There are a lot of financially sound reasons to adopt LEED standards for your next building. The resale value of the building will climb faster than normal. Spare space that needs to be rented out will go for a premium. Operations costs and energy bills will likely be far lower than they would if you built a conventional headquarters. (Jeanne Clinton, Clean Energy Advisor, California Public Utilities Commission, says green building has a negative cost because the financial gains will outweigh the initial expense.) It's a great recruiting tool as well, says Larry Vertal, senior strategist at AMD and the person who runs their sustainability programs. "It is one of the soft things...

Although ultracapacitor manufacturer EEStor is highly secretive and few people outside the company can fully explain what it is up to, there are two things you can almost always count on the company to do. One, to delay its product. Two, to be highly entertaining. This week, Richard Weir climbed out of his hidey hole to respond to a comment on the GM-Volt blog about the company's status. Weir reiterated that the company had said earlier this year that it would come out with products by the end of the year, EEStor did not get the funding it was seeking. Therefore, it seems that the ultracapacitors will be delayed once again. Initially, they were due back in 2007. According...

SAN DIEGO -- What is Herman Miller, the god of fancy, overpriced office furniture, doing at a green technology conference? It's a new direction, says Mark Matusow, regional manager of Convia, a company created by Miller to tackle energy efficiency. Convia has created a software package that lets office managers, homeowners or anyone really control their lights, security cameras, air conditioning systems or other appliances through a centralized software console? You want the lights to dim during the middle of the day, or to shut off entirely after 8:00 p.m.? Plug those commands into the software console and it's done. Leaving lights on when nobody's figuratively home can...

SAN DIEGO -- In a few years, your light bulb will track you. The declining cost of photo sensors (which detect light) and motion sensors will allow light manufacturers to ultimately include them inside of light bulbs, speculated Konstantinos Papamichael, a professor with the California Lighting Technology Center at UC Davis during a session at the Emerging Technologies Summit taking place in San Diego this week. When you walk out of the room, the bulbs will know and thus crank down the light they produce or turn themselves off entirely. Right now, building owners install sensors to do this same job, but with sensors incorporated into every light, the bulbs will be able to do a...