The Empire State Building -- one of the favorite places in the world to try to impale strangers by tossing change off the observation deck -- is getting a major retrofit, according to the Environmental Leader. Energy efficiency will constitute $20 million of the overall $500 million modernization project for the iconic building. Ideally, it will result in $4.4 million in energy savings annually. The payback on green building projects like this are typically faster than in solar, where payback can take eight or more years. Some of the improvements include: 6,500 thermal windows, individual power management consoles for tenants and a retrofit of the chiller and ventilation controls. (Air conditioning is one of the big power consumers in the U.S. -- read here for an overview of several startups in the field. The retrofit in part is being orchestrated by Johnson Controls, one of the old guard in building maintenance and management. When startups talk about companies doing more "traditional" technologies, they often mention Johnson. But the company is not lying down and over the next few years could become one of the major purchasers of startups.

Ember, which specializes in ZigBee chips and other wireless networking devices, said it raised $8 million more today. Since 2001, it has raised $89 million. Polaris Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, WestLB Mellon Asset Management (formerly West AM) and strategic partners such as Chevron Technology Ventures and Stata Venture Partners participated in the round. Earlier investors include STMicroelectronics, Hitachi and MIT. On one hand, it's an unvarnished positive. Who doesn't like money? ZigBee and remote wireless networking has also taken longer to take off than anticipated. Back in the early part of the decade, ZigBee chips and chips on competing protocols were championed as remote sensors for "extroverted computing." (Disclosure: That is a  meme I made up and tried to popularize. It flopped big time.) The devices could be used to monitor wildlife, or man security cameras in your home. The public yawned. Now, however, ZigBee has a reason to live: the smart meter and smart home. By putting ZigBee warts on energy-hungry appliances like dryers, homeowners can automatically, autonomically and easily control power consumption better. The market for 802.15.4/ZigBee devices is expected to reach as high as 292 million units in 2012, up from about 7 million units in 2007, according to research firm, In-Stat. On the other hand, $89 million is a lot to sink into a company that makes what are rapidly becoming commodity chips that will also be produced by large, established manufacturers. Getting chip companies off the ground has become increasingly difficult during the decade because of the inherent costs of chip design and competition. Talk to VCs: most of them have veered away from chips. It's just not fun anymore. The total also gets close to that "magic" $100 million mark. It's tough to quantify, but after a company raises $100 million, you begin to hear skepticism about it. Like, "what are they doing with that money?" Again, it's tough to put your finger on, but Montalvo Systems, E-Ink, Alien, and other chip/hardware companies went from hot to not as they neared and passed that funding milestone. Ember isn't there yet, and it's in a hot market, but these are all factors that should be taken into account.

First, hats off to John Carey of BusinessWeek for breaking the story on the controversy between Calera, the green cement company funded by Khosla Ventures, and Ken Caldeira, a well-regarded and notable climate scientist with the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The debate is thus: Calera says it can make cement out of seawater and carbon dioxide. The process would curb energy use because cement production is incredibly energy intensive and sequesters carbon dioxide. Caldeira says the vague statements don't add up. Instead, Calera may just be taking calcium carbonate, the principal ingredient in cement, putting it through chemical reactions with other materials like magnesium hydroxide to get magnesium oxide, calcium and carbon dioxide. The company then likely remixes to get calcium carbonate. "They are just putting back what they started out with," he said. "I think all they are doing is taking alkaline minerals and returning them back to be carbonate materials." Calera, Caldeira noted, built its prototype plant at a magnesium oxide factory. MIxing seawater, carbon dioxide and heat, he added, typically ends up as water vapor, salt and carbon dioxide. Sources, however, told me a while back that Calera creates its carbonates through metabolic engineering, i.e., microrganisms. The organisms consume carbon dioxide and are able to produce, directly or indirectly, carbonates. Founder Brent Constantz has said in interviews that the process mimics marine cement, which is produced by coral extracting calcium and magnesium from seawater. Calera, in other words, might have figured out a way to harness this process for industrial purposes. Like coral and other marine animals, the mineralization process can occur at somewhat normal temperatures and pressures. Constantz is also an expert in biomineralization. Metabolic engineering is in its infancy but drawing considerable interest. Algae companies are growing algae through carbon dioxide. Abalone shells are made out of calcium carbonate: the abalone accomplishes by secreting specific proteins. MIT researchers earlier today showed off a battery cathode that is coated with carbon nanotubes. Startup Climos has raised money to experiment with ways to fix carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with plankton. Is this the answer to the controversy? Possibly. Or not. Turning carbon dioxide into cement would still require massive feeder ponds, so Calera may not be scalable. There is also no confirmed evidence that this is what they are doing. And most metabolic engineering companies are in lab experiments with their magic microbes at the moment. The company doesn't comment in much detail on its process. Calera may also be exaggerating its effect on greenhouse gases. Its process might produce less carbon dioxide than standard cement, but may not cause a net reduction in atmospheric CO2. Researchers are also looking at other ways to produce similar minerals. At Harvard, researchers are examining whether hydrochloric acid, produced from hydrogen harvested from the "green" electrolysis of water, drizzled over silicate rocks could work, or grinding silicate materials. (Startup Carbon Sciences turns carbon dioxide into carbonates with heat. The company, however, readily admits it is a carbon sequestration play that will rely on greenhouse gas regulations.) UPDATE: A patent application surfaced in January with Constantz name on it that indicates that the company may just be working with ordinary chemical processes after all. See here. One section reads:

[0049]In normal sea water 93% of the dissolved CO.sub.2 is in the form of bicarbonate ions (HCO.sub.3.sup.-) and 6% is in the form of carbonate ions (CO.sub.3.sup.-2). When calcium carbonate precipitates from normal sea water, CO.sub.2 is released. Above pH 10.33, greater than 90% of the carbonate is in the form of carbonate ion, and no CO.sub.2 is released during the precipitation of calcium carbonate. While the pH of the water employed in methods may range from 5 to 14 during a given precipitation process, in certain embodiments the pH is raised to alkaline levels in order to drive the precipitation of carbonate compounds, as well as other compounds, e.g., hydroxide compounds, as desired. In certain of these embodiments, the pH is raised to a level which minimizes if not eliminates CO.sub.2 production during precipitation, causing dissolved CO.sub.2, e.g., in the form of carbonate and bicarbonate, to be trapped in the carbonate compound precipitate. In these embodiments, the pH may be raised to 10 or higher, such as 11 or higher.

It's a long application and most of it goes over my head, but it sounds like they are manipulating the pH balance to maximize carbonates and minimize off-gassing. Would something like this work? Or would would you just have with salt and CO2? Calera has not returned calls for comment.

Google has always kept its server technology under wraps. In 2006, I begged to interview the company on its server designs, especially how the company tied down the hard drive with Velcro. The Velcro makes for an easy swap. I also wanted to interview the guy who ran the crash cart, the trolley with spare parts the technicians rolled around. They said no. The search giant, however, showed off its server design to reporters today. And one big surprise: The servers each come with their own 12-volt battery to ensure power stays on, says News.com's Stephen Shankland. Shankland writes more:

The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers -- each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

It may sound geeky, but a number of attendees -- the kind of folks who run data centers packed with thousands of servers for a living -- were surprised not only by Google's built-in battery approach, but by the fact that the company has kept it secret for years. Ben Jai [Google's server architect] said in an interview that Google has been using the design since 2005 and now is in its sixth or seventh generation of design.

"'It was our Manhattan Project," Jai said of the design.

They work. In the first carbon auctions conducted last September by RGGI Inc., the administrative body for the East Coast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the auction yielded 12.6 million allowances for $3.07 per allowance, according to World Energy, which provides the underlying software and services for the auction. A second auction in December yielded 31.5 million allowances at $3.38 per allowance. At another auction on March 23, 31.5 million allowances were auctioned at $3.51 per allowance. The March auction also saw the sale of 2.2 million 2012 vintage allowances for $3.05 per allowance. In all, the the March auction raised $117 million for energy efficiency and other projects. (The money goes to the ten participating states.) These kind of results are helping bolster the argument for cap-and-trade programs over carbon taxes, said Phil Adams, World's president. RGGI is an example of cap and trade. Representatives from several governments have already contacted World about auctions. People who helped implement RGGI now work in the Obama administration. Cap and trade has an advantage over taxes in that the price is less arbitrary, he argued. (Canada, Al Gore and others, though, say a tax is the way to go.) World also conducts energy auctions. Manufacturers and other large organizations state what they want to buy and independent power producers bid on the deals. Buyers can see the identity of the sellers, but the sellers don't know who else is bidding. They just see the latest quotes. Despite the fact that the contracts can total well into the millions, you see a lot of the same psychology you do on eBay. The bidding will proceed on a moderate basis until the last minutes of the auction, which last an hour. Then it plummets as sellers try to undercut each other. Some sellers have multiple log-ins to better react to incoming bids from competitors. Buyers are not obligated to buy any of the offers "but we close almost every deal," said Adams.

The battle over regulating power consumption in TVs is just getting cranked up in California. One of the interesting issues will be to see how the different stats and arguments match up. The California Energy Commission says that TVs and the black and silver boxes that go with them (set-top boxes, DVRs) consume about 10 percent of household power. The total has grown in part because of the increasing size of TVs. To curb it, the CEC wants standards that would lead to TVs that consume 33 percent less power than they do now by 2011 and 49 percent by 2013. The Consumer Electronics Industry, however,  is against the regulations and says that TVs only consume 4 percent to 5 percent of household power. The CEA, though, does not include DVRs, DVDs and set-top boxes. Overall, the CEA says consumer electronics gobbles up 12 percent of power in the home. That 12 percent figure includes PCs. In reality, the two sides might be closer than they think. PC makers have managed to cut power consumption considerably and a lot of consumers have shifted to notebooks. In an even comparison, the CEC and the CEA might be within a few percentage points of each other. Still, it should be an interesting argument. Which brings us to the big argument: Should TV power consumption be regulated? CEC has technology and history on it side. TV makers are already working on ways to reduce power consumption; manufacturers should easily be able to make the first set of standards it has issued, the CEC has said. History also works in its favor. Simply put, manufacturers don't push energy efficiency until required. Appliance makers didn't push efficiency until the state passed regulations. The Detroit auto regulators improved mileage in cars until the CAFE standards were slackened in the 80s. The regulations on appliances did not kill innovation. On the other hand, the car makers dug themselves into a deep hole without regulation. The CEA, however, can argue that voluntary standards like EnergyStar work and will encourage innovation. If they can produce some sales stats that people are gravitating toward these kind of TVs, it can be argued that the market is doing its trick. Another issue, though, will be utility rebates. If efficient TVs are selling because of utility rebates, regulation might be a better bet. What's the point of using money from public-private institutions to get consumers to buy the "better" products from manufacturers that they would have to make if regulations were passed. But rebates work to get people to buy, and that's the point, isn't it? Again, it will be worth watching. What happens in California provide a model.

Everyone generally knows that data centers are the big energy hogs in the building universe. In some data centers, nearly half of the power goes to air conditioning (which counts toward power consumed by a building and its operations). Put another way, that means that the air conditioners use as much power as the computer systems (which can be counted under another energy budget). But what are the second worse types of facilities? Probably scientific labs, says Lynn Olechnowicz, a senior associate at Perkins + Will, an architectural firm known for LEED and energy efficient designs. Labs typically need to be equipped with fume hoods, which suck away chemicals or loose biological material. "All of the air is conditioned air" as a result, she said. To reduce power, building owner or lab managers need to adopt control systems that will only condition air when necessary, rather than all of the time. Air conditioning accounts for a substantial portion of the outrageous amount of energy consumed in running buildings. It ranks up there with heating and lighting. And, like heating and lighting, large gains in efficiency can likely be made over the next few years by replacing old technology with new, efficient products. Air conditioning, in fact, has knocked out waste heat as my favorite topic. If anything, it makes me a fascinating conversationalist. Olechnowicz, by the way, will be one of the speakers at our Green Building Summit coming in June.