Demand response systems ask companies to ease off on their energy use at peak times to relieve the power grid, and are gaining in popularity with rising energy costs, climate change and infamous blackouts.

Operation Save New York, a demand response program administered by Energy Curtailment Specialists, Inc. has gotten 20 Marriot hotels in New York State to participate in the program. To adjust their energy levels, the hotels may turn down lights, reduce cooling and heating in unused areas, run emergency generators and turn off non-critical equipment. Operation New York members receive notice a day prior to when they'll need to lighten their loads.

The program participants receive payments in return for agreeing to reduce their load when the electric grid is overloaded and in trouble.

Energy Curtailment Specialists also just signed a contract with utility KCP&L to provide demand response programs in Missouri and Kansas. The deal is expected to reduce peak energy use by 30 megawatts a year, equivalent to the peak demand of about 10,000 homes. The company also is branching out to California, where it is working with utility PG&E and Southern California Edison to provide demand response systems across the country.

Programs like this help prevent blackouts and eliminate the need to build new power plants in addition to lightening the load on the environment.

The Free Enterprise Action Fund believes global warming regulations hurt company earnings and shareholder value.

The fund publicly stated that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should take immediate steps to require publicly-owned corporations to reveal the harm such regulations could cause.

It claims that five of the 21 members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a lobbying group supporting global warming regulation and cap-and-trade schemes, disclosed evidence that limits on greenhouse gas emissions pose a business risk.

According to the fund, General Electric is fighting federal and state legislative efforts to ban incandescent light bulbs. And PepsiCo is facing bans on bottled water after legislation, such as that passed in San Francisco, which prohibits city agencies from purchasing bottled water.

Instead of fighting against global warming regulation, the fund should be fighting for ways to work with global warming regulation.

Investment groups, state finance officials from 10 states and environmental groups with a more realistic outlook recently petitioned the SEC to require companies to assess and disclose how climate change would cause financial risks to businesses. These risks include increased energy costs and financial losses from extreme weather conditions – such as floods, hurricanes, drought and fires.

We can't profit off a dead planet, so companies should be creating ways to market their green actions for profit and the environment instead of rebelling against them.

General Motors is thinking beyond the gasoline engine in engineering a return to its past glory. The company is stepping up its research into hybrids in China and ethanol vehicles in the U.S. to compliment its continual commitment to fuel cell technology. Whether or not this strategy helps the bottom line or will produce significant environmental benefits is an open question.

GM is investing $250 million in China on a new hybrid research facility. Hybrids are the safest bet because the technology is already in production, so it is a matter of refining the power management and redesigning vehicles. The first of GM's dual mode hybrid vehicles in the U.S. are due out soon, so we'll see how fast they move the technology to smaller vehicles aimed at the Chinese market.

GM was out early in hyping fuel cell vehicles, and is now road testing 100 fuel cell vehicles in LA and NY. GM's Larry Burns has stubbornly pursued fuel cells for more than a decade despite the need for a massive infrastructure to support hydrogen distribution and a cost effective way of producing it. It has been a huge money sink for GM so far, but a breakthrough could pay back the investment. How long can GM continue to gamble?

Ethanol or flex-fuel vehicles are a good business strategy for GM since the company gets credit for displacing gasoline as determined by the EPA's CAFE scoring system. The company gets to tout it's green commitment while continuing to sell SUVs and trucks that get 20 miles per gallon or less because they can run on a biofuel. If cellulosic ethanol can be mass produced, GM will reap the benefits instantly by quickly increasing production of flex-fuel vehicles, and all of those big vehicles with yellow gas caps will be viewed in a different light.

A proposal announced this week would ban plastic bags from stores larger than 5,000 square feet in Manhattan. Nearly 700 large department stores such as Macy's and Target would be required to set up in-store plastic bag recycling programs and sell reusable bags.

The bill may take more than a New York minute to pass, but should be voted on within a few months.

If passed, New York would join environmentally-forward thinking communities, such as Ireland – which introduced a tax on plastic bags in 2002 that reduced their use by 90 percent, and San Francisco – which in March banned them from large supermarkets.

Banning the bags is a great move for the environment. If more cities took similar actions Americans could curb their habit of using more than 80 billion of plastic bags a year that often end up in landfills where they won't biodegrade in even our great-grandchildren's lifetimes, and lessen our consumption of petroleum required for their production.

But recycling them is not without drawbacks. It is time consuming and expensive, and some so-called recycling centers actually ship them off to China and India to be incinerated.

The best bet is to establish a ban or a high tax and encourage the use of reusable bags. Idea for the day – perhaps if cities established taxes on plastic bags, they could afford to purchase reusable bags for their residents.

Energy efficient solar panels, cellulosic ethanol, affordable fuel cells and cheap electrolysis -- these are all important technologies that could push renewable energy to become a substantial contributor to our equation, but none are as important as battery technology.

The intermittent nature of wind and solar power are at odds with utilities' need for consistent and on-demand power, and batteries are needed to bridge the gap.

American Electric Power is ahead of the curve on this, committing to developing 1,000 megawatts of energy storage using batteries during the next decade, according to The New York Times.

AEP can store wind energy that is produced overnight and sell it at a premium during peak times in the afternoon hours. Even with the additional cost of batteries, wind energy can be more cost effective than building more coal power plants that may not be needed 24/7.

Solar power farms that heat water to produce steam to drive turbines can somewhat time shift their output by conserving the heat for a few hours, but batteries could enable solar farms to sell their energy at a premium during peak times.

Then there's the wild card of plug-in hybrids and the "vehicle to grid" backers who see cars as a distributed source of battery back up and on demand power for the grid. Cars could be charged overnight and then the electricity send back up the grid during peak hours. There are many infrastructural challenges for smart metering and the interface between the vehicles and the grid, but those aren't as tough as creating reliable and affordable batteries. When they are on the road the plug-in hybrids will also be displacing petroleum by the millions of barrels per year.

The House of Representatives passed the The Energy Storage Technology Advancement Act of 2007 which would allocate $150 million for energy storage research. This is a big step in the right direction, but it should take priority over fuel cell funding and other more speculative research.

If clean energy is to become more than a niche industry -- like a quarter of our power by 2025 -- -batteries must be an important part of the equation.

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, commonly known as the RSA, just started CarbonLimited, an experiment in personal carbon trading.

It's a twist on the controversial scheme of cap-and-trade carbon emissions schemes proposed and implemented by some countries and businesses.

Individuals can enter their estimated housing, energy and transportation levels, or choose avatars – or characters – most similar to their own lifestyles, to calculate their projected emissions per year.

If someone causes more than 5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, you can donate online to a project that will neutralize your emissions. People can also submit a carbon emissions reduction project to the site, which if selected, could get seed money from everyone's donations.

Despite widespread efforts to push wind power, it seems we still haven't come far from Don Quixote's infamous attack on windmills.

The New York Times recently took a closer look at a classic case of a community fighting for and against wind farm development. A proposed project in the Catskills mountains in upstate New York has brought out the "not in my backyard" attitude among many who still insist they do support wind power technology – just not when it's blocking their view.

The project calls for a wind farm with 33 turbines, each 410 feet tall, to stretch six miles along a ridge. The farm could produce 260 million kilowatt hours a year, or enough to power 43,000 homes.

It's sad to see so many proposed wind farms die in the planning stages because of mostly aesthetic reasons. Either we should learn to appreciate their design and see them as collections of sculptures that just so happen to provide clean power to our homes, or we should help to change the design so it appeals to the masses. Several papers and books narrate the power design holds in wind farms gaining acceptance. Perhaps a design challenge is in order.

The fate of 10 new environmentally friendly towns in England will be in the hands of 10 people, with plans for that panel expected to be announced this week.

The panel will choose the final design of the towns from designs shortlisted in a design competition run by a handful of governmental community and architectural organizations.

The towns will each contain 5,000 to 20,000 homes, forgoing high-density apartments in favor of family homes, gardens and green spaces within walking distance to shops and schools in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. The houses will include green building features, such as timber, solar thermal panels, double glazing, insulation and biomass boilers. Between 30 to 50 percent of the housing units will qualify as affordable housing.