Ever have this experience? One day, you read about something, then suddenly you start noticing references to it everywhere. This happened to me recently with energy-efficient IT, aka the green datacenter. Today, a gentle trickle of attention; tomorrow — blam! — it’s on everyone’s lips.

Mind you, I wasn’t unaware of the subject matter. For some time, InfoWorld Senior Editor Ted Samson has been pitching “green IT” stories during our editorial planning meetings. We even ran an article entitled “IT confronts the datacenter power crisis” in October. But I began to suspect that the debate was heating up when I heard Michael Dell proclaim in January that tech companies must start taking responsibility for the energy they were siphoning off. The rhetoric was good, even if Dell’s solution for offsetting carbon emissions — asking customers to donate money to plant trees for every system they bought — is unlikely to be effective.

Last week, though, was the capper. First, I received an announcement of the CleanTech Forum, a conference run by a venture capital outfit focusing on green technology investment. Then Senior Contributing Editor David L. Margulius pointed me to a study examining U.S. datacenter power consumption.

A day later, I met with representatives from The Green Grid, a group addressing the very same issue. The consortium, which launches today, boasts an impressive roster of members, including AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun. A collection of tech heavyweights like that will surely get people talking about the greening of IT more than ever.

One of those people will be our own Samson, whose Sustainable IT blog launched — when else? — last week. How’s that for timing?