Today: Home solar firm, SolarCity, has found a huge benefactor in Google; now’s not the time to be shy about the cloud’s green attributes (competitive advantages?); and NJ will soon be the home to the largest private solar power plant thanks, in part, to publishing giant McGraw Hill.

And in a sign that ARM-powered servers are sneaking up on the data center, Calxeda partners with cloud tech innovators and Ubuntu’s devs at Canonical.

Google invests $280 million in SolarCity – CNNMoney
From 10K to 50K yearly solar home installs in less than half a decade, no wonder Google wants a piece of the action.

A Green Cloud Is a Transparent Cloud – Reuters
Corporate secrecy and conflicting business priorities surrounding data center operations are giving the cloud a bad name.

East Windsor to be site for largest private solar power plant in Western Hemisphere – NJ.com | Times of Trenton
McGraw-Hill preps for a its clean energy-powered future in digital publishing with a huge solar array in NJ.

Calxeda Primes Pump for ARM Server Adoption – Data Center Knowledge
Canonical, Couchbase and Pervasive are partners in its early-access program.

ENXSuite Takes a Social-Networking Approach to Carbon Software – GreenBiz
Carbon accounting software maker continues its crowdsourced

Cavern Technologies Expands Data Center in Kansas City – The Web Host Industry Review
Yup, you guessed it. It’s in a cave!

White House smart grid framework short on cybersecurity details – ZDNet | Greentech Pastures
Oops.

NEC creates storage chip as fast as RAM – Geek.com
Content addressable memory (CAM) offers the data retrieval speed of RAM with better-than-SSD energy savings. Spintronics to the rescue!

Dedupe and the Cloud: Is There a Problem Here? – IT Business Edge
The tech’s runaway popularity, thanks to its ability to lower data storage and energy requirements, could face headwinds if cloud providers fail to implement it properly.

Cash for clunkers: Old tech equipment boosts the bottom line – Computerworld
It’s painful to watch that server you spent thousands on five years ago get kicked to the curb. Luckily, there’s a way to recoup some of that cost and help out the environment.

…Bonus link!

As suburban office parks lose steam, Apple unveils the ultimate example – Grist
Is Apple’s bucking the anti-suburban-sprawl trend gripping corporate America with its expansive “spaceship” office design?