Kennedy is an outspoken advocate of developing a US national smart grid

The high-tech industry is at the forefront of smarter energy use, at least in the opinion of Robert Kennedy, Jr., a prominent US advocate for environmental protection and attorney that has throughout his career aggressively pursued changes in US environmental policies.

"You're at the cutting edge of the most important industry in our country today," Kennedy said, saying the industry would restore jobs and shift the balance of controls over energy distribution in the US from the market incumbents to the consumers.

Kennedy, nephew of the late US President John Kennedy, delivered a keynote address at the third annual conference of the Green Grid, a consortium of IT companies and professionals working to increase data center energy efficiency, in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday.

Among other causes, the member of the United States' most prominent democratic political families is an outspoken proponent of building a national "smart grid" to create jobs and encourage more intelligent use of energy and co-generation by customers.

"Our grid is antiquated. It's tired. It's overburdened," he said. "We need to create a grid that is smart. We just have a tangle of wires now. We need a grid that can create and store" energy from renewable sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal.

"You need to be able to build a grid that functions in both directions. You have a technology that's going to put the power of our energy economy into the hands of millions and millions of Americans and democratize it. You're going to create a rational market place in which all of us can participate and to which all of us can contribute."

Most of Kennedy's speech, however, did not revolve around data centers and the smart grid but was more of an overview of the state of the environment in the US and the business and political forces that influence it.

He said the attitude toward environmental protection policies and global warming in Washington was radically different today from what it was like during the Bush administration.

A key reason for the change was President Barack Obama's commitment to pushing new greenhouse gas emission regulations (similar to the new CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, formerly called the Carbon Reduction Commitment, that was recently enacted in the UK) through the legislative process.

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