By now you’ve heard of the poor fellow that got canned because he ran SETI@home on his school district’s computers. Part of the reason: the $1.2 to $1.6 million in electricity and associated costs.

This case brings up an interesting point. Will IT’s newfound fondness for energy efficiency put a crimp on these projects?

Even if searching for ET is not your cup o’ tea, there are other worthwhile projects like as Folding@home that are using the distributed computing model to help unravel the causes of some serious diseases like cancer and AIDS. And don’t forget the other areas of research (climate data, cryptography…) that can benefit from distributed computing platforms like BOINC.

Like Paul Mah mentions in his article at FierceCIO, modern CPUs have throttling capabilities that allows them to tackle workloads without going full-bore. But is that enough? Personally, I’ve been shutting off my PCs or letting them slip into sleep mode. It’s been a years since I’ve contributed meaningfully to such projects because my guilt over leaving my PC on has been too great.

What about you? Are distributed computing projects and Green IT incompatible?