The U.S. Army and LEED architects. Not exactly two groups you expect to be hanging out at cocktail parties together.

But in an effort to reduce energy consumption, the Army has commissioned the construction of two net zero energy duplexes at Fort Cambell that will likely achieve LEED platinum status. The buildings will consume 54 percent less power than similar, conventional homes and draw power from solar panels and geothermal systems. More interesting technologies: the buildings will sport an airtight building shell and thermal windows. Buildings consume 40 percent of the energy in the U.S. and lot of that power is wasted by old equipment, not-so-hot insulation and designs not tailored for energy efficiency.

If it works, expect more, both at Army bases and elsewhere. To date, net zero energy homes have largely been the status symbol for the rich and famous. Success with these prototypes could convince more to jump into the market for product and services to build relatively inexpensive net zero homes. (That's a goal of Zeta Communities which has a net zero beta in Oakland.) The Department of Defense already has ambitious plans to move toward electric and biodiesel cars. It has also been experimenting with bridges and structures made from recycled plastic.

This isn't part of the Fort Campbell project, but SG Blocks in South Carolina has been promoting modular homes out of old shipping containers for housing around military bases. Check out the video on the link. They don't look as nearly as utilitarian as you might think.

AT&T has partnered with smart grid networking upstart Silver Spring Networks, the latest in a line of partnerships for the telecom giant as it seeks to provide communications for smart meter networks and other smart grid systems.

The deal announced Tuesday will allow the two companies to pitch their combined services to utilities using Silver Spring for their smart meter communications, though no utility partners have yet been announced.

AT&T has similar partnerships with smart meter maker Itron, smart meter communications provider SmartSynch and distribution grid equipment maker Cooper Power Systems (see Green Light post and Your Electrical Meter Becomes a Cellphone).

It's far from the only telecommunications giant getting into smart meters and smart grid services. Verizon is working with Duke Energy and others, T-Mobile USA is working with smart meter maker Echelon, and Sprint is working with utilities including Florida Power & Light (see Echelon, T-Mobile Team on Smart Meter Contracts and Spring Stakes Smart Grid Claim).

In most cases, these telecoms are providing so-called "backhaul" communications between utility control rooms and concentrator devices that use separate networks to link to many smart meters at homes and businesses.

But in some cases telecoms are seeking to connect individual meters via their public wireless networks. That's what AT&T is working on with SmartSynch.

Freescale, the chip company formerly known at Motorola Semiconductor, wants to cut its carbon footprint by 50 percent by 2015 from a 2008 baseline and recycle 90 percent of its waste. It will also try to reduce water consumption by 50 percent – chip companies actually end up using a lot of water in their fabrication facilities.

The goals come on top of an earlier goal to reduce the carbon footprint by 40 percent in 2010 from a 2001 baseline. Freescale recently passed that by reducing emissions 42 percent under that measurement. It has also conserved around 170 million gallons of water. Like Samsung, Freescale has also begun the process of substituting chemicals with a high greenhouse gas profile with ones that emit fewer harmful emissions. It's not an easy process – chip making remains notoriously precise and complex – but so far companies seem to be making progress. Most of the greenhouse gases associated with electronics companies actually get emitted indirectly: far more emissions are produced by customers using their products than are produced at the factory. But every bit helps and regulations will require these companies to change existing practices.

Like a lot of chip companies, and chip equipment makers, Freescale hopes to see much of its future growth come from the green market. The company sells controllers and other devices for automotive manufacturers and it's a big player in home-networking components.

I attended a water summit on Monday presented by Sustainable Silicon Valley at the NASA Ames Research Center at historic Moffett Field. Although attended by 250 people, there was nary a venture capital investor in the crowd. If you go to a solar, smart grid or biofuel event there are typically packs of VCs (what's the word for a group of VCs? herd? school? flock?). Anyway, I did bump into Drew Clark of IBM Ventures, and I'm pretty sure he was the only corporate or venture investor in the hall. Drew has been looking at the water market for years on behalf of IBM and has often mentioned the similarities between information networks and water networks.

Drew recently returned from an enormous water conference in Israel, Watec, attended by thousands of people  Mr. Clark suggested we look to Israel for the an example of an innovative, emerging water ecosystem. According to Neil Fink of Worrell Water, Israel recycles 75 percent of its water compared to Los Angeles' 3 percent. Meanwhile, David Zetland, a political economist, water expert and the author of the Aguanomics blog, said that "over 50 percent of potable water in Southern California is used for landscaping." 

"The economics of water are simple," Zetland added, continuing to say that "abundance is over." He suggested that one way to change attitudes about water is to "get peoples' attention with higher prices – the price has to be so painful that it affects demand," he said, adding, "Remember that water is always a local issue. There are 54,000 water districts in the U.S., more than energy districts."

The U.S. obviously has a long way to go in managing its water resources. I will look into water issues and startups in upcoming posts.

Anyway back to venture capital. VC lore has it that you can't make money in water; it's too long a design cycle, too regulated and too fragmented a market. Flying in the face of this faulty reasoning is the fact that Energy Recovery had one of the few Greentech IPOs last year. Additionally, I did a little research and discovered that VCs are indeed investing in water across a variety of water sectors. Here's a quick list of water investments just in the first three quarters of this year. Note that while Israel has its share of water startups, U.S. VCs seem to be waking up to the water market as well. Watch out for a surge in water investments in 2010 and 2011.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will accelerate the process for obtaining a green technology patent in an effort to spur the development of a renewable business here (tip to VentureBeat).

Right now, it takes about 40 months to get a decision from the USPTO. The office will try to reduce that to around 12 months. 3,000 patent applications will be run through the accelerated process to see how well it works. 25,000 more will follow if it does.

"American competitiveness depends on innovation and innovation depends on creative Americans developing new technology,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a prepared statement. “By ensuring that many new products will receive patent protection more quickly, we can encourage our brightest innovators to invest needed resources in developing new technologies and help bring those technologies to market more quickly.”

A lot of people hate patents and they immediately start complaining about patent trolls, stifling of innovation, etc. when the topic comes up. I've reviewed several patent cases and talked to several intellectual property firms over the years (here's an article from way back). I've only met a few people who genuinely milk the system. Most patent cases invariably are grounded in a legitimate argument. And rarely have I met anyone who complains about the system that actually has something worthwhile to pirate.

Patents are also going to be increasingly important in greentech. Most companies will not be able to obtain the funds to build factories. Many companies will have to turn to licensing. So overall this program could be good.

Japanese corporate giants such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo are aiming to capture a growing share of the business of providing clean water in an increasingly thirsty world – a business that some estimate could reach $1 trillion by 2025.

The news comes from Reuters, which on Friday cited executives at Japan's largest trading houses staking big claims in the expanding market for drinking water filtration, wastewater treatment and other water technologies and services.

For example, Sumitomo Corp. plans a tenfold growth in its drinking water and wastewater treatment business portfolio by 2020, up to 10 million customers from today's 1.3 million, company director Takahiro Moriyama told Reuters.

Trading house Marubeni plans to expand its water business customer base fivefold to 10 million over the next few years, and it and fellow giants such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi have been taking big stakes in water projects in countries from China, the Phillipines and Australia to the Middle East and Latin America, Reuters reported.

Welcome to the water world. The push by Japanese giants follows big new water investments from such international corporate giants as IBM, General Electric and Siemens, which have been applying cash and technological expertise to the field (see Green Light posts here and here and this Bloomberg article for some examples).

Those companies, in turn, are challenging longstanding water industry leaders such as France's Suez and Veolia, as the Reuters story noted. At the same time, a host of startups are bringing new filtration, purification and desalination technologies to market, along with systems to measure and manage the transport and use of water for farms, homes and industry (see Water Purification for the Masses? and A Guide to the Water World).

Companies like Sony have their own stake in clean water, Reuters noted – Sony has had to turn to Asahi Kasei group to provide clean water for its factories making circuit boards in central China, after it found itself unable to work with impure water at the site.

Industry's need for clean water could be one of the more lucrative places to start in the water industry, as Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit Pacific Institute, pointed out in a presentation to greentech investors earlier this year (see 'Peak Water' Requires Low-Cost Solutions).

That's because much of the world's water for homes and farms -– the latter making up the lion's share of global fresh water use – is still priced too cheaply to make large-scale high-tech investment cost effective, he said.

Projects aimed at privatizing public water supply systems also have met backlashes in some countries where they've been implemented. Only about 5 percent of the world's water market has been privatized, Reuters reported.

The U.S. currently gets about 50 percent of its electricity from coal. And coal isn't going anywhere – it's cheap, abundant and politically entrenched. In fact, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), essentially a research arm of the utility industry, predicts that our dependence on coal will grow in the coming decades.

Coal has enabled our current industrial world, but it's dirty. If we're going to need to clean it up – we need to capture and sequester the emitted CO2 (and other emitted poisons). So, just in time for Christmas and Copenhagen, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu announced three new projects with a price tag of $3.18 billion to ramp up the development of advanced coal technologies with carbon capture and storage at commercial-scale. Up to $979 million will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, leveraged with more than $2.2 billion in a private capital cost share as part of the third round of the Department’s Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI).    

The governor of coal state West Virginia, Joe Manchin was in on the announcement.

The projects announced today:

American Electric Power Company, (Columbus, Ohio)
Project Title: Mountaineer Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Demonstration
American Electric Power (AEP) will design, construct and operate a chilled ammonia process that is expected to effectively capture at least 90 percent of the CO2 (1.5 million metric tons per year) in a 235-megawatt flue gas stream at the existing 1,300 megawatt Appalachian Power Company Mountaineer Power Plant near New Haven, WV. The captured CO2 will be treated, compressed, and then transported by pipeline to proposed injection sites located near the capture facility. During the operation phase, AEP plans to permanently store the entire amount of captured CO2 in two separate saline formations located approximately 1.5 miles below the surface. The project team includes AEP, APCo, Schlumberger Carbon Services, Battelle Memorial Institute, CONSOL Energy, Alstom and an advisory team of geologic experts. (DOE share: $334 million; project duration: 10 years.)

Southern Company Services, (Birmingham, Ala.)
Project Title: Southern Company Carbon Capture and Sequestration Demonstration
Southern Company Services (SCS) will retrofit a CO2 capture plant on a 160-megawatt flue gas stream at an existing coal-fired power plant, Alabama Power’s Plant Barry, located north of Mobile, AL. The captured CO2 will be compressed and transported through a pipeline, and up to one million metric tons per year of CO2 will be sequestered in deep saline formations. Southern Company Services will also explore and utilize potential opportunities for beneficial use of the CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. In addition to SCS, the project team includes Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, Schlumberger Carbon Services, Advanced Resources International, the Geological Survey of Alabama, EPRI, Stanford University, the University of Alabama, AJW Group and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. (DOE share: $295 million; project duration: 11 years.)

Summit Texas Clean Energy, LLC (Bainbridge Island, Wash.)
Project Title: Texas Clean Energy Project (TCEP)
Summit Texas Clean Energy will integrate Siemens gasification and power generating technology with carbon capture technologies to effectively capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide (2.7 million metric tons per year) at a 400-megawatt plant to be built near Midland-Odessa, Texas. The captured CO2 will be treated, compressed and then transported by CO2 pipeline to oilfields in the Permian Basin of West Texas, for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations. The Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas will design and assure compliance with a state-of-the-art CO2 sequestration monitoring, verification and accounting program. (DOE share: $350 million; project duration: 8 years.)

Senator Robert C. Byrd, the still ambulatory senator from West Virginia (since 1959), was quoted as saying: "Clean coal can be a green, competitive 21st century fuel."

There are a few CCS pilot projects in the world but none at full commercial scale and none at market price.