Too far to walk. Too close to drive. That, in a nutshell, is Intrago’s business model. (Unlike Jethro Tull’s, which was “Too old to rock and roll. Too young to die—tickets now at the War Memorial.�) The company wants to build rental station on college campuses, crowded downtowns and industrial parks stocked with scooters, Segways and other small electric vehicles. Users approach the station, flash their RFID-enabled membership key, and then take a scooter for a mile or so jaunt. The users can return the vehicle to its point of origin, but they don’t have to. They can just leave them at a rental station near their destination. Intrago, or one of its licensees, then charges a rental fee that gets automatically tallied through the membership key. “We’re filling a gap between Zipcar and bike shares,� said CEO Larry Blankenship. In the third quarter, the company will kick off a trial at the University of Washington. Someday, this sort of transportation could dominate large city downtown areas. Many are moving toward banning regular cars or charging a lot for parking to discourage drivers. People could park on the outskirts, grab an electrobike and then engage in scooter rage. Intrago will build some of its own rental stations, but it will also license the system to third parties. The company’s secret sauce is the back-end system that tracks the rentals as well as the local charging stations. (The bikes and scooters get recharged after being returned to the station.) It may also be possible to run the business partly on an ad-supported basis. In Paris, JCDecaux put together a rental bike system called Velib (a mashup of the French words for bike and free). The company changes a rental fee but expects to get most of its revenue from ads emblazoned on the bikes. So far, the company has 20,000 bikes on the street and 1,400 rental stations. It cost $126 million and the world awaits the results. JCDecaux pulled off a similar trick with public toilets.

Serious Materials, the green drywall guys, want to expand.

“We find insulation very interesting,� said Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, which has developed a technique for making drywall that consumes almost no fossil fuel, during a session at the Environmental Ventures conference sponsored by Dow Jones taking place in San Mateo.

The Silicon Valley company has raised $60 million from Foundation Capital among others as part of an effort to become the green building material king. Buildings consume roughly 40 percent of the power generated in the U.S. and that’s just the energy used to run the buildings. Construction and building materials gobble up another 12 percent. The company’s mission statement goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emission by a billion tons annually through efficient manufacturing and the introduction of green materials.

Serious has delivered beta samples of EcoRock, the company’s green drywall, to customers and hopes to release it commercially by the fall, said Surace. Traditionally drywall essentially consists of gypsum that gets cooked at high temperatures. Serious has devised a chemical mix that congeals at low temperatures, sort of like Jello. The company plans to run its factories on solar panels.

Serious will also later this year come out with its Thermaproof windows. The windows consist of panes of coated glass that sandwich in krypton gas.

The windows can cut home energy use by 15 to 40 percent, Surace said, and insulate far better than even EnergyStar rated windows. The windows, in fact, insulate as well as walls.

“The main difference between our windows and walls is that you can see through them,� he said.

Solar panel manufacturers have figured out that financing plans are going to be key to their future. And the same is occurring in solid state lighting. Lighting companies are promoting light emitting diodes (LEDs) and other forms of solid state lighting through performance-based contracts. The concept is simple. The company installs the lights at a cut-rate and then makes its money through energy savings. The new lights cut your power bills by 20 percent? The energy service company might take half of that. The service companies can also ask for a portion of the lower maintenance bills. Energy service companies have used these contracts for years, and the lighting component is built into overall contracts for better heating and cooling and other facilities. But you will likely hear more about them in the future because lighting is evolving rapidly. Like in solar panels, the vendors are using these mechanisms to get around the capital costs in replacing all those old fluorescent and incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs cost anywhere from $13 to over $100, depending on the intensity and quality of light. The price is coming down and performance is increasing, but the cost delta for the light itself still exists. Add up all the sockets in the building that would need to be upgraded and you can make the head of a facilities manager spin. Siemens Building Technologies has employed these contracts in deals with the state of Kentucky and the housing authority in Cleveland. Lighting, of course, is the fifth Beatle in clean tech. Investors and futurists love to chat about solar, wind and biofuels. Energy efficiency gets a lot less attention, but the potential for savings is significant. Lighting consumes 22 percent of the power in the U.S. after all.

Someday, downtown streets may be lit with bulbs the size of a Tic Tac. Luxim, a lighting start-up in Silicon Valley, has released a lamp--the elegantly named LIFI STA-40-01—that delivers as much or more light than a standard street light. The trick is that it consumes less power. The new lamp cranks out 120 lumens per watt. Top-end LEDs provide around 70 lumens per watt. High-intensity discharge (HID) lamps, which you see on light poles today, get about 90 lumens per watt. HIDs are also quite large, which means a heavier street light or spotlight. The bulb at the center of Luxim's lamps is only a centimeter or so long. It looks like a Christmas tree light. You can pick up the whole lamp with your hand. The company has talked about putting its LiFi lamps inside cathedrals and other public spaces to replace architectural lights. The lamp also lasts 30,000 hours, longer than HIDs, so the repairmen don't have to replace them as often. The company, which has received over $60 million in venture capital from Crosslink Capital and Sequoia Capital among others, initially concentrated on providing lamps for rear-projection TVs. With projection TVs fading away, the company shifted to tackle the larger, and potentially more lucrative, market for commercial lighting. Although it doesn’t get as much attention as solar or biofuels, lighting is expected to be one of the growth markets for green tech. Approximately 22 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. goes to lighting, according to an oft-quoted statistic from the Department of Energy, and light sources weren’t designed for efficiency. Incandescent bulbs only use around 5 percent of the energy fed into them for light: the rest gets converted into heat. (That’s why Easy Bake ovens work.) Light-emitting diodes are already replacing neon signs and some public light fixtures. LED maker Cree, for instance, is currently working with several cities to convert garages and municipal buildings to LEDs. Other LED companies to watch include Luminus Devices, a Boston-area company that landed $72 million recently, and the stealthy Kaai. Like LEDs, Luxim’s lights cost more than incumbent solutions, but the company (like LED makers) says the difference can be made up in lower replacement rates, lower maintenance costs, and lower power bills. Both LEDs and Luxim’s bulbs can also be remotely controlled by sensors to crank the amount of light coming out of them up or down, depending on foot traffic and other factors. How does Luxim’s bulb work? Energy is pumped from a puck into a small gas-filled chamber. The gas gets heated up, turns into a plasma and emits light. Crazy, eh? Check out this cinematic masterpiece for more.

There will be less heat coming out of your Dell PC in the future. The Round Rock, Texas-based PC giant has set a target of cutting the power consumption on its laptops and desktops by 25 percent in 2010, according to a report from Martin LaMonica at News.com. That will mean lower power bills for large companies—close to two-thirds of the power in PCs never gets used for a productive use, according to some estimates. A lot of that power gets converted to heat (reach around and touch the back of your computer). Idle time also consumes a lot of power. The company will also do the same for its servers. Last month, Michael Dell showed off a compact desktop that uses 70 percent less power than a regular minitower desktop and takes up 80 percent less space. Smaller computers, of course, also mean less plastic, which means less petroleum products consumed in production. So how will they reach this goal? PC makers didn’t really start concentrating on power consumption in earnest until a few years ago. Back in 2001, Intel and a bunch of other companies began to crank down power consumption in their chips, but mostly to curb heat. There was a fear that hot chips could cause servers to melt or malfunction. Since then, of course, electricity rates have climbed. While Intel and AMD have largely curbed processor power consumption, a lot of other components haven’t been retrofitted for lower power. Power supplies, that brick you plug into the wall to run a notebook, are historically somewhat inefficient. Several companies are trying to bring down the price on power supplies that can convert 75 percent or more of the power coming in from the wall into something that your PC uses. Microsoft and Verdiem, meanwhile, are working on software that lets IT managers optimally adjust power consumption remotely. Swapping out traditional hard drives, which have whirring motors, for flash memory will also help. Screens are notorious power suckers. Some companies are working on screens made from organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Right now, though, OLEDs are somewhat expensive. A few companies such as 3M are also looking at films that will let more of the light from LCDs through the screen, which in turn will improve brightness while curbing power consumption. And watch out for novel ideas from companies like Liquavista, one of the great company names in high tech. The Philips spin-out uses a technology called electrowetting. And for servers? Tubes filled with chilled water will start to become fixtures in server rooms. Some are also trying to harness the waste heat in server rooms for productive uses.

I talked a while ago about the elusiveness of the "Killer Amp," and ended, perhaps in a cop out, saying there isn't one for greentech, only the White House and Congress have the power to truly invigorate this market through policy, not a compelling new application at the consumer end. But maybe I was going about this the wrong way. Looking for analogies to the telecommunications industry, where killer apps grow on trees and ripen for picking every year before the first frost, perhaps missed the point. Telecom and energy markets aren't the same, and never will be. Utilities have never really responded to a market pull from new applications - there are no energy market equivalents to the iphone, video-on-demand, or even email. There is, in the end, only economics. So I gave up looking. Time passed. I did some reading, and got an idea. Two ideas, really. The first came via the Boston Globe, which recently summarized a range of proposals around reducing one's own personal carbon footprint - personal cap-and-trade or cap-and-share, among others. You get a carbon allowance from the government, and if you use less, thanks to your commitment to the bus and bike, you can sell your excess allotment on a regulated market to the Hummer-drivers in the 'burbs. The killer amp, in this scenario, is you, the consumer, now made aware of your energy choices with real specificity and consquences, and the ability to profit or lose individually in a market that ideally could be quite efficient. The second idea came from a group of futurists, funny little human curiosities who makes careers, or blogs, out of preposterous speculations in fine language. They talk of saving the planet through various methods of willed human extinction. You die, your children die, and that's it. The planet lives on without us, and the better for it.Really, that's a plan put forward by a logo-challenged organization called VHEMT that envisions a rather pleasant, voluntary extinction of the human species. As the population ebbs, kids grow past adolescence, our planet will begin to heave a global sigh of relief, recognizing this grand gesture as one meant for her. That last generation will walk among an Earth slowly retreating towards Eden, then take leave once and for all, with a brief apology for all the nuclear waste, PCBs, dammed rivers, torched rainforests, and acidified oceans we have left for her to clean up and make whole again. Having sat through Children of Men, which assumes such a global condition (minus the voluntary part), it's hard to grasp the pleasance of this. The movie was cast in such a sepulchral grey and suffused with such violence, I left the theater feeling covered in ash and a bit of blood. Thinking of VHEMT, the idea that all of humanity would go in for this to save a Mother Earth murdered by a wee number of hyperconsumers in America seems, to keep the Brit-tone going, daft. Nick Bostrom, of Oxford University has a better idea. Whole Brain Emulation. "Uploading" one's self into a vast mother computer that would not only hold us in an eternally virtualized state but allow us to continue to develop, take a next evolutionary step free of mortal limitations. The idea has been around for quite a while and is a darling of sci-fi writers, but with computing power increasing at the pace it does, the idea that we can in a computer system replicate/emulate a brain, i.e., a human "life," is approaching plausibility and has some of these same the killer amp is you folks thinking it's a way to end the human race's continued savaging of the environment while preserving our intellect. Think, Second Life, with better graphics, forever. Right, right, someone has to keep the power on. That's easy, the robots will. Someone has to fix the computers when they fail. Robots again. But who repairs the robots when they fail? Well, you just create a class of robots that come with whole brain emulation of the original robot repairpeople. Maybe it is plausible, just needs some time to season, get the price of terabyte RAM down far enough, million-core processors into production, and robots. Thinking it through, this is a game everyone has to play. You would need some special robots to hunt down and kill the people who refuse to die or stop having babies. You'd need a real global, coordinated plan for that, and some convincing PR, considering this is motivated by planetary goodwill. But inevitably Will Smith would show up and fight those robots and reveal this was no grand plan to save the world at all. No, it was a plan hatched by a ruthless corporate megalomaniac who just wanted to sell more robots! Personal cap-and-trade. The Killer Amp. It's a safe start.