Last week, Google hosted a conference “How Green is the Internet?” at Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif.

How do you further reduce the environmental impact of data centers? The main conversation during “How Green is the Internet?” focused on closing the efficiency gap between server farms and small IT closets.

“Large data centers are the easiest part to solve, their activity is concentrated.”

“Many startups in Silicon Valley operate entirely on the cloud and online services.”

~Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure for Google.

“A shift to the cloud, moving from inefficient data centers to highly-efficient data centers, will save a lot of energy.”

Eric Masanet, an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University

“There are huge inefficiencies in in-house data centers.”

Jon Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance