Last year, I wrote about an organization that AMD and other industry members such as HP, IBM and Sun were launching to focus squarely on the energy issues that are becoming increasingly thorny in today’s data centers.

The backers told me that the group, called The Green Grid, would be aimed at bringing together parties from across the industry and from within the user community to take a close look at how energy issues are impacting data centers and how organizations can make their IT deployments more energy efficient. Participants would include everyone from chip makers to hardware vendors to software companies to end users who handle IT, as well as end users responsible for facilities.

This week, The Green Grid is officially launching. I spoke with Rick Schuckle, a Dell executive, and John Tuccillo, an executive with American Power Conversion (APC), both of whom are on The Green Grid board of directors. They talked about the growing momentum behind the group, saying that nearly half of the people who have registered on the group’s Web site are end users.

At this point, however, the members of The Green Grid’s working groups are vendors, though the group will start inviting end user participants as the direction and focus of The Green Grid gets more defined.

“No end users are active members, though we’re in a stacked holding pattern,” Tuccillo says, explaining that about 49% of those who have registered on The Green Grid Web site are end users. The Green Grid was waiting for the formal launch to begin inviting end users to be active members, he says.

“The launch is the formal announcement that we have formed, we have processes, we have structure, we have work underway and we are actively looking to bring people together,” Tuccillo says.

The Green Grid offers two membership levels: A $5,000 general membership, which gives members access to Green Grid technical output and the ability to vote on some organizational issues; and a $25,000 contributing membership, which enables members to participate in workgroups and in drafting Green Grid technical documents.

“The more user-input we have, the more valuable it’s going to be,” Tuccillo says. “Getting direction from those folks is going to be key.”

Register to be part of The Green Grid here. And get a look at some of the group’s first white papers: “Power and cooling in the data center”; “Electrical efficiency modeling of data centers”; and “Assessing power and cooling requirements in the data center”.