Last week Google announced it would grant $5.7 million to 12 university projects to make the Internet a greener place. The biggest grants went to the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Rutgers University. The grants are generally for $500,000 a year for two years, with a renewable third year. Google, of course, is keenly interested in developing new technologies to both reduce power consumption and carbon footprint for its gigantic data centers (the company is famously shy about the power consumed and carbon emitted by those data centers).

The Rutgers team will explore ways to create low power modes in servers, essentially allowing ways for parts of the computer to be turned off or go into sleep mode and only be powered when there is computing demand for it. The goal of this redesign is to conserve 40 to 50 percent of the power that servers now consume.

The Michigan team will receive two smaller grants. The first is to fund research into data structures and to better understand how computers use and access data to better save energy. A second grant will go into research into making hardware for computer memory more energy efficient.

The Princeton grant is curious, because there the research will be on Internet privacy issues. Researchers there focus on web activity tracking as well as maintaining privacy across multiple synchronized devices. Presumably, Google believes that these privacy issues eventually have an impact on energy usage and management.

With data center energy usage predicted to double in the coming decade, it's unsurprising that greening the data center continues to be a major policy initiative for big tech firms. It's encouraging to see Google fund nascent research, even research that may not pay off, in hopes of cutting down some of these energy uses.