A presentation from Friday night that stood out for me was by Kevin Brokish, about adaptive load-leveling, which is akin to what the black box will do on the smart grid, but within that context, quite different.

For the smart grid, the box will allow communications between customer and grid, allowing, among others things, customers to set the rates they are willing to pay for the functions of each (i.e., run the dryer only overnight, when electric prices are at their lowest).

Building Energy '09 is next week, but online registration ends tomorrow. The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, which runs the show, is offering an enrollment deal: With six, you get discount. If you shared the savings, it would amount to 18 percent off for each of you, which is decent.

A friend spied us in the Metrowest Daily News....

I learned about "The Age of Stupid" from the Guardian newspaper, and it's a fair bet it will hop the pond at some point. For now, it's slated for a premiere in London on March 15, followed by general UK release on the 20th. It's described as a "drama-documentary-animation," in which Pete Postlethwaite plays a man in 2055, looking back at clips from 2007 and wondering why we didn't fix the climate crisis when we had the chance.

If someone would pay me, I do believe I could make a complete living just debunking — and ridiculing — the boneheads who troll the comments sections of interactive media. This one appeared in reaction to an item by Beth Daley of the Globe about a suit filed regarding Reggie, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative:

One of the tenets of effective public communication is to pick one message at a time and to stay on it. Today is apparently Energy Day for the Obama administration. 

This is another installment in my series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people. The Green Building Initiative is a nonprofit working to hasten the adoption of sustainable-building practices, and administers the Green Globes, a tool for assessing and rating green-building practices, comparable to the more well-known LEED program. To recap, the profiles are "mini" not only because they're short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match.

In addition to my continued opening to the biomimicry movement, I'm presently reading "Naturalist," E.O. Wilson's autobiography — I was moved, in part, to pick it up recently because I knew that he would be closing the GreenBuild conference last month with Janine Benyus, the biologist who is credited with coining the term biomimicry and who, with Dayna Baumeister, founded the Biomimicry Guild.

Before they sat together, Wilson and Benyus each addressed the very large crowd separately, and she opened her remarks remembering the "microwilderness" behind her house in suburban New Jersey, and how she used to spend as much time as she could out there, observing and communing with the organisms who lived there. Very quickly, she conveyed her love for that place, and the sorrow and offense she felt when the bulldozers came to start phase two of her subdivision.

The story dovetailed (note bio allusion!) very neatly with the tales Wilson tells in his book at greater length, the substance of which he acknowledged when they came together on the stage couch. Both these people went out of doors and fell in lifelong love. I can't relate. I played out of doors too, climbing on rock faces and playing war in the brush in places that also have since fallen to the dozers' blades, but I somehow missed the forest for the trees. They were just there, and so were the animals — musta been. But they didn't capture me.

Of course it's the season for gatherings of friends and neighbors. But increasingly, 'tis also the season for solar power — and I'm speaking of "season" in the eon sense. Friday night, I joined about 30 other guests at a neighbor's home not to share holiday cheer but to learn details about home photovoltaic installations.

Another in a series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people who are working to reduce humankind’s footprint on the planet. They're "mini" not only because they're short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match.

PRESTON KOERNER, 29, Salt Lake City Lawyer, LEED AP, and founder of Jetson Green, an exceptionally informed website on green building initiatives.

What do you do: “I’m obsessed with green building and with helping other people become obsessed with green building.”

Did you know Jetson Green was going to be such a hit? “Not at all.”

Green epiphany: “Boy Scouts is when it started: 'Leave it better than you found it.’”