Cisco expanded for years by aligning itself with IT professionals. Now it is spending a lot of time with city planners.

The networking giant signed an agreement in principle to work with San Francisco on the city's "Sustainable 21st Century San Francisco" plan to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption through strategic urban planning. Part of San Francisco's plan includes a Living Innovation Laboratory in the Hunter's Point area. Cisco also unveiled an EcoMap for Amsterdam, which gives people information on localized carbon output.

If you had to sum up Cisco's strategy in two words, it's "Stay Home." The company wants to promote high-end, lifelike video conferencing without the jitters and other remote management tools as a substitute for business travel or even going to the office every day. Cutting back travel has the potential to drastically reduce liquid fuel consumption and greenhouse gases. Many experts have said that while it might become economically feasible to capture carbon dioxide at power plants, capturing it from car tailpipes is much more difficult. Greenhouse gases from transportation account for around 40 percent of the greenhouse gases in the U.S. and well over 98 percent of vehicles rely on fossil fuels.

A world connected by broadband, of course, would boost Cisco's sales. It can cut operational costs too. The company's travel budget has dropped from $750 million to $250 million.

The company has also worked on pilots to promote public transportation. Back in 2007, Cisco has rigged up a municipal bus in San Francisco with wireless internet access so commuters could get their email, browse the web, or get information on when their connecting bus or train was coming in.The company also has projects underway in Seoul, Amsterdam, Madrid and other cities.

Bluestone Energy Services, which designs and implements energy efficiency projects for commercial and industrial buildings, has a new data center partnership in New England.

The Norwell, Mass.-based company said Tuesday that it has an exclusive arrangement with data center cooling startup AdaptivCool for all projects in the territories of utilities NStar and National Grid.

AdaptivCool makes systems that pinpoint "hot spots" in data center aisles and racks, and floor tile fans that direct cold air to those hot spots. That can help data centers cut their cooling bills by 30 percent or so – not bad, considering that cooling can use up to half the energy for some data centers (see AdaptivCool: The Goldilocks of Data Center Cooling).

Bluestone has been moving more aggressively into the data center efficiency business, said Adam Fairbanks, vice president of engineering and business development. That's because data centers are starting to face serious concerns about having enough electricity to expand or keep running (see Data Centers Could Hit 'Resource Crisis').

One project Bluestone and AdaptivCool did at a Cambridge, Mass. data center cut cooling power by about 40 percent, he said. Beyond the about $86,000 a year in projected power bill savings, the project garnered a $54,000 grant from NStar – one of many utilities giving rebates to data centers that cut their power needs through a variety of means, from better cooling to more efficient IT (see PG&E OKs Rebates For Data Storage, Sees Thermal Energy Storage Next).

Lining up the most lucrative sets of utility rebates is one of the services that companies like Bluestone, Lime Energy, and a host of big energy services companies (ESCOs) such as Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Lockheed Martin, Siemens, Schneider Electric and Chevron Energy Services help clients with (see The ABC's of Energy Efficiency, Postal Style and A PPA Model for Building Energy Efficiency?).

Putting together conferences is never easy. Speakers come up with unusual, exacting requests at the last minute. And the bigger the conference the more fluid the schedule becomes.

Cop15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place next week, however, takes fluidity to a new level. Here is what is currently listed on the overview schedule:

Monday, December 7: Opening of the Session. Organizational Matters. Lunch Break.

Tuesday, December 8: Opening. Lunch Break.

Wednesday, December 9: Plenary, Informal Groups, Lunch Break. Plenary.

Thursday and Friday: Informal Groups, Lunch Break.

The link for the meetings schedule currently comes up blank.

Nonetheless, the conference is expected to be a watershed moment for green technology. Various world leaders will speak at the event. Denmark also remains one of the globe's premier centers for greentech development. Giants like Danfoss and Vestas are based there and various universities have set up tech transfer programs.

You know green has gone mainstream when military contractors talk about it.

Wednesday, Lockheed-Martin executives will outline the company's strategy with regard to alternative energy, energy storage, and efficiency. (More at this link here. We initially said tomorrow. We regret the error.)

Lockheed, Bechtel and other mainline contractors have long been on our list of alternative energy companies to watch. Although startups often come up with innovative, clever ideas, it will be up to these large outfits to transform the concepts into reality. They are the only ones with the technology, talent, time and money. Lockheed has employees who've spent more time in land use hearings than probably all of the solar startups put together.

So far, Lockheed hasn't seen unimpeded success. It signed, and then cancelled a deal to build at 290 megawatt solar farm with Starwood. Clearly, though, that's not the last deal for the company.

As a result, expect to see green become a barbell market: A lot of small companies competing to get acquired or sign strategic alliances with large companies. And in the middle you'll see First Solar.

Tesla Motors gave us the Sport edition of the 2010 Roadster for an afternoon, now here's the video.

Like most people that get behind the wheel and don't have to plunk down the $128,000 plus on the purchase price, we loved it. It handles well, accelerates rapidly and nearly everyone stares when you come to a stop at the intersection. We also had a few people try to race us. In terms of acceleration, nothing came close. We let a guy in a Mustang pass us, but that's only because I am a terrible driver and didn't want to go past 85 miles an hour. It took him a long time to overtake us too.

One of the more interesting aspects of the car is how the company is trying to blend sedan comfort with sports car zip. The company has discovered that many consumers now use it as a daily commuting car. Thus, it inserted expanding pellets into the doors to reduce sound. That way you can take conference calls. The Sport can do zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds, or faster than the 3.9 seconds it takes the regular Roadster. Firmware included in the car's system also optimizes the acceleration. The firmware, which comes in the Sport, is probably the biggest difference between the older and the newer Roadster. (We drove the Roadster Sport.) Between zero and 20 miles an hour, it moves fairly fast, but once it hits 20 the acceleration climbs. The first time you gun it, you get thrown back in your seat at the 20 mile per hour mark.

And don't worry about charging. Costco and other places are installing free electric charging stations.

In our never-ending quest to popularize waste heat as a new energy source comes this bit of news:

Finland's Helsingen Energia plans to build a data center underneath a cathedral and capture and channel the waste heat into the municipal heating system. Although the data center will be relatively efficient, it will still generate about the same about of energy in the form of waste heat as a wind turbine. The heat effectively gets sucked into water pipes, which snake through homes around Helsinki. Waste heat isn't free – you have to install equipment to capture it – but it's relatively constant. The sun goes down, but computers never stop (except, of course, in an Omega Man-like future).

You probably don't know it, but you live in the dawn of the Golden Age for waste-heat research. The U.S. consumes around 100 quads (100 quadrillion BTUs) of energy a year and 55 to 60 quads get dissipated as waste heat, according to Arun Majumdar, the UC Berkeley professor who now runs ARPA-E, the advanced projects group inside the Department of Energy. Besides, you've already paid for it. Quite simply, it's power delivered but not exploited for a productive purpose. A variety of startups in the U.S. will soon release products that will more efficiently capture and convert heat or allow notebooks to run longer. You can read about a whole mess of them here.

California regulators have released a draft plan for a program to steadily reduce greenhouse gas emissions and force businesses to limit their emissions and pay for permits if they emit above limits.

The draft plan, issued by the California Air Resources Board, aims to help the state to achieve its legislative mandate to cut emissions to the 1990 levels by 2020. The state has taken other steps to achieve this goal, such as by requiring utilities to provide more renewable electricity and nudging carmakers to make more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The proposal to cap emissions and allow trading of permits to pollute is arguably more controversial than some other measures, largely because any cap-and-trade program could impose greater costs on a wide range of industries and, ultimately, consumers.

Congress has been wrestling with climate change bills that would include carbon cap-and-trade, and results have been mixed. An early idea to auction off all of the permits didn't muster enough support in the House, which passed its bill in June this year. Utilities, automakers, oil refineries and other major sources of emissions all vied to get free allowances initially.

The U.S. Senate is debating its own version of the climate change bill now.

California began working on its own cap-and-trade plan after passing the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. The state has drafted the proposal in conjunction with a consortium of western states and Canadian provinces.

Under the proposal, the state would auction some of the permits at the start of the program. The program would initially target the largest sources of emissions, such as power plants and oil refineries. The state also would allow a limited use of carbon reduction projects for companies that want to use them to offset their emissions.

Each allowance is good for a compliance period set by the state and must be surrendered at the end of that period.

California would gradually limit the amount of permits it issues to force companies to reduce their emissions.

The state plans to start running the program in January 2012.