Finally, a light bulb that can get rid of without worrying about environmental hazards. Eden Park Illumination, a University of Illinois spin-out, has created what it calls microplasma lights that will produce 40 lumens of light or more per watt. In these lights, two glass or plastic panels create a sandwich. Inside the sandwich sits an aluminum mesh dotted with microcavities filled with phosphors. When a current is passed through the sandwich, the phospors get excited and light is generated. You’re looking at a prototype in the picture. (Eden Park will present more on its technology at our Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity conference taking place on November 17 and 18 in New York City. But that's all that's in the light -- aluminum, phosphors and glass. There's no mercury. "Adding mercury would increase the lumen output but the intent is to make it fully recyclable," said CEO Philip Warner. Like plasma TVs, plasma lights can be both large and thin. Imagine a wall covered in panels that emanate light. (Effects with color and brightness, depending on what the customer wants, can also be tuned.) LEDs produce more lumens per watt than plasma lights, but you’d need several LEDs in an array to get this kind of wall-of-light effect. Other companies are trying to make similar lights out of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and capacitors, but Warner claims that plasmas will have superior performance and lifetimes. Plasma lights can go for 40,000 hours. Eden will show off its lights at large trade shows next year and come out with lights commercially in 2010. Universal Display, which will also be at the conference, makes OLED lights and no doubt will beg to differ. Lighting remains one of the growth sectors for VC investing. Approximately 22 percent of the power consumed in the U.S. goes into lighting and many basic technologies are decades old. Compact fluorescents, which were the last huge innovation, were devised in the 1970s.

Automated control over your household appliances just moved a step closer. Tendril, which has devised a Zigbee-based system for monitoring and controlling power consumption inside homes and buildings, has successfully integrated its system with the OpenWay Advanced Metering Infrastructure from Itron. Tendril will outline its technology at our Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity Conference in New York on November 18. What's this mean? In the future, utilities will be able to use the OpenWay system to communicate to the appliances inside your house without a separate broadband link. This, ideally, will lower the cost and difficulty of implementing demand response systems. Itron, of course, is one of the big meter companies. Tendril is one of a number of companies building software and hardware for linking freezers, dryers and other household appliances into a network for energy efficiency. Consumers can set their own levels and controls. If they don't want the air conditioner to ever let the house get above 68 degrees, so be it. But those that accept controls from the utility, or set tighter controls on themselves, will see benefits in lower utility bills. You can even cycle that electricity-gobbling freezer off and on in your garage to save power without hurting your food. Tendril's meter also glows red when you start to consume more power than you really want to, a nice visual cue. See photo. It's green there, so you aren't burning ridiculous amounts of power. While there are a number of companies plying this market, Tendril has clawed its way toward the top of the pile. it already has alliances with 20 utilities. Fifteen of the utilities are engaged in lab tests with the Boulder-based company, four are preparing field pilots and another will kick off a commercial rollout to consumers in the next few weeks. Collectively, these these utilities serve 56 million customers, CEO Adrian Tuck told us earlier this year. Tuck was one of the early pioneers on Zigbee. Some, though, claim that the Zigbee's hold may wane. GainSpan, an Intel spin-off, has created WiFi chips that can do the same thing in the same power profile. WiFi is easier for Taiwanese equipment manufacturers to accommodate, says Vijay Parmar, GainSpan's CEO. Bosh, says Zigbee backers. Parmar will also speak at the conference. Should be a good debate.

Lighting. It's not as sexy as electric cars, solar thermal plants or biofuels, But it's a key component of greentech. Kaj de Daas, chiarman of Philips Lighting North America, provided an overview of the lighting market at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference today and here's what he said.

• $75 billion: the overall size of the global lighting market. The U.S. accounts for 20 percent of the total. (Philips does about $3.5 billion a year.)

• 52: The average number of light sockets in a U.S. home. Put another way, there are 4 billion screw-in light sockets in this grand land of ours. Although the U.S. is the largest market, it's the slowest when it comes to adopting new technologies.

• 40: The average number of sockets in a home in the Netherlands.

• 5, now 18: The average number of sockets in the recent past (5) in a home in Shanghai compared to the present.

• 2012: The year, in some nations, that traditional incandescent bulbs will no longer be sold.

• 45 lumens per watt: That's the minimum level of efficiency he'd like to see mandated.

• 5 milligrams: The amount of mercury in a compact florescent.

• 3: The number of universities in Shanghai that have well-regarded departments in lighting. If you want to know why Philips is conducting more research there, that's the answer.

• $1 to $3.50: The average price of LED chips. It's too high, den Daas said. Technically, companies can make LED bulbs that can dim and put out as much light as a traditional bulb. Economically, it's just not feasible right now.

• The Whole Enchilada: LEDs can last 50,000 hours. Thus, light bulb makers will lose their replacement market when LEDs go mainstream. The solution? Philips is shifting to making entire lamps and light fixtures. "I need ot offer something big to offset replacements," he said.

• $17: The amount of kerosene bought by households in Ghana to fuel lamps. Philips has started to sell cheap LED lamps in that country to reduce the danger and fossil fuel consumption presented by these lights.

• November 5: The date that Philips will release a new line of LED lamps for the hotel industry.

One of the reasons the PC market took off so rapidly in the 1980s and '90s was that everyone seemed to quickly know their place in the world. Intel shuttled off memory and focused almost exclusively on processors and chipsets. PC makers in turn stopped making chipsets and other components to focus on logistics and cost cutting. Networking people stuck to networking. The world went horizontal, companies carved out tiny niches, and the whole market grew. The same forces are starting to work their magic in the smart grid world and will likely turn "smart grid" from an amorphous, catch-all category to something that's easier to grasp. EnerNoc, one of the first smart grid companies, for instance, started out as a full-service provider of systems for automatically cutting back power consumption. Now, and increasingly in the future, EnerNoc is going to function more like a software and services company, said T.J. Glauthier, a director at the company during an open house at Foundation Capital yesterday. The company will provide demand management services to industrial clients and this middleware stack, as it were, will operate on top of equipment based around standardized protocols and hardware. In a sense, it will become a Salesforce.com or SAP of power consumption for industrialists. Similarly, eMeter can be looked at as a software-as-service (SaaS) company. And who will make this industry-standard hardware? Silver Spring Networks, says Scott Lang, the company's CEO. Silver Spring aims to be the Cisco of the grid (assuming Cisco doesn't decide to become the Cisco of the grid itself.). Silver Spring makes circuit boards that can turn regular electricity, gas and water meters into smart meters that monitor the use of resources in a home. The company also makes routers that aggregates information from various buildings by neighborhoods and routes it to utilities. The company has a deal with PG&E: By this time next year, Silver Spring will have installed one million smart meters in PG&E territory. But horizontalization will work its magic there too to segregate companies into even smaller niches. While Silver Spring makes a whole panoply of equipment for connecting utilities to homes, you might see them inch up the stack, Lang said, spending more time on routers and less time on the access points at the home. Someone else -- contract manufacturers and embedded board makers in Taiwan -- might take over the home meter market. The company in fact already licenses the designs of smart meter boards to third parties. Smart grid companies, or at least some of them, will become power providers. EnerNoc, for example, already has 2 GW of power under management. It can throttle back that much power if needed. (Companies that agree to have EnerNoc control their power consumption of course get discounts and lower power bills for participating.) Because utilties now trust these systems, they count that 2 GW as a power resource.

Zeta Communities, which wants to build inexpensive, modular homes, has just landed a round of funding and is working on its first prototype, according to chairman Marc Porat. The company has been working on a 17-unit townhome development in San Francisco that it hopes will cost $165 a square foot to build, cheap for around here. Investors include Northpoint Capital. The company is run by Porat's sister Naomi. Entrepreneurs have touted green buildings and building products for the past few years, but the momentum finally seems to be peaking. Michelle Kaufmann Designs a few months ago landed a round of funding, according to sources. SG Blocks showed off a home made from old shipping containers at West Coast Green recently. (You read the article -- now see the film!) A VC firm, Navitas Capital, was formed specifically to put money into green building companies. Meanwhile, product companies like Integrity Block and CalStar Cement (founded by Marc Porat) have attracted investors too. What is driving it? For one thing, VCs have probably become exhausted flinging millions of dollars into solar and biofuel deals. That's just got to get dull after a while. Second, investors are paying more attention to efficiency plays: companies that can cut demand for electricity. It is far easier to cut electricity consumption after all than produce it in a green manner. If you talk to utility execs, nearly every conversation begins with efficiency. Buildings consume 51 percent of the energy in the U.S.; 39 percent of the energy in the U.S. goes to run air conditioners, lights and other systems while 12 percent gets consumed in constructions. Air conditioning and heating accounts for 16 percent of the total energy consumed annually in this country.

It's the biggest technological changes in bricks since the Canaanites, according to Marc Porat. CalStar Cement, the somewhat secretive green building products company (which was revealed in this article late last year) will soon start shipping a green brick that requires almost no energy to produce. It is the company's first product, says founder Marc Porat. "Bricks have an enormous energy footprint. [Brickmakers] take clay and burn it," he said during an open house at Foundation Capital. Foundation invested in the company and on Monday showed off some of its portfolio companies as well as its new, exceedingly green office building. Instead of burning clay, CalStar will take fly ash, the particulate matter that ordinarily leaves smokestacks to enter the atmosphere, add some extra chemicals and make bricks. Rather than requiring high temperature cooking, the chemicals sort of congeal into a solid, hard mass, similar to the way the power in packages of instant pudding turns into an elegant, delicious desert when milk is added. The CalStar process will reduce the energy content in bricks by over 90 percent, according to CalStar. Porat also dished up the familiar factoids about green buildings. Buildings account for 51 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S.: 39 percent of the energy goes to operations while 12 percent is consumed in building the structures themselves. 40 percent of the energy used in operations is consumed by air conditioning and heating; put another way, heaters and air conditioners account for 16 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. Transportation only accounts for around 26 percent. Not only will this help reduce CO2 emissions, it will even further date one of the most bloated epics of all time: "The Ten Commandments" starring Charlton Heston. I love the way Edward G. Robinson barks out to John Derek, "You can't make bricks without straw." If you use that clip in your advertising, Marc, consider yourself in my debt. Making building materials with near-room temperature chemical reactions is similar to the strategy taken by Serious Materials, the green drywall guys, and Integrity Block, which has a compressed earth building block. No surprise there. Porat is the chairman of Serious and Serious' CEO sits on the Integrity board. Although Integrity says that it's product will cost less than traditional cement bricks, the other companies plan to be within striking distance of prices of traditional products. When the LEED benefits are added, the price delta is less of an obstacle. Studies have shown that LEED certified buildings gain value faster and can rent for larger amounts, so reluctance is fading. CalStar will come out with cement forms made from a large amount of fly-ash after the bricks emerge, Porat said. Traditional cement makers now use some fly-ash in their cement but they can only add a limited amount before the integrity of the cement is compromised. Why don't traditional building equipment makers hire their own chemists and come wipe all of these guys out? He claims it is the innovator's dilemma. Large cement makers have invested too much in their existing processes to turn away from them. Investors will punish them if they try to make a transition to green products and it takes longer than expected. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it appears that green building is shaping up to be a strong market. Many cities are baking in LEED guidelines into their building codes, said Foundation partner Paul Holland. Thus, in a growing number of jurisdictions green products like this that help reduce the energy content of structures will be mandatory. So it is written, Yul Brynner might say.

Because of big screen TVs and home computers, utilities are seeing another peak power problem evolve. Traditional peak power hours -- the time during the day when power demand shoots up -- run from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm, according to Andrew Tang, senior director, smart energy web, at Pacific Gas & Electric. Air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home. On some unfortunate days, brownouts occur. But utilities are now seeing a second surge after the 7:00 pm drop in demand; it runs from about 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm, he said. That's when people head toward the electronic entertainment devices. (See: Atomization of the American family.) "It is so much a peak as it is a plateau," he said, adding that "8:00 pm is kind of a recent phenomenon." The 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm plateau is also "reasonably close" to the 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm peak. This new geographical monument on the daily power consumption curve, of course, is becoming a problem that utilities will have to solve. Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition. Approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. (Tang will also speak at our Greentech Innovations End-to-End Electricity conference taking place November 17 and 18.) Some of the efforts to fix this are already underway. Panasonic and other TV manufacturers are all working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma TVs while Intel and the PC crew are cranking down computer power consumption. Sharp, in fact, showed off a 26-inch prototype LCD TV that consumes 40 watts of power and runs on solar panels at Ceatec in Tokyo recently. Utilities are also figuring out ways to deliver their own resources more effectively. In California, for instance, plug-in hybrid cars would allow PG&E to better deploy energy from wind farms. Wind blows at night here often. If demand doesn't exist, it gets dumped. If thousands or even millions of drivers had their cars plugged in, they could refuel on cheap power in the wee hours. Plug-in cars, however, could also create problems with peak power, he added. Most people will try to plug-in as soon as they get home or at work. Thus, the utility is working with companies to regulate charging time. You might plug in at 6:30 pm, but actual charging might not begin until after midnight. Tang remains a bit of a skeptic of using plug-ins to provide power to the grid during peak times. The grid simply wasn't designed to accommodate power delivery from millions of comparatively small batteries. To work effectively, parking structures will have to aggregate power from a number of car batteries and even then it will remain a challenge. And here's another issue with plug-in cars. Consumers will have a natural tendency to plug-in wherever they go to top-off their batteries. Car makers, though, are worried that the large number of charges that will inflict on a battery -- close to 1,000 times a year if you plug in at home and work -- will prematurely age the battery. "Car makers hate the concept" of cars feeding the grid, he said.