I’ve never been a huge fan of Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy, other than when he’s Microsoft bashing. I’ve had the pleasure — displeasure? — of interviewing him once, and didn’t find him to be the most friendly fellow. Perhaps it was just a bad day. He’s also the guy who said “You have zero privacy. Get over it,” which as a privacy advocate I found a tad annoying… but I digress.

I was intrigued, however, with an opinion piece he recently wrote for CNET’s News.com, and Sun’s announcement on Monday that it is committed to “eco-responsibility” in the design of its computing products, or what it also refers to as “sustainable computing.” This all coincided with the launch of the company’s new energy-efficient UltraSPARC T1 processor, which before launch was codenamed “Niagara.”

Sounds like Sun is hopping on the bandwagon that General Electric, Ford and Toyota are driving. And that’s a good thing — a solid sign that the move toward clean technologies is gaining momentum, profile and legs.

In a nutshell, McNealy wrote that the computing industry needs to do a better job of making its hardware more energy efficient. Claiming that Sun’s servers use one-third the power of many rival systems and do 50 per cent more work, he issued a challenge to competitors to try to do better with their products.

He also raised this interesting point: “None of them carry the Energy Star label, by the way, because there’s no such thing for servers. There certainly should be, though. After all, a good server is always on, unlike your washer and dryer.”

If you think about massive data centres running these machines 24-hours a day, you realize there’s money to be saved — and associated environmental gains for reducing electricity consumption — by buying the most efficient hardware on the market. “So if the chief information officer isn’t calculating the cost of electricity into his purchasing decisions, the company may as well be burning money,” says McNealy.

He says the same thinking applies to desktop computing. Why, he asks, use a fully loaded, more power-hungry desktop computer when most of the applications can be delivered to an energy-efficient “thin client” — i.e. a so-called network appliance — that can access all its computing applications from a server through a broadband connection?

“Consider the typical office PC,” he writes. “It uses about 300 watts of electricity and pumps out about 850 British thermal units, or BTUs, of heat. It’s not really an efficient space heater, though, and in warm weather it makes your AC work overtime.”

By comparison, he says a thin client has no microprocessor, no disk drive, no cooling fan, and as a result only uses 15 watts of electricity. And here’s the kicker: “This computing paradigm has reduced our power consumption by nearly nine times and raw materials consumption by 150 times while saving us $25 million in energy and systems cost last year alone,” he claims.

Now, I can’t verify those numbers but you’ve got to assume McNealy has done his homework. All I can say is it’s about time that somebody has raised the issue of computer power efficiency and network computing designs that can reduce energy consumption.

Funny, McNealy has been trying to sell the idea of the thin client “network appliance” — or the “network as the computer” — since my years as a technology trade journalist in the mid-1990s. It never gained as much traction as it should have, and the fact is most corporate desktops have computers loaded with bloated Microsoft and other applications people hardly use. Perhaps, put in the perspective of eco-friendly computing, McNealy can revive this paradigm by getting corporate and government buyers of information technology to consider the energy impact of their purchases.

Like him or not, McNealy is blunt with his opinions and knows how to grab the media’s attention. I expect his next rant will focus on how energy-intensive the average Microsoft-loaded PC operates. It’s a debate that needs to take place.

In Sun’s announcement on Monday, the company said it is launching a series of high-level conferences to engage industry and government leaders in support of Eco-Responsibility, with the first conference scheduled for Jan. 31, 2006 in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The conference will “focus on innovative ways to reduce energy use in the enterprise servers that power the world’s computers.”

According to Sun’s chief technology officer, Greg Papadopoulos, “energy efficiency is a competitive advantage in the automotive industry and in the markets for everything from airplanes to refrigerators. It’s high time we bring the same focus and competitive zeal — the same level of responsibility to the environment — to our industry.”

The company outlines its eco-responsibility initiative in more detail in a special area of its Web site. For a different take on this, check out Joel Makower’s blog.