon become redundant, and there is a parallel need to ensure that, when it reaches the end of its lifecycle, it can be recycled as effectively as possible.

Sounds like a plan. Catch the rest at BBC News.

Infinitely more interesting than a Senatorial smackdown on MoveOn (more of a stern finger wave, really), today's links:

The North Pole Is Melting - Scientific American

...BTW, Time has a hauntingly beautiful set of images of the Arctic from photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov's book, "Nordmeer".

Intel’s Nehalem Focused on Power Efficiency - Earth2Tech

To go green, live closer to work, report says - LA Times

Amen! Create an Online Press Kit for Your Business - TreeHugger

From: IT green-up stymied by vicious cycle - Computerworld

"To achieve 60% carbon reduction, if the world just stood still, would be challenge. But the reality is that the amount of IT on planet will have more than doubled by 2020 -- so if we are going for a 50% cut we need to reduce the carbon emitted by a factor of two just to meet our targets." - Richard Barrington, head of sustainability and public policy, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

InternetNews, that is.

Remember PowerTop, the Intel-sponsored tool that takes a granular approach to power savings? It turns out that it's part of a larger effort by the company to promote open source power-saving technologies called Less Watts.

And the prime beneficiaries? Linux users.

Sean Michael Kerner at our JupiterOnlineMedia sibling InternetNews explains:

Less Watts is geared toward Linux users as opposed to users of any other operating system. Hohndel explained that applying some of the techniques described on the site would be difficult, though not impossible, to port to other operating systems.

As an example he cited the tickless idle changes in the Linux kernel, which he described as being at the very core of the operating system and could not be easily transported.

Looks like users of other OSes are out of luck. Hopefully other OS makers are taking notes.

For information on some of the other projects, visit LessWatts.org.

NAS vendor ONStor decided to have a look at the space, power and cooling challenges data center operators are encountering. Their findings aren't pretty.

After surveying 369 IT managers in the U.S., ONStor discovered that a whopping sixty-three percent of them ran smack into a wall without warning. One day, out of the blue, they simply ran out of room or couldn't provide power for more systems.

Awesome! Though this may help to explain why VMware is having a bang-up year.

But wait, it gets better...

Another alarming statistic was that although the power consumption of an enterprise's data center is massive, 40 percent of respondents have not discussed a green initiative within their company; 60 percent reported that they had a green initiative in place, would have one in place in the next two years, or had at least talked about it with management.

One must wonder how many of that 60 percent are actually following through. But enough negativity, let's go play with the org chart!

"11 percent report interest in creating a chief energy officer position." Ha! Good luck getting that OK'ed by your Chief *Executive* Officer. May we suggest a CSO, instead?

Here are a couple of other interesting tidbits gleaned from the press release:

At their current data growth rate, 43 percent of respondents could stay in their current infrastructure for only six months to one year if they changed nothing

24 percent reported that the cost and time of building another data center is the most serious issue driving the reduction of data infrastructure power consumption

Half of respondents favor service-level agreements (SLAs) and chargebacks to IT disciplines for power and capacity consumption, but only half of them either have implemented these policies or know they will be doing so

[via TreeHugger]

Photo: "Things you don't want to see in a datacenter" - skreuzer/Flickr - Creative Commons

Didn't know there was a connection between climate change and Talk Like a Pirate Day? Ah, but there is, and leave it to TreeHugger to expose it!

Head over there and feast your eyes on a slide with irrefutable proof that global temps have risen as the pirate population plummets (<-- 3 times fast, you can do it!). The reason: holy favoritism.

You can find the original slide in the thought provoking Ninja vs. Pirate clickfest at Wellington Grey's site. Who prevails?

Spoiler Alert!

Tech wins, as it should.

HP is jumping on the solid state drive bandwagon with its line of pro business laptops. An eco-conscious road warrior's dream come true, indeed. But prepare for some sticker shock.

Ticking off the 64 GB SSD option comes at a $1,000 premium. Ouch!

HP will first offer the option of 64GB NAND flash memory drives in products it announced earlier this month, the HP Compaq 2710p, 2510p, 6910p, and 8000 series, and will continue to offer it in future models, an executive said Wednesday.

Choosing the SSD option will add around $1,000 to the cost of a laptop, but HP expects the cost to come down as SSDs gain acceptance in the marketplace and volumes increase, said Dan Forlenza, vice president of business notebooks at HP, during a news conference in Taipei.

HP also claims that the laptop will shed roughly a quarter of its weight with the new drive. If so, those are some beefy platters they're using.

[via Engadget]

Digg is required clicking for info junkies that want to get caught up on the latest tech, gadgets, political and celebrity scandals, open source drama and annoying memes that are taking the intertubes by storm.

Fortunately, not every Digger is obsessed with YouTube hijinks and the Apple outrage du jour. Some have decidedly green leanings.

The Daily Green has compiled a list of the greenest Diggers. What results is an eclectic collection of personalities and approaches to green advocacy. Take, for instance their top pick Mark Johnson (aka Aidenag), whose avatar is an A-Team era pic of the late, great George Peppard:

Aidenag Real Name: Mark Johnson Location: Seattle, WA Occupation: Photographer

In the Digg community, one name rises to the top whenever people are asked about environmental content: Aidenag. Self-proclaimed news junkie Mark Johnson is particularly good at sleuthing out green hard news and science-based analysis. “When a new study comes out, I go find the source,” says Johnson. “I subscribe to Nature. I like to be able to make first-hand decisions.”

Johnson says he first got into Digg when he saw how little media attention a vast slurry spill received in Appalachia in 2002...

Catch the rest of the list here.

[via Digg, of course]

Green and cleantech items that caught my eye...

Memory: The Overlooked Power Issue - InternetNews

With the switch to 64-bit, the advent of multicore chips and the virtualization craze, machines today need a lot more memory. But as you're soon about to find out, it comes at a hefty energy cost under certain architectures.

InternetNews' Andy Patrizio has the fascinating and somewhat shocking article on this often-overlooked aspect of powering your data center gear.

Virtualization a Boon to CIOs - BusinessWeek/Silicon.com

Brits Propose Abolishing Gasoline by 2040 - EcoGeek

Nuclear, Tech and Solar Duke It Out for Rare Metals - EcoIron

MTA To Launch Commission To Study Ways To Green Transit System - NY1

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, is looking to invest $10 million to organizations that can help make plug-in hybrids a common sight on American roads in the near future. The effort, called RechargeIT.org, is currently in the Request for Investment Proposals (RFP) stage.

One of the most interesting aspects of the project is the pursuit of vehicle-to-grid tech, where charged cars could conceivably provide power to stabilize the grid and reduce the need to build more power plants.

Google explains:

Increasingly, there are ways for each of us and for corporations to generate electricity through renewable resources and store electricity that can be sold to a power company. There is significant potential for plug-in hybrids to also become power suppliers. This vehicle-to-grid ("V2G") approach may be particularly attractive when there are peaks in power consumption that a utility may not be able to handle through normal power generation. When utility demand exceeds normal generation capacity, the utilities resort to stand-by power generating sources (which often cause higher levels of emissions) and in extreme cases instituting rolling brownouts. At significant scale, plug-in hybrid batteries could help deliver power during peak times when it is often the most expensive. This could generate revenue for the car owner and help the utilities deal with peak demand.

If you're developing the "technologies, products and services" that mesh with their goals, the RFP deadline is October 22, 2007.

[via EcoGeek]

Considering a green roof for your data center or humble abode? You may want to keep an eye on the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), which will soon be sharing the lessons they learned during their green roof demonstration project.

On September 19th, Nancy Somerville, Executive Vice President and CEO of ASLA -- and green roof expert -- will discuss how such a system realistically performs in the real world. The media event, which takes place in Washington DC, will cover a range of topics, including: stormwater runoff and stormwater pollution; energy and other maintenance savings; green roof temperature compared to non-green roofs; and plant performance on the roof-top environment.

This week the group posted an interesting update that highlighted some of the challenges in planning a green roof. Those included feast-or-famine summer rainfall in DC and destructive birds.

In the world of IT, there's at least one data center is in the process of installing a green roof, and it should come as no surprise that it's AISO, the solar-powered host.

LCDs are already incredibly energy efficient compared to CRTs. OLEDs hold even more promise, but aside from some small gadgets, the technology is still out of reach.

TreeHugger has an item on yet another technology from Woodlands, TX startup Unipixel that blends the tried-and-true with some clever ways of producing an image.

Unipixel uses a technique known as frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) to bend incoming light toward the viewer, producing an image. While most liquid-crystal display technologies consist of 3 subpixels - red, green and blue - that cooperate to create a range of colors, Unipixel's display instead relies on red, green and blue LEDs placed at the edge of screen. Because they flash at such a rapid clip, the viewer perceives a range of colors as extensive as that found in liquid-crystal displays.

The company claims that panels made in this fashion are 60 percent more efficient. Click the TreeHugger post for more details. Unipixel goes into more technical depth here.

Sadly, I couldn't attend VMworld in San Francisco, what with those carbon-spewing airliners and all. But plenty of my colleagues and tech pundits have got it covered.

Let's see what the rest of us missed by saving our frequent flier miles for worthier treks (Mardi Gras!). It's pretty scandalous stuff from what I've been reading...

Larry Barrett of InternetNews, explains how Cisco is cozying up to VMware in the data center in Cisco Sharpens Virtualization Focus. Get a room, you two!

David Needle, also of InternetNews, tells us how VMware is parading around, making announcements like it owns the place in VMware Makes a Show of Its Golden Summer. Shameless.

Needle returns with this bombshell: VMware Tools Available as Open Source. Way to seduce the Linux faithful. Shameless².

It's official! VMworld moves into the mainstream. So says San Jose Mercury News. Hmm... nothing too shocking there. Moving on.

...And InfoStor provides a product recap. Truly, the stuff of checkout line "literature".

Think we're missing something? That's what the comments are for!

A smattering of solar panel manufacturers and installers today announced the formation of The Solar Alliance. Heading up the group is former US Representative Claudine Schneider from Rhode Island.

If the appointment of a former congresswoman as president isn't already a clue, here's the deal. The group's goal is to influence policy on the state level.

The leading U.S. solar electricity module manufacturers and systems integrators announced today that they had joined forces to form The Solar Alliance and appointed the Hon. Claudine Schneider, former five-term U.S. Congresswoman from Rhode Island, as the group's first president. The Solar Alliance will focus its efforts on supporting state lawmakers, regulators and utilities in their efforts to establish more effective solar policies and programs throughout the United States.

Members include BP Solar, First Solar, Mitsubishi Electric, Sanyo Energy, and SunPower.

The Solar Alliance will be concentrating their efforts in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Massachusetts and Ohio to start. Plus, they're buddies with the Solar Energy Industries Association, which is taking up the cause on the national level.

Sun shiny days ahead? Quite possibly...

Update: Solar Alliance president Claudine Schneider answers five questions at Earth2Tech.

Earth2Tech's Adena DeMonte pours a dose of realism onto the lovefest that's surrounding cleantech coverage of late. We all know that for the sake of PR value no one wants to give the appearance of driving a dagger through Mother Earth's heart (kinda hard actually, iron core and all). Yet, there's a bigger motive for VCs that are investing green.

DeMonte picks out this telling quote:

“We are a single, bottom-line entity,” said Bill Green, Managing Director with VantagePoint Ventures. “If we pick the right company in the right sector and that company becomes a billion-dollar market cap company, the trees will get hugged.”

Nice surname, Bill. Read the rest of the post for some more perspectives.

Let's open with a little rant, shall we?

As much as we all want solid state drives (SSDs) for their power-sipping ways, there's a huge tradeoff. Without putting too fine a point on it, SSDs ain't cheap. We're not talking spending a little extra for CFL bulbs here; the devices are very expensive for the storage you get.

No matter how much you want to extend battery life and cut down on hard drive heat, noise and power usage, it's hard to pay out the nose for meager capacities. Just look at the "that's nice" reaction (not OMG!?!!) to the 8/16 GB flash-based iPod Touch (aka - iPhone minus the phone) when viewed against the 80/160 GB hard drive-packin' iPod Classic.

With that out of the way, BiTMICRO's announcement is still pretty huge, and thus drool worthy. They plan to roll out the E-Disk Altima, a 2.5-inch IDE drive with up to 416 GB of solid state storage. Here are some details as only writers of press releases can give:

The first product to be released to market is the 2.5-inch E-Disk® Altima™ E2A133BL ATA-133 model, a flash memory-based SSD designed for military, industrial and commercial users who are looking for faster and bigger storage upgrades for time-tested PATA-based systems. This 2.5-inch ATA/ATAPI-7 PATA solid state drive, supporting PIO 0-4, DMA 0-2 and UDMA 0-6 data transfer modes, will utilize the latest high-density single level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips to deliver an astounding storage capacity of up to 416 GB, while providing 133MB/sec burst with up to 100MB/sec sustained Reads and Writes and up to 20,000+ Random IOPS. With operating temperatures ranging from –40°C to +85°C, the E-Disk® Altima™ ATA-133 model is suitable for 24x7 deployment even in extremely hostile environments.

No word on price, which is sure to be astronomical when it ships in March. Still, I want.

[via Engadget]

AMD today officially debuted its quad-core Opterons code-named Barcelona. The processors are the chipmaker's belated answer to Intel's quad-core Xeons. As is the custom for AMD, they promise to eke out more performance per watt than the competition. How are they accomplishing it? New tech, of course.

InternetNews.com explains:

Those new technologies include CoolCore, which turns off unused parts of the processor, Independent Dynamic Core Technology, an enhancement to AMD PowerNow! Technology that allows each core to vary its clock frequency depending upon its workload, and Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM), which provides an independent power supply to the cores and to the memory controller, allowing the cores and memory controllers to operate on different voltages, determined by usage.

Virtualization is also an area they poured some engineering into:

The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors also sport new features specifically designed for virtualization, thanks to the integrated memory controller. The Rapid Virtualization Indexing, formerly called Nested Paging, reduces the overhead of virtualization software and better handles memory for near-real time application performance.

How do the new chips perform? Anandtech has a review up.

And the verdict? With exception of some highly optimized Intel binaries, not too shabby.

I've seen more than one DIYer tote a Leatherman around. For you, behold with envious eyes the Skeletool.

You ask, "How is this even remotely green?" Less material was used in its construction, bringing weight down to a mere 5 ounces. From Popular Mechanics:

It’s the multi-tool you might actually carry around with you, with a few essential functions—a knife, screwdriver, pliers and a bottle opener—but surprisingly little weight. At 5 ounces, Leatherman claims this is the lightest full-size multi-tool ever (less than full-size being those tiny keychain models). The stainless steel blade and bottle opener are accessible when the tool is closed. We can’t stress enough how handy that is. And we’re not talking about the easy-access knife, which is now standard on many multi-tools. It’s the bottle opener that you need to get to, repeatedly, and in various states of mind. When it comes to multi-tool design, Leatherman simply gets it.

Nifty for cracking open that server or PC case with style (thumbscrews next time, OK?). Plus, it looks just plain awesome, like something you'd bring to a knife fight with a Terminator (pre-T1000 model) or the Borg.

Leatherman will start selling the Skeletool in November for $72 ($96 for the CX with carbon fiber handles). Until then, revisit this page (repeatedly) to wallow in the geek lust.

[via BoingBoing Gadgets]

Power management is getting a lot of attention lately. It's fairly simple to do on a desktop or laptop, just go into the power settings and tweak your options. But what about those servers in your data center?

Dan Ragle over at the mother ship spotlights Cassatt Corporation's new power management technology. Of course, you can't have your app, database or Web servers flipping off without suffering a productivity implosion.

How does it work? Dan explains:

…Cassatt's new Active Power Management technology is specifically designed with these challenges in mind: Manage the power status of each server in an application aware (noting the interdependencies of each application and using appropriate tools and commands to shut them down gracefully) and policy-based (admins can define which servers to include in the management as well as how and when they should be shut down) manner.

And unlike the typical PC I described above, the technology itself doesn't go to sleep after it shuts down unneeded servers. If conditions and policies warrant it, the technology can also power servers back up as needed, taking care to do so in the same graceful, and application aware manner with which it shut them down in the first place.

Promising! There aren't any products based on the tech just yet, but they are currently testing the technology with early adopters. Expect an update from Cassatt soon.

Speaking of early adopters. The Datamation IT Management Blog has a little update on the iPhone Nerd Rage Storm™ we mentioned yesterday. Happy now?

Update: Wait, InternetNews too! iLOLed at the title alone.

Photo: simon.carr Flickr photostream - Creative Commons

More exciting than iPhone nerd rage, today's cleantech/green links of interest:

4 Questions for Noventi VC Masa Ishii - Earth2Tech
Some interesting revelations into how one VC views nanotech/cleantech investments.

One Watt Wonder - The New CPU From VIA - EcoIron
500MHz, 1 Watt. Chew on that!

Alaskan Senator Claims Worst is Already Over When it Comes to Global Warming - Treehugger
After providing his deft explanation of the complicated workings of the Internet (thanks for the million LOLs), what's next? His views on global warming, of course!

From the employees-must-wash-their-hands file: Pee-Powered Batteries to Make Recharging Much Grosser - Gizmodo
Luckily, they work with other liquids. Still, no thank you.

...However, in the just-plain-awesome file: a (somewhat) green-themed, realtime web traffic widget from maps.amung.us. [Thanks Lifehacker!]

Visit us and light up this map, I made it especially for you.

Now this is encouraging.

A General Motors plant in White Marsh, MD, which is set to produce the first two-mode hybrid transmissions, no longer sends any waste material to the landfill. It's the eighth such GM manufacturing facility to do so. GreenBiz.com reports:

About 97 percent of the waste materials, or 7,300 tons, will be recycled or reused, with the remaining 3 percent being converted to energy at a waste-to-energy facility. In 2006, the plant recycled, reused or converted 99 percent of tis waste.

If a huge auto maker can do it -- in the midst of a turn around, no less -- there's hope for manufacturers everywhere. Are you listening technology providers?

[via EcoGeek]

Some of us are still wearing the scars of the dot-com bubble. So how do we prevent a cleantech implosion? Call your congressfolk!

Elias Blawie, Alison Freeman-Gleason, and Todd Glassre, co-chairs of the Heller Ehrman Energy & Clean Technologies Law Practice, think there's more the government can do. Their answer: stable, longer-term tax breaks, more R&D dollars and stronger protections for valuable IP.

Now, please.

Their argument is based, in part, on the belief that VC's seek quick returns, a tactic that's not exactly compatible with the long development times of the promising technologies. So, they say, it's up to the government to incentivize the field now for a vibrant cleantech landscape in the long run (one hopes). Here's their thinking on tax breaks in the BusinessWeek opinion piece:

This industry cannot be built on a system of mercurial tax incentives. Tax incentives that pop up one year, only to disappear the next, do more harm than good. The current federal investment and production tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2008. If they are not extended soon, the development and financing of most solar and wind projects in the U.S. will grind to a halt about halfway through next year because such new projects cannot be placed in service before the credits expire. A more effective tax regime would take a longer view, building an incentive window of 5 to 10 years, gradually tapering to create a stable, predictable environment for investment, development, and deployment.

As for R&D, they call for some of the gumption the government exhibited during the space race.

It's inevitable really. Companies are quickly jumping on the energy efficiency/low waste bandwagon. But what good is it if many business functions are taking place in less than ideal environmental conditions?

InvestmentNews reports that the green ethic is extending to outsourcing firms, but not necessarily by choice.

When choosing an outsourcing vendor and drawing up green contractual performance agreements, 97.4% of public companies demanded that outsourcing providers require environmental legal compliance, and 92.3% wanted outsourcers to demonstrate successful green strategies, the survey found.

Good to know, though somewhat distressing to think that there's a 5 percent gap between the "demanders" and those requiring proof. I guess the brochure is proof enough?

Let’s think this through...

The environment has its fans (6.6 billion and counting) and flash-based games have their fans. Obviously, as a big oil producer hip to the ways of the Internet, one way to tackle that image problem is to make an eco-themed browser game.

Genius!

Susan Kuchinskas over at InternetNews takes a look at Chevron’s SimCity-esque Web game, Energyville. It’s a slick production by any measure, but it’s also got a message.

The Economist Group, publisher of The Economist and CFO magazines, developed Energyville, which is its latest entry in Chevron's "Will You Join Us" public information campaign launched in 2005. The campaign includes the Web site, television and print commercials. "It's part of a coherent communications platform we're using to try to engage people broadly and around the world about energy issues," said Chevron spokesman Alex Yelland.

Players hoping to build a green utopia will be disappointed. Plop down one too many windfarms, solar arrays or nuclear power plants, and you’re admonished for letting gas tanks go dry. What, no plug-in hybrids?

One can't help but walk away from the little pastime feeling that the deck is a bit stacked. Not so, says Chevron.

Yelland said that the Economist Group was given a free hand to develop the game, with no bias for or against the various energy sources. The Economist Group based the game on independent data from around 100 different global organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Energy Agency, the Electric Power Research Institute and the Energy Information Administration.

In any case, the “game” is not exactly fun or terribly enlightening if you’ve been following the scene. Still, be sure to read the rest of the article for other advocacy projects that have taken a similar tack, though for different causes.