The market for new construction is still struggling to pick itself up, but the growing trend of green building promises a sort of renaissance for the centuries-old industry. That’s the hope, anyways, and if you believe (as we do, though with a healthy pinch of skepticism) the mountain of reports and data pointing to the growth of the green building industry, then 2010 looks to be a pivotal year for transitioning the built environment into one that consumes significantly less energy, water and other resources.

Below we present four of the most important trends that we see shaping the industry in 2010. Since energy use, at least so far, has been the primary focus of innovators and investors, we’ve largely limited our view into the green building crystal ball to that slice of the industry.

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For companies looking to sell energy efficiency tools, green building products and alt-fuel vehicles, a new scorecard from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy could offer a roadmap to markets with some of the friendliest policies in the U.S. This year’s scorecard, which will be released in full Wednesday morning, ranks states according to their “adoption and implementation of energy efficiency policies and programs” — things like building energy codes, tax incentives for hybrid-electric vehicles and strict appliance energy efficiency standards. This year the top 10 states include, in alphabetical order: California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Business leaders surveyed earlier this year expressed a belief that a turnaround for energy efficiency startups could hinge on more incentives and legislation from the government. So in a time when interest in energy efficiency among North American businesses is growing, but oftentimes is not leading to actual investments in the technology, the types of policies factored into ACEEE’s report this week are of critical importance to many startups.

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The federal stimulus bill is allocating billions for energy efficiency projects, but a new report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab predicts that state-level, ratepayer-funded efficiency programs already in the pipeline will be an even bigger recipient of funding in coming years. The study found that funding for these projects –- in the form of subsidies for energy-saving light bulbs, for example, or home energy audits or incentives for commercial building retrofits — will increase to anywhere from $5.4 billion to as much as $12.4 billion a year by 2020, from just $3.1 billion in 2008. The result will be a “fundamental re-drawing of the energy efficiency map,” according to the recently released report, entitled “The Shifting Landscape of Ratepayer-funded Energy Efficiency in the U.S.”

There’s been a proliferation of new state-level policies enacted in recent years that promote energy efficiency, the report found.  These policies include energy efficiency portfolio standards, requirements that utilities adopt cost-effective energy efficiency programs, and regulatory incentive mechanisms to better align utility financial interests with improvements in customer energy efficiency. These programs are funded through rate increases on the sale of electricity and gas (as opposed to federally funded initiatives like the Weatherization Assistance Program), hence the “ratepayer-funded” focus of the report. 

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Venture capitalists often speak of green building as a promising sector, but few have actually invested in companies developing innovative building materials. Beyond Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Serious Materials, most cleantech junkies would probably struggle to name more than one or two other venture-backed green building outfits. But a stealthy startup called Soladigm might become the next familiar name on that list.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based company has raised $20.7 million out of a total equity offering of $21.6 million from Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners, according to a regulatory filing (hat tip VentureWire). Based on other filings, it appears the startup has already raised at least $14 million in previous funding rounds earlier this year from the same VC firms.

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Highlighting the increased interest in green construction this year, green-building materials company Serious Materials announced on Tuesday that it has raised $60 million in its third round of funding. The round represents one of the largest U.S. venture-capital deals –- and the largest energy-efficiency deal –- in 2009, according to an Ernst & Young analysis based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

Investors include Mesirow Financial, which led the round, Enertech Capital, Cheyenne, Saints Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Foundation Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners, Navitas Capital and Staenberg. The Series C round brings Serious Materials’ total capital to more than $120 million. The company said it plans to use the cash to accelerate its growth and complete the development of new products.

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We wouldn’t normally report on a clear marketing effort, but a program launched today from software giant Autodesk is actually pretty valuable to its partners — on Tuesday afternoon the maker of design and engineering software announced that it is starting a “Clean Tech Partner Program,” through which it will hand out free software bundles, worth $150,000 each, to the most promising early-stage cleantech startups. Autodesk calls its program a way to provide “seed” grants for firms and plans to give away software bundles to 100 companies by the end of January 2010, for a total value of $15 million.

Already Autodesk has handed out the bundles, which include six types of software and up to five licenses for each one, to green building firm Serious Materials,and Syncromatics, which creates bus-tracking systems using GPS and cellular location technology and won the transportation division of the California Cleantech Open in 2007.

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General Electric’s Net Zero Energy Home project unveiled this week highlights the rising branding power of “net zero” buildings. The laudable goal of making buildings produce as much energy as they consume is easy for consumers to understand and easy for companies to use as a marketing tool. But GE’s emphasis on next-generation gadgets and gizmos risks masking the dirty little secret behind green building design — that the construction industry already has on hand, but has largely failed to deploy, the tools to make homes and other buildings much more energy efficient than they typically are today.

GE’s three-pronged approach to net zero includes energy-efficient appliances and lighting, a management system for monitoring and presumably controlling energy use, and on-site power production coupled with energy storage. The management system is to be ready next year and the full package is slated to pulled together by 2015. The new project is an initiative under GE’s energy division, one of the tech giant’s few bright spots in terms of profit this year.

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NEA Clears $2B With Latest Fund: New Enterprise Associates, which has backed Bloom Energy, Gridpoint and Serious Materials, has just added another $1 billion to its 13th fund, bringing the total to $2.15 billion. — VentureBeat

Musk on Letterman: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is scheduled to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman tomorrow night along with Tesla’s Model S electric concept car. — Edmunds Inside Line

Turning Carbon Into Fuel: A team at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore has devised a process for converting carbon dioxide into methanol at room temperature. — New Scientist

Chint Solar Grabs $50M: Two-year-old solar power producer Chint Solar, based in China, has raised $50 million in first-round funding led by Cybernaut and Shanghai Alliance Investment. — peHUB

Leave EVs to the Entrepreneurs?: Electric cars might ease a lot of problems related to auto emissions, but columnist Charles Lane argues the Obama administration should refrain from lavishing public money on losing propositions such as GM’s Volt and let the entrepreneurs keep on tinkering. — Washington Post

We need a two-way communication between our utilities and our homes that can be delivered via a smart grid, according to a panel of experts speaking today at the Green:Net conference today in San Francisco. Andrew Tang of PG&E, highlighted the issue facing the utilities by noting that in the past power companies got their energy from a few generators. “In the past supply just happened,” Tang said. “In this brave new world, we have tens of thousands of generators to control but we still have to keep this balanced system [of supply and demand.]“

Tang brought up the difficulty utilities have when it comes to managing intermittent renewable power, and increasing resource loads from devices such as electric cars. Those problems and others will drive the need for a smart grid. The panelists agreed that when it comes to communications on the smart grid, there are some huge problems to surmount. Utilities cover a huge area, need communications that are more reliable than a cellular network, and have to do it cheaply. Whatever communications are used on a smart grid also need to also be open and standards-based, secure and future proofed — a utility cannot switch out its meters each time the technology changes. Eric Miller, chief solutions officer of Trilliant, claims the grid will require multiple communications technologies, and will require a mesh networking structure.

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President Obama last week visited an electric vehicle R&D lab in California where he called on battery developers to step up and innovate. Today, back at the White House, the President once again reached out to cleantech entrepreneurs, this time at an event dubbed “Investing In Our Clean Energy Future.”

Obama met with entrepreneurs and researchers to talk about building an economy that runs on renewable energy and creating green jobs — and to continue promoting his 10-year budget plan, which includes $75 billion to make the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent.

Paul Holland, who focuses on early-stage cleantech investments as a general partner at Foundation Capital and sits on the board of green building materials maker Serious Materials (and will speak at our Green:Net conference tomorrow), kicked off today’s session by telling event attendees about Serious Materials’ plans to reopen shuttered plants and rehire laid-off workers.

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