White Room

The ambitious Austin, TX-based Pecan Street project is piloting a number of green neighborhood technologies, but the real challenge will be getting these systems to talk to each other to reduce energy consumption and peak loads.

The manufacturing sector could drastically lower the cost of solid state lighting, the same way the price of the semiconductor has dropped in the last few decades.

A new generation of photovoltaic streetlamps was debuted at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which promise 98% efficiency in converting stored energy to light.

Researchers at Cornell have developed a silicon device to speed up optical data transmission. The device requires little energy and works by splitting up the data into pulses, which it outputs at 270 gigabits per second.