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My colleagues here at Channel Insider are rightly excited about a new collaborative effort to promote cloud computing in the channel. Dubbed Project Nimbus, it’s a joint effort between CI and a collection of solution and service providers known as Heartland Tech Groups.

The effort, quite naturally, is about helping VARs and MSPs capitalize on emerging opportunities in cloud computing. In fact, my good friend Larry Walsh is at this very moment dutifully unveiling Project Nimbus findings to industry insiders in Orlando, Fla. as part of the ConnectWise Partner Summit.

This is an important effort around a game-changing technology. The fact is solution providers are starved for information and ideas and guidance when it comes to turning cloud computing into a business proposition. One of the things Larry and his team have done very well is to create a list due-diligence questions every solution provider should ask before entering into partnerships with cloud vendors and hosts.

But one area still not getting much attention when it comes to clouds are the green implications. Solution providers are bound to be curious about the potential energy cost savings and efficiency gains, and customers are sure to ask just how environmentally friendly this new form of computing. With more and more business decisions being made with the electric bill and the carbon footprint and the planet in mind, the smart could computing service provider will need to build some green knowledge into their cloud repertoire.

On the surface, the messaging seems to be good. As The Economist opined recently:

In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. Virtualization technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.

Cloud computing may raise privacy and security concerns, but this growing practice -- offloading computation and storage to remote data centers run by companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo -- could have one clear advantage: far better energy efficiency, thanks to custom data centers now rising across the country.

But that doesn’t mean the sector isn’t fraught with uncertainty and skepticism:

In a recent Rackspace survey of its IT-manager customers, 21 percent said they believedt cloud computing is greener than traditional computing infrastructures. But a full 35 percent said they were not convinced of cloud computing’s green benefits.

And 25 percent of the respondents flat-out said the green benefits of the cloud were being overhyped. Just shy of 20 percent gave the benefit of the doubt and said the actual green benefits have not yet matured.

As for their future efforts, 7 percent said the cloud is critical to their green initiatives and 14 percent are evaluating cloud computing’s environmental benefits. 20 percent want to know more about how green the cloud is.

But a whopping 46 percent say cloud computing is not currently a part of their environmental strategy.

And therein lies the opportunity. As Mark Hamilton writes on his sun.com blog:

In theory, a shared resource like Amazon or Google's public clouds can have higher utilization and thus greater power efficiency. Locate your cloud data center close to a green power source, like a hydro plant, and you can minimize transmission line power losses and be even greener. I could rattle off another dozen reasons why cloud computing should be greener. But is it really?

The debate about cloud efficiency is sure to go on. But IT executives should not worry. Efficiency will not be what enables clouds.

Perhaps not. But making the green argument a part of your core case for the cloud will certainly hit customers in two places of special interest: Their heightened environmental awareness, and their wallet. And that is very much in keeping with what Channel Insider and HTG are trying to do with Project Nimbus. It’s one more way to sell this red-hot technology.