Finally, a light bulb that can get rid of without worrying about environmental hazards. Eden Park Illumination, a University of Illinois spin-out, has created what it calls microplasma lights that will produce 40 lumens of light or more per watt. In these lights, two glass or plastic panels create a sandwich. Inside the sandwich sits an aluminum mesh dotted with microcavities filled with phosphors. When a current is passed through the sandwich, the phospors get excited and light is generated. You’re looking at a prototype in the picture. (Eden Park will present more on its technology at our Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity conference taking place on November 17 and 18 in New York City. But that's all that's in the light -- aluminum, phosphors and glass. There's no mercury. "Adding mercury would increase the lumen output but the intent is to make it fully recyclable," said CEO Philip Warner. Like plasma TVs, plasma lights can be both large and thin. Imagine a wall covered in panels that emanate light. (Effects with color and brightness, depending on what the customer wants, can also be tuned.) LEDs produce more lumens per watt than plasma lights, but you’d need several LEDs in an array to get this kind of wall-of-light effect. Other companies are trying to make similar lights out of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and capacitors, but Warner claims that plasmas will have superior performance and lifetimes. Plasma lights can go for 40,000 hours. Eden will show off its lights at large trade shows next year and come out with lights commercially in 2010. Universal Display, which will also be at the conference, makes OLED lights and no doubt will beg to differ. Lighting remains one of the growth sectors for VC investing. Approximately 22 percent of the power consumed in the U.S. goes into lighting and many basic technologies are decades old. Compact fluorescents, which were the last huge innovation, were devised in the 1970s.

Automated control over your household appliances just moved a step closer. Tendril, which has devised a Zigbee-based system for monitoring and controlling power consumption inside homes and buildings, has successfully integrated its system with the OpenWay Advanced Metering Infrastructure from Itron. Tendril will outline its technology at our Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity Conference in New York on November 18. What's this mean? In the future, utilities will be able to use the OpenWay system to communicate to the appliances inside your house without a separate broadband link. This, ideally, will lower the cost and difficulty of implementing demand response systems. Itron, of course, is one of the big meter companies. Tendril is one of a number of companies building software and hardware for linking freezers, dryers and other household appliances into a network for energy efficiency. Consumers can set their own levels and controls. If they don't want the air conditioner to ever let the house get above 68 degrees, so be it. But those that accept controls from the utility, or set tighter controls on themselves, will see benefits in lower utility bills. You can even cycle that electricity-gobbling freezer off and on in your garage to save power without hurting your food. Tendril's meter also glows red when you start to consume more power than you really want to, a nice visual cue. See photo. It's green there, so you aren't burning ridiculous amounts of power. While there are a number of companies plying this market, Tendril has clawed its way toward the top of the pile. it already has alliances with 20 utilities. Fifteen of the utilities are engaged in lab tests with the Boulder-based company, four are preparing field pilots and another will kick off a commercial rollout to consumers in the next few weeks. Collectively, these these utilities serve 56 million customers, CEO Adrian Tuck told us earlier this year. Tuck was one of the early pioneers on Zigbee. Some, though, claim that the Zigbee's hold may wane. GainSpan, an Intel spin-off, has created WiFi chips that can do the same thing in the same power profile. WiFi is easier for Taiwanese equipment manufacturers to accommodate, says Vijay Parmar, GainSpan's CEO. Bosh, says Zigbee backers. Parmar will also speak at the conference. Should be a good debate.

One of my personally favorite automotive startups is hitting the road. Transonic Combustion, which built a fuel-injection system that it says will let cars hit 100 miles per gallon, has created a car with its technology integrated and it has been testing it in the labs, says Mike Cheiky, founder and president. Later in the year, it hopes to take the car out and test it in real-world driving conditions. Right now, the car is basically spinning its wheels on some rollers in Transonic's labs. In those conditions, the car gets 100 miles per gallon when going the equivalent of 50 miles per hour. It can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in six seconds and has a top speed of 140 miles per hour. The crew at Transonic has even hit 105 miles per gallon in the lab in one instance. The company is currently talking with three of the top six car companies in the world, including a very large Japanese automaker. Transonic essentially is trying to combine the best of diesel and gas engines. It takes a high compression diesel engine and inserts its own injection system so that the engine can run on regular gas, which is far easier to get in the U.S. Gas can also result in lower particulates going into the atmosphere. Transonic's demo car, for instance, emits 55 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer, he said. While biofuel and electric car companies have dominated the headlines, there is also a strong market for clean car components. EcoMotors and Achates Power, for instance, are tinkering away on opposed piston/opposed cylinder diesel engines and shooting for the 100-MPG mark. The design of those engines is similar to the design of a plane engine Junkers (the plane maker to the Third Reich) created in the 1930s. Chip makers like Freescale are also targeting the efficient transportation market. It's just easier to develop parts than a whole car. Even Tesla Motors says one of its best divisions right now is the one that sells components to third-party companies. Look for all of these names during the Automotive X Prize, which will give away cash for anyone that can hit 100 miles per gallon with a "mainstream" car. Mainstream meaning that you just can't load up a Winnebago with lithium-ion batteries and expect to win. It's got to be something the average Joe the Plumber might want to drive someday. Khosla Ventures and Venrock have invested in Transonic. Khosla also put money into EcoMotors.

The National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) has upped the bar in copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells once again, sources tell me. NREL scientists have developed a CIGS cell with 20.2 percent efficiency, inching past the 19.9 percent cell the lab announced in March. I've called NREL but haven't heard word back on confirmation. That number helps explain why VCs and investment banks continue to pour money into CIGS. Potentially, CIGS cells have the ability to convert more sunlight into power than other thin-film technologies like cadmium telluride and amorphous silicon. Cadmium telluride solar cells have a theoretical maximum of around 19.6 percent and commercial cad tel cells have an efficiency of around 10 percent. (We said nine earlier.) CIGS can also be printed, say advocates, on cheap, flexible substrates that can be integrated into building products. Cad tel solar cells, to date, need a glass substrate, which limits cad tel to rooftop applications. CIGS cells are being produced in limited quantities around the 10 percent efficiency mark and theoretically CIGS cells could get into the mid-20 percentile or even low-30 percentile range someday. Some of the leading CIGS companies include: Nanosolar, Solyndra, SoloPower, HelioVolt and Miasole. There are newcomers too: Telio Solar and NuvoSun. Still, the stakes are high. Nearly a billion dollars have been invested in CIGS startups in the past couple of years and most of them have yet to start commercial production. Many companies have had to delay their CIGS solar cells due to manufacturing issues. (Chemically, the elements don't play well together either -- it's the solar equivalent of trying to pull off a Guns N' Roses reunion.) Even the large companies doing CIGS and CIS cells like Honda haven't exactly been cranking these things out of the factory.