When it comes to trash-to-fuel, Ze-Gen is the contrarian. Most companies try to extract vegetable scraps, manure and other waste products into methane, or natural gas. When scrubbed of impurities, the gas can be safely shipped through pipelines. "We try to make as little methane as possible," said Bill Davis, CEO of Ze-Gen in an interview. Instead, Ze-Gen has created a process that harvests carbon monoxide and hydrogen from garbage. The highly combustible gases can then: a.) be burned on site as a gas to power local industrial operations; or b.) exploited to crank a turbine to produce electricity. (Davis will also speak at the upcoming Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity conference on November 17 and 18.) The process also finally changes the economics of trash-to-fuel. Now, companies in this market garner revenues from two sources: producing power and taking in trash. Unfortunately, because of the high cost of trash-to-fuel systems and the quality and price of the gases being extracted by most companies, most of them have to heavily rely on trash-hauling revenues. To make it, some trash-to-fuel companies will charge up to $70 a ton for taking in trash. Since traditional landfill operators will take garbage in for $30 a ton, these deals haven't been well received by investors. Ze-Gen is far less reliant on hauling fees, he said. So far the company has demonstrated the technology on a small prototype. The next step lay in building a larger, commercial-scale, prototype.

In the smart grid market, GridPoint did one of those sudden right-hand shifts. The company started out with a box that would allow homes to curb energy consumption by controlling different devices, said CEO Peter L. Corsell. While the hardware consisted of off-the-shelf components, the value of the box lay in the software developed by GridPoint. GridPoint, however, discovered that there were only a limited number of upper-middle class homes that would want a device like that. More importantly, though, it found a larger opportunity existed in selling a scaled-up version of the software to utilities for demand response programs. Since then, the company has landed development deals with a number of utilities. The company, for instance, is participating in the $100 million SmartGridCity project with Xcel Energy and working on a smart charging trial for plug-in hybrids with Duke Energy. GridPoint has also raised over $220 million. (Corsell will further detail the company's plans and contracts at Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity taking place November 17 and 18 in New York.) The best way to think of what GridPoint is that it's a network operating system software company, he said. Other companies will make the meters, routers and other devices and GridPoint will publish its APIs and run compatibility tests to ensure that everything works together. EnerNoc, which has been in the market for a number of years, is moving in a similar direction. Like the computer industry, players in smart grid are establishing niches and the whole industry is going horizontal. It's one of the big trends in greentech to watch. These deals and the funding have helped put GridPoint toward the front ranks of the market for software that will regulate power consumption. In the future, utilities will likely operate more like software-as-a-service companies than traditional power producers: A huge part of their job will lay in swapping and transferring power for optimal efficiency rather than cranking it out of turbines. As an attendee at the Emerging Technologies Summit that took place in San Diego told me: "This is the idea that Enron was supposed to be about." It is also a competitive market: Trilliant, eMeter, EnerNoc, Comverge and Silver Spring Networks are in the same market with similar, overlapping products and services. Who will win? Who knows. Some competitors like to chide GridPoint for having to shift its strategy. Many of these companies have also been in the market longer. But it's also a huge opportunity. Virtually every utility is moving to adopt smart grid technologies and most of them are at or near square one.

Cold air and geothermal power -- Iceland hopes these two geographic facts of life will allow it to become a global power in datacenters. The island nation is cranking up strategies to attract search engines and hosting providers, said Peter Gross, CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company that designs datacenters. (Hewlett-Packard bought it and made EYP a subidiary.) Iceland faces some significant hurdles, especially since it's been so hard hit by the global credit crunch. The broadband connections to Europe will have to be improved. Ireland and Denmark, both of which have growing wind energy footprints, are better connected in terms of fiber. The air in Iceland can also contain quite a bit of sulfur, which has to be filtered out. Still, the circumstances are attractive. Geothermal power has emerged as one of the country's most valuable commodities, Gross said. Data remains easier to export than power. Free cold air is also something all datacenters want. Roughly half of the power consumed by datacenters goes into air conditioners. Some vendors -- such as IBM, Dell and HP -- have introduced systems that cool computers with chilled water. These can cool computers more efficiently, say supporters, but customers overwhelmingly prefer air cooling, Gross said. Cutting the air conditioning bill in a large datacenter could result in millions in savings. (Chilly air is also one of the reason's Microsoft is building an ambient cooled datacenter in western Ireland.) Overall, optimizing a datacenter for power consumption can cut an operating budget by $20 to $25 million a year. The Iceland tidbits came during an aside with Gross at a roundtable with reporters, analysts and HP execs at the HP Labs offices in Palo Alto, Calif. (The labs date back decades and even house the still-untouched offices of the late David Packard and Bill Hewlett. The architecture is great -- think Pancake House of Tomorrowland. The photo is of one of the two mosaics at the entrance.) Other notes during the meeting: Electricity will continue to be a big headache for large companies. Soon, large companies will spend more on power to run their datacenters than computers and other equipment, said Gross. The total cost of power for datacenters is increasing by about 20 percent a year. "Datacenters will use more power than a small town with 20,000 to 30,000 households," he said. "It is becoming the most glaring element of energy consumption in a corporation." A large datacenter can cost $200 million to $300 million. That total just includes the building, power systems and air contioners, not computers. LEED platinum is the standard you want for your datacenter. Going LEED adds about 1 percent to 8 percent to the total cost of construction, but it will pay off over time with lower power bills. Under a new version of the LEED standards coming out soon, it will be easier to get LEED points for installing energy-efficiency equipment. Now, the LEED standards are tilted more toward adopting green building materials. "The vast majority of projects today are LEED," he said. Datacenters a few years ago consumed about 25 watts per square foot. Then in 2004 and 2005 the figure shot up to 52 watts per square foot. Blame it on multi-core chips and virtualization software. These increase computing utility but increase the power density. The average server cabinet at a typical large company will consume 2 to 3 kilowatts. One at a search engine will gobble up 8.5 to 9 kilowatts. Here's something wacky to look out for in the future: Most software applications can be pretty much run in a datacenter anywhere in the world. So in the future, large companies could roll them from center to center around the world and take advantage of low nightime electricity rates. Some HP customers and HP itself is already examining ways of shifting computing loads with the clock.

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 that many companies don't understand but it is crucial in the retention and moral of employees," he said. "It is amazing how the highest talented people will grill you about your sustainability practices in job interviews. ... We've seen a lot more interest in it, so it really does matter." As a result, AMD's Lone Star Campus in Austin, completed earlier this year, figures prominently in the company's marketing and its eighth annual Global Climate Protection Plan, issued today. Built to the LEED Gold standard, the building consumes 20 percent less energy than a similar building built to standard codes. It also sports the world's largest water cachement system. All the energy for the facility is provided from renewable sources through Austin's GreenChoice program. The climate protection plan also includes new goals for its sustainability. The company is now shooting to reduce energy consumption by 40 percent in 2010 compared to a 2006 baseline and reduce carbon emissions by 33 percent in the same year by the same baseline. (And let's not forget much larger rival Intel. Yesterday, it got the 2008 Green Power Leadership award and announced it invested in Trony Solar.) Starting with this version of the report, AMD has begun to try to quantify and account for the greenhouse gases and energy consumption from third party suppliers. It will take quite a bit of work: The company's suppliers will have to adopt standards to account for greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, they will be motivated: Despite two plus years of financial turmoil, AMD remains one of the largest chipmakers in the world. If you want to sell it vapor deposition chambers, get ready to report. Greenhouse gas and energy accounting will also likely become mandatory anyway under future regulations. "There is no doubt in my mind that strong regulation and reporting requirements are coming here," Vertal said. Accounting for so-called "Scope 3" emissions from suppliers will also allow AMD to accommodate one of the biggest shifts in the company's history: It is spinning off its manufacturing division. Without a change in reporting, AMD would see greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption plummet, but in a somewhat artificial way. On a side note, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite spiff used to increase employee loyalty. Back in the 90s, another semiconductor company used to offer household cleaning services at a highly subsidized rate. When employees contemplated a new job offer, they'd then wonder to themselves: "But what will happen to my cleaning lady?" It apparently worked, a source told me.

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 to the GM-Volt blog, Weir wrote:

As we have provided certified information on EEStor, Inc. this information certain indicates the excellent progress that we are making.

+As we stated in the beginning of 2008, properly funded EEStor, Inc. would anticipate in being in production status late in 2008.

The funding that we did receive was not sufficient to meet the production status late in 2008 but as identified by our last news release, EEStor, Inc. has made excellent progress with that level of funding.

That sounds like 2009 to me. Vague, yes, but simple math seems to indicate next year at best. In turn, that means those prototypes from Lockheed and the car from Zenn due this year will be delayed as well. For those of you unfamiliar with EEStor, the company is extremely reclusive. It issues few press releases; although, Weir occasionally gives brief interviews. Kleiner, Perkins is an investor, but neither the firm nor the company acknowledge it. Former Dell chairman and high-tech guru Mort Topfer was on the board, jumped off and returned. People I've talked to who have seen EEStor's labs (or have spoken to people who have seen the labs) say they are wonderful and state-of-the-art. However, they also tended to strongly doubt the company's claims that its parts could power an electric car for hundreds of miles and recharge in a jiffy. EEStore does have supporters. And other companies, albeit less secretive and cryptic ones, are working on ultracapacitors to help charge battery-powered cars. So you never know.

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 run up power bills. Roy Sierleja, Senior Lighting Specialist, GE Lighting, during another session at the conference estimated that offices are empty around 50 percent of the time that the lights are on. This being Herman Miller, there is, of course, a gadget to go along with the software -- the Wand. You can see it in the above picture being held by Matusow. The Wand can turn off lights and activate fans. All you have to do is point it at the thing you want to control and via radio frequency it will shut it off. Think of it as a remote control for lights. (Naturally, the appliances have to be linked into the Convia system. You can't just walk up to a random light and expect it to obey.) Convia charges around $1.25 a square foot to commercial builders. That's in line, albeit a little higher, than what other building control companies charge. The premium, though, can be justified by the ease of use, claimed Matusow.

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 better job of balancing the needs of the people who work in the buildings against the goals of energy efficiency. Achieving that balance is crucial, he said, adding that an hour of employee productivity lost is equal to the energy savings of a single light fixture for a year. The bulbs will also be able to take more advantage of sunlight. If the photo sensor notes that it is fairly light in the room already (presumably from light coming in from the window) it can correspondingly turn down the bulb. Getting lighting systems to take advantage of sunlight has actually turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated, he said. Objects in the room can easily throw off a photo sensor. If you move a white table into a room, for instance, the photo sensor begins to detect more light and cranks down the bulbs. Wal-Mart had trouble in one store where the company installed a lighting system activated by photo sensors. The idea was that the lights would dim or turn off when sunlight was streaming through the skylight. The lights one day went off and wouldn't go back on, which caused customers to complain about shopping in darkness. The problem? The store had held a celebration one day and released balloons inside the store. One of the balloons sailed to the roof and got lodged near the sensor. The shiny surface of the balloon reflected some of the sunlight and tricked the sensor into thinking it was bright inside. Davis researchers first realized this would be a big problem when one day researcher Michael Siminovitch, a Davis professor and one of the leading experts in lighting walked underneath a photo sensor (see video of him and the California Lighting Technology Center here). Siminovitch typically only wears black clothes. The clothes absorbed the light and the signal going to the photo sensor dropped by 80 percent.