I don't want to sound complacent, but I don't see that 2% is necessarily a bad sign. I suspect that 2% of the power-consumption is integral to well over 2% of the economy, for instance. Improving energy efficiency is always good, of course, but I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that people need to be economically incentivised to implement.

That said, there are projects like Erlang on Xen [0] (a bare-metal-ish system) which enable unusual deployment patterns like spinning up a VM only after a request has been received, which could, presumably, make radically more efficient use of virtualised platforms. Not sure if anyone's done this in anger though.

Edit: I suppose higher prices would lead more people to do simple things like configuring their test servers to shutdown overnight and on weekends, mind

[0] http://erlangonxen.org/ , also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431392