[UPDATE 7/31: See additional context on Google’s own energy thirst below.] David M. Herszenhorn, who covers Congress, sent me a note from Washington today on an interesting hearing held to explore the role of efficiency in cutting Americans’ expensive energy appetite.

Here’s David’s report:

WASHINGTON -– Dan Reicher, Google’s guru of all things related to energy and the environment, came to Capitol Hill on Wednesday with some ideas on how to keep Earth from overheating and poor families from freezing this winter in the face of sky-high prices for heating oil.

A central proposal, laid out in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, was a national program aimed at cutting heat and electricity bills in 10 million low-income homes over a decade. The existing federal “weatherization” program saw its Energy Department budget eliminated recently. The hearing was called “Efficiency: The Hidden Secret to Solving Our Energy Crisis.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and chairman of the joint committee, said he planned to include the weatherization proposal in a bill later this year. “I am very interested in the low-income home weatherization program,” he said. “And I’m going to put in some legislation to move it up.”

Over in the main part of the Capitol, lawmakers have been locked in a bitter stalemate over energy policy, with Republicans pushing for increased oil exploration, including expanded offshore drilling. Democrats, meanwhile, insist that drilling should be limited to existing leases on federal lands. Both sides say efforts to produce energy from renewable sources should be vastly increased, but they disagree on how to do so.

Mr. Reicher offered an array of ideas to a mostly receptive panel of lawmakers. In addition to weatherizing 10 million homes for low-income Americans, which he said would cost about $2 billion annually, he also said Congress should establish a mechanism called the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard that would set efficiency resource targets for electricity and gas suppliers over a given period of time.

He also called for a national “renewable portfolio standard” to increase the amount of electricity produced by sources other than fossil fuels. Some two dozen states have a hodgepodge of such requirements now for their utilities. This issue has divided Congress deeply in recent years. Other proposals included a greater focus on boosting fuel efficiency, the improvement of electric cars and increased tax incentives for the construction of energy-efficient buildings.

Perhaps Mr. Reicher’s most intriguing comment, though, was his observation on the role that information technology will play in helping solve the nation’s energy problems. “The increasing interplay between energy hardware and information software — and the corresponding rise of the Internet and the connectivity it brings — adds to the potential to make and to use energy more productively,” Mr. Reicher said. “From smart meters and smart appliances to smart homes and a smart grid, we are poised to significantly advance our ability to monitor and manage energy.”

Presumably Google foresees a role in helping consumers or companies do this. It’s already aggressively pursuing investments in what it calls “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.” Mr. Reicher directs climate and energy initiatives at Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, which has been capitalized with more than $1 billion in Google stock to address the issues of climate change, global poverty and global health.



UPDATE, 7/31: Google, of course, is large and fast growing user of energy. The company has been building large data centers — warehouse sized buildings with rows upon rows of computers that can deliver search results, YouTube videos, email and a growing array of digital goodies — around the United States and the world. Google does not disclose its own energy use or carbon “footprint.” (Yahoo does disclose its carbon dioxide emissions.)

Collectively, data centers accounted for 1.5 percent of all electricity used in the United States in 2006. Even though Google is believed to have one of the largest collections of data centers of any company, its energy use likely accounts for a small fraction of that total.

In his testimony, Mr. Reicher addressed the company’s electricity appetite: “At Google we have been working to lower the cost and increase the deployment of renewable energy, and to accelerate the deployment of plug-in vehicles. We have also been working to increase our use of clean power and energy efficiency at Google data centers and offices in the U.S. and other countries. Together with other technology companies and organizations, Google launched the Climate Savers Computing Initiative last year to reduce the power consumption of computers and servers.”