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.

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.

LEDs are coming, and iWatt says it can make them a little cheaper.

The company has devised a driver for LEDs that effectively lets a manufacturer eliminate another component called an opto-coupler. Reducing components reduces prices. Bridgelux, a larger and better known LED company, is already marching down the that path. Bridgelux came out with a packaging system earlier this year that ultimately lead to LED bulbs that cost $26 dollars in the not too distant future. It is not clear if iWatt can have the same level of impact. It's part costs 98 cents in quantities of 1,000. Another open question: will iWatt be able to survive the notoriously difficult market for semiconductors or will they get out-competed by established companies hawking the same thing? Far fewer chip start-ups make it out of the early stages than they used to.

Still, any price cut in LEDs helps.

Both companies, interestingly, have received investments from VantagePoint Venture Partners, which tends to pair investments. The firm also has investments in Tendril (home energy  management) and Adura Technologies (commercial building energy management.) Shotgun wedding anyone? Just a thought.

Although LEDs only represent a fraction of the market, they will likely come on strong in the next decade. Australia, Canada, the EU, the U.S. and others are phasing out incandescent bulbs. LEDs are also improving in quality and the price is declining.

The component, by the way, operates in quasi-resonant mode and employs adaptive gate drive control, in case you were wondering. 

Boston has joined Cree's LED City Program and put LED streetlights in Boston Common.

LEDs use less than half of the power of conventional streetlights, but more importantly they rarely need to be replaced. In a more extensive trial, Anchorage, Alaska replaced 16,000 light fixtures, about one-fourth of the streetlights in town, with LEDs. The swap should save the city about $360,000 a year in electricity, judging by current prices. The city will likely also save a similar amount of money in lower maintenance costs. LEDs last longer than traditional sodium lights so fewer maintenance crews are required. Toronto, Austin, Ann Arbor and Raleigh, North Carolina have already launched municipal LED lighting projects with Cree. Maintenance is one of the big reasons that LEDs will take off in commercial and municipal settings first. Starbucks is putting them in.

LEDs can also be easily networked. In Quebec, technicians have rigged smart streetlights up with sensors to allow police to detect when accidents occur. Oslo has paired networked streetlights with applications for pedestrian safety.

San Francisco has put up networked LED streetlights on one block in the Tenderloin, an area frequented by drug dealers. Weirdly, it was pushed as an idea to save energy. It's not a neighborhood where you would ever want to dim the streetlights, even in the daytime.

Johnson Controls will informally refer to itself as the IBM of green building and in many ways the analogy is apt. Both companies have extensive histories. The Milwaukee-based company just announced another quarterly dividend, the latest in a streak that stretches back to 1887.

And, like IBM, the company is pervasive in its field. Johnson is one of the principal contractors behind the retrofit of the Empire State Building. It also employs 800 LEED-accredited employees. Thus, what the company does will have some impact on the market. (It also received a $299 million grant to develop transportation batteries earlier this year.)

We recently spoke to Don Albinger, vice president of renewable energy solutions. Here's what's on his mind:

• Performance-based contracts continue to gain popularity, particularly with public sector companies like schools or government agencies. In these agreements, a contractor performs a retrofit and then guarantees certain reductions in energy consumption, etc. If they miss, the owner gets a refund. The contracts are similar to energy services contracts, in which the contractor gets paid through a portion of the energy saved, but there are differences.

• Industrial solar steam is taking off. In these systems, heat from the sun is exploited to run industrial boilers. "It is about a 40 percent efficient process. Solar thermal has advantages we need to capitalize on," he said.

• Although biomass has been gathering interest in some parts of the country, it is being challenged by the relatively low price of natural gas.

• One of the next waves in the industry will involve around tying building energy management systems to other enterprise applications. HVAC will be linked to building security applications and both will be integrated into financial and other applications. This will make energy savings and efficiency more dynamic and easier to measure. The company worked on a project like this with the state of Missouri, which has helped cut millions out of operating budgets.

• And of course, customers looking at ways to cut power bills should always think about reducing consumption before putting up solar panels.

"You've got to stop the building from losing energy before you start putting in new capital equipment," he said.

Two days after California passed energy efficiency regulations for TV, government officials in Ontario say they might go the same direction.

"We're always looking at ways we need to improve standards with appliances," Energy Minister Gerry Phillips told the Star. "Over the next few months we'll be looking at whether we need to set some additional new standards."

Whether and how quickly another government might follow California was one of the big questions following the 5–0 vote by the California Energy Commission to adopt regulations that set standards for energy efficiency. Under the new California rules, TVs measuring 58 inches or less will have to become 33 percent more efficient by 2011 and 49 percent more efficent by 2013.

The annoucement likely already sent members of the Consumer Electronics Association to Expedia to book flights to Canada's home of greentech. The California regulations came after a long, hard battle.

Many TVs already meet that standard. Panasonic already makes plasma TVs, for instance, that consume 142 watts. Hitachi and others have also begun to show off technologies – like automatic shut-off and TVs with energy efficient lighting schemes – that could lead to TVs that consume less than 100 watts. In fact, 1,000 TVs already meet the standard, the CEC pointed out.

True, but it's the unintended consequences that scare manufacturers. Integrating a hard drive into a TV so that it can record TV shows invariably will increase power consumption. However, a TV with a built-in DVR might consume less energy than TVs and DVRs sold separately. The regulations, thus, could increase power consumption. Energy efficiency can also add to the cost of TVs.

Cash For Caulkers, now officially called Homestar, is in front of the president, according to the The New York Times.

“It’s one of the top things he’s looking at," said Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff told the paper.

The $23 billion dollar program would essentially provide incentives to homeowners to weatherize and energy retrofit their homes. John Doerr has become the public face for the program, but it emerged from Steve Cowell and Matt Golden, the founder of Recurve (formerly Sustainable Spaces). Matt told us about his work a few weeks ago and the clever caulkers name, but forgot to get around to it. Sorry about that.

"We looked at the state of the construction industry (scary, 17%+ unemployment) and the opportunity for job creation and for hitting our climate goals in retrofitting," Golden wrote us earlier this month. 

Housing is a top priority in the White House. Joe Biden has already launched the Recovery through Retrofit program to make home retrofits easier to finance. It's also no coincidence that Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, formerly run by Department of Energy Secretary Steve Chu, is the nation's premier building energy efficiency research center.

With carbon cap and trade looking like a next year issue, don't be surprised to see energy efficiency bills carved out of the main legislation and passed on their own. This is one of the few green issues that enjoys bipartisan support. It saves energy and creates jobs that are difficult to outsource to China. Someone has to go into the attic. If both programs pass, there could be a stampede to Lowe's.

Just by coincidence, Golden has been writing a series of articles on weatherization and energy efficiency on our website. Here are his two most recent posts.