DOE Funds Green IT Projects
from the saving-energy dept
Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced $47 million in funding for 14 projects to promote developing technologies that can improve energy efficiency in IT and telecommunications. These projects are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and will aim to reduce energy use and carbon pollution. The government funding for these efforts will also be matched by over $70 million in private industry investments, raising the total funding to more than $115 million. The three main areas for development will include:- Equipment and Software -- for improving servers and networking devices, as well as creating software for optimizing their energy usage.
- Power Supply Chain -- for minimizing the power loss and heat generation for transmitting electricity.
- Cooling -- for new ways to cool equipment to work effectively while using less power.
However, what's not clear in this announcement is whether the developed technologies will be released to the public or if the resulting more efficient technologies will be owned entirely by the entities that create them. It's only a somewhat recent trend that arguments have been made to release federally-funded scientific research back to the public so that the rate of progress can be accelerated by open discourse and collaborations. Looking at the list of the grants (pdf), though, it seems likely that only a small fraction of these projects will have published results.
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handout to Yahoo...
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I'm not sure if that's how it works in the US, but if it is, then asking the companies to release this stuff would be asking them to give away their investment. The only way you could ask for full release is if the government funds the work completely.
Of course, you could ask to recoup seed funding out of proceeds, or whatever. I suppose you would do that out of tax on the company, eventually.
I figure you can make good arguments for either side of this.
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Re: Subsidies
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