Forgot to put this in the last post about UC Berkeley trying to get undergrads into research.

The university will try to cut its power consumption by 50 percent within four years, according to S. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering at the university.

Berkeley in some ways is the national center for energy efficiency. Art Rosenfeld was a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) when he began the push to get the state to force appliance makers to curb the power their products consumed. His work has saved several billion. LBL is also the home of the Center for Building Science. Energy Secretary Steve Chu ran LBL before his current job.

2030. It's one of those years you see goals pegged on a lot these days. California, for instance, wants to update the building code so that new commercial buildings will be net zero on energy by 2030.

Now, the IEEE, the large and influential standards body, has set forth a program entitled IEEE P2030 to come up with standards for smart grid interoperability and two-way communication.

2030 is not when the first planning meetings will end. It is, ideally, when these things can be implemented.

The first P2030 meetings will take place at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara on June 3 through 5. Turn right at the Marriott and keep going. It's the blue building on the right.

General Electric execs have estimated that 41 gigawatts could be wrung out of the grid just by making it 5 percent more efficient.

If you learned that someone had invented a car that runs on water, you’d probably be thrilled. But if you found out that the car consumes 50 gallons of water for every mile driven, you might wonder if it’s worth it.

Of course any vehicle that requires 50 gallons of any liquid fuel is a nonstarter given the volume and weight of the fuel, but for the purposes of this thought exercise the issue is using up all that water.

Something very like this scenario is rapidly becoming a reality, and is even mandated by law. It turns out that producing ethanol from corn uses an awful lot of water, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires the U.S. to produce 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually by 2015.

A study by researchers from Rice University, Clarkson University and Missouri University of Science and Technology found that it takes 500 to 4,000 liters of water to grow feedstock to produce one liter of ethanol, depending on the crop and where it’s grown.

Given an 800-to-1 water-fuel ratio and a car that gets 16 miles per gallon of ethanol (ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline, which means lower mileage), you’d use 50 gallons of water per mile. This is the case for Nebraska-grown corn. You’d use 23 gallons per mile for Iowa corn and 115 gallons per mile for Texas sorghum.

The 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol mandated by 2015 is only about 10 percent of the transportation fuel the U.S. is likely to use that year, but producing it will require the equivalent of 44 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. in 2007. Agriculture today accounts for 80 percent of the water consumed in the U.S., and our freshwater supply is already under a lot of pressure.

The water-use scenario is very different for cellulosic feedstocks, particularly drought-resistant plants like miscanthus that require far less water. In theory, many types of grasses can be grown without any irrigation.

This makes efforts to come up with economical and scalable cellulosic biofuel production all the more urgent. Sorting out the land-use issues around biofuels is challenging enough without worrying about water.

Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

The short answer to that question is "yes," says Bruce King, author and structural engineer. (Bruce will also speak at our Green Building Symposium in Menlo Park, Calif. on June 11.)

“It’s documented,” he said.

Tt is tough to trace the lower number of sick days to fewer VOCs or other chemicals in the air, however. Instead, it’s because there is typically more natural light and less air conditioning. In short, they are comfortable, inviting places to work. Conventional buildings indirectly encourage people to work at home more often.

It stands to make sense. Larry Vertal, the senior strategist at AMD and its green chief, told us last year that its LEED Platinum Lone Star campus in Texas has become a recruiting tool.

“It is one of the soft things that many companies don’t understand but it is crucial in the retention and moral of employees,” Vertal said. “It is amazing how the highest talented people will grill you about your sustainability practices in job interviews. … We’ve seen a lot more interest in it, so it really does matter.”

Free. The word has defined American culture for over 300 years. (And it sounds so much more dramatic than "The Land of the Brave, Now 10 Percent Off!)

And to curb household energy consumption, utilities may some day give out free energy assessments and possibly some level of retrofits, according to Jim Parks, who runs energy efficiency programs for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

Speaking at an event held by TechCoire in Rancho Cordova last night, Parks suggested that one way utilities could get consumers past their ordinary state of inertia is to organize street-wide or neighborhood-wide assessments. Announce that energy efficiency experts would be there on particular day and that they can come into assess your home for free. Who would refuse that? Having the assessment alone could motivate some consumers to fix up their home. (See an energy assessment video here.)

Conceivably, if the retrofits could save enough energy over a given period of time, utilities could come up with a program with help from a state agency to pay for some repairs itself.

Again, it's not here yet, but expect to hear more ideas like this. Energy efficiency has become the chief topic in the green world and it won't likely fade away any day soon.