One alternative, recently put forward by management consultancy McKinsey and advocated by the Uptime Institute, is to create a new C-level position: energy czar, responsible for monitoring the efficiency and performance of a company's entire IT department. (McKinsey specifically recommends that the EC would be mandated with doubling IT energy efficiency by 2012.) He or she would report to the CIO, who in turn would be held accountable for datacenter expenses and operations.

Given the growing importance of energy conservation, it's certainly not a far-fetched proposition (aside, perhaps, from the rather unappealing title of "energy czar," which to me is just slightly better than "power dictator"). There are already companies out there with executives in this type of role. In fact, beyond overseeing just energy initiatives, some are developing environmental policies as well.

Sun, for example, has Dave Douglas, its vice president of eco-responsibility, charged with overseeing "the strategy and execution of environmental initiatives across the company, including enhancements to Sun's products in the areas of energy efficiency, cooling technologies, product recycling, and clean manufacturing."

Over at Yahoo, Christina Page serves as the company's director of climate and energy strategy. As she told Mother Jones, her tasks include "looking for opportunities around energy efficiency and increased sustainability," as well as finding ways to maintain Yahoo's carbon neutrality.

The bottom line here, in my view, is that IT organizations, particularly ones with ever-increasing energy needs, could greatly benefit from either creating a job role for overseeing energy and possibly environmental initiatives -- or expanding an existing employee's role to tackle the task. It's entirely possible such a person will be able to find ways to save your company thousands or millions of dollars, improve your environmental standing, and help steer you away from the kind of disasters that a power crisis can bring.