Home Energy control panels are connected to refrigerators, lamps, lights, heating and cooling systems, showing shoppers how the digital energy home could be connected.

Best Buy’s Home Energy section has a lot of potential to educate consumers and grow the market for home energy products.

It’s one of the only large retailers in the country paying attention to this market, though we’ll have to see how much volume goes through the section in the coming months, and whether Best Buy will recreate the section in other stores, keep it as a niche in just three stores, or someday shut them down if they aren’t performing.

The Open Data Center Alliance, an umbrella group of more than 300 companies including global banks, released a statement last week saying they had planned to adopt cloud services much faster than thought.

Interviews undertaken by the Carbon Disclosure Project study's authors show that blue-chip companies in the UK plan to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing from 10% to almost 70% of their information technology by 2020.

There are concerns about privacy and security of data, and open source advocates argue it will lock users into proprietary systems and further big monopolies.

For example by 2020, large UK companies that use cloud computing could achieve annual energy savings of £1.2 billion (€1.39 billion) and carbon reductions equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles, the study says.

"Carbon reduction is one driver, but not the primary driver," Citigroup's Paul Stemmler said. "The primary driver is time to market. Developers used to take 45 days to get new servers, but in the internal cloud infrastructure that we operate in our own private network, it takes just a couple of minutes."

The study claims that these companies could benefit from billions in savings if they do.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, has publicly called the cloud a "trap."

Alberta's vast oil deposits are dirty and hard to reach, mixed into sand or locked deep underground. Recovering the oil is a hugely energy-intensive process, multiplying its climate footprint at a moment when extreme weather is getting worse.

Primeval forests and bogs are denuded and drained, replaced by barren slopes and toxic ponds. It may take centuries for life there to recover.