Hewlett-Packard, chipmaker AMD and a number of other companies have teamed up with the  New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (N.Y.S.E.R.D.A) to make datacenter electricity consumption in the state more power and cost effective, thanks to cloud computing.

Data centers account for three percent of all power consumption in the state, a figure that is expected to double over the course of the next five years. This joint project will try to address this issue by attempting to develop a new kind of datacenter.

“Engineers and students from partner institution Clarkson University will experiment with managing data through a network of servers powered by wind turbines or photovoltaic systems. They expect to create a clean-energy-driven Performance Optimized Data Center system that could be available on a large scale to serve colleges, hospitals, corporations and other entities that require data processing.”

Cloud computing will be leveraged by routing workloads to facilities that use more renewable energy, and transmit data over optic fibers which will further reduce power costs. The  N.Y.S.E.R.D.A is investing $300,000 in the project along with $374,000 contributed from private sources.

The other participants in the project include G.E. Global Research Center,  ultracapacitor developer Ioxus,  AWS TruePower, Alban, Vento Tek and Ballard Power.

Datacenter energy efficiency has a been a hot topic lately, and in particular, the reason why the energy use of datacenters did not double from 2005 to 2011 as the EPA predicted. There are two possible explanations, as Maurice Johnson explained in an article posted earlier this week: the economy, or the technology. The likely answer is a little bit of both – Dell, for example, recently launched a push to encourage wider adoption of “fresh-air cooling” among its customers.