Step aside “Cash for Clunkers,” and make way for “Cash for Caulkers.” The White House is reportedly considering rolling out a two-year, $23 billion program to encourage homeowners to undertake weatherization projects such as adding air sealing, insulation and energy-saving light bulbs. The program would be called Home Star -– playing off the name Energy Star, the Environmental Protection Agency’s widely recognized energy efficiency program. The New York Times, in a story published last night, reported Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, as saying that it’s one of the “top things he’s looking at.”

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If diplomats headed to Copenhagen this December are able to negotiate a new global climate treaty, how will the world know these countries are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they claim? Michael Woelk, the chief executive of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Picarro, believes he has an answer: build a network of monitoring sites equipped with his company’s sensors that can detect carbon dioxide and other GHGs down to single-digit parts per billion. Woelk’s grand vision got one, albeit small, step closer to reality today with the announcement that the World Meteorological Organization will be using Picarro’s sensors to verify measurements taken from hundreds of GHG-monitoring stations around the world. Picarro will lend one of its $50,000 gas analyzers to a Swiss-based research lab that conducts audits for the WMO. Woelk, in a statement, described the selection of Picarro’s technology as a “technical validation.”

Woelk told us that the deal will bring “terrific exposure” to his company’s analyzers, but the chief executive has bigger aspirations than the WMO’s program. He says the current methods used by governments (and companies) to calculate GHG emissions are often based on the amount of fuel consumed and can thus be inaccurate. Governments and companies could also be tempted to provide fraudulent data about their reductions, especially as carbon credit trading becomes a bigger and more lucrative business. Woelk think his sensors can help bring more transparency to carbon emissions calculations.

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The Departments of Agriculture and Energy late yesterday announced they will be doling out a dozen grants — ranging from $1 million to $4 million each — to private sector and university research projects focused on alternative fuels and bio-based products. In total, the departments will give out $24.4 million in funding, part of their standard full-year 2009 budgets, with each project expected to contribute at least 20 percent in matching funds. The projects were selected based on their potential to increase the availability of alternative fuels and bio-based products. Here’s a snapshot of five of the most interesting recipients:

Gevo: The Englewood, Colo.-based startup will receive up to $1.7 million to develop a yeast fermentation organism that can cost-effectively convert cellulosic-derived sugars into isobutanol. This liquid could then be used as a biofuel or as a chemical precursor for certain “high-value” products like PET plastic. Despite the economic downturn, Gevo hasn’t had much trouble raising funding. The startup got a $40 million investment led by French oil company Total SA in April after raising $17 million from Khosla Ventures Virgin Green Fund and others the year before.

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Water scarcity is becoming a hot-button issue in the U.S. (and globally), with water managers in 36 states saying they expect freshwater shortages hitting their states by early in the next decade. But the coming shortages could present opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors to develop new water-saving technologies. One ripe area for innovation is the building sector, according to a report, titled “Green Buildings + Water Performance,” released this week by publisher Building Design+Construction.

Buildings account for about 12 percent of water use in the country, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and green building ratings systems like the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED encourage more efficient use of water, such as through low-flow toilets, drip irrigation and on-site water reuse. Typically more water is consumed outside commercial buildings and homes (see charts below taken from the report) — for landscape irrigation and cooling towers — than is used inside by things like toilets, faucets and showers, according to the report. With that in mind, we’ve summarized the three areas in green building design noted in the report as the most promising for reducing water use outside buildings:

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A bevy of companies now offer flashy software packages for tracking an organization’s carbon footprint. But engineering software developer Autodesk believes existing solutions don’t do enough to tie international climate targets (i.e., the IPCC’s 80 percent greenhouse gas reduction by 2050) to a company’s own emissions reduction goals. In fact, there hasn’t been a way to calculate how much a company should strive to shrink its carbon footprint based on the global climate goals until today, says Autodesk’s Emma Stewart, with the unveiling of Autodesk’s Corporate Finance Approach to Climate Stabilizing Targets, or C-FACT. The “methodology,” as Autodesk calls it, is free and described in a white paper, also published today.

“We talked to companies, even sharp, leading companies, and most said they set their emissions goals to be just slightly ahead of their competitors or at what just looked good,” said Stewart, the senior program lead for Autodesk’s sustainability initiative. “There wasn’t a rhyme or reason to it.” With C-Fact, which Autodesk used to set its own emission reduction targets, the San Rafael, Calif.-based firm is advocating for companies to calculate their climate goals based on revenue.

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People Power, the latest Silicon Valley venture focused on the home energy management space, will officially launch today, hoping its consumer-friendly product design and open-source home area network platform will make it stand out in an increasingly crowded industry. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup has raised an undisclosed amount in its first venture round from New Cycle Capital and several angel investors to support the commercialization of the company’s product launch. “We think we can build something that is significantly better than what we’ve seen on the market so far,” founder and CEO Gene Wang told us.

The startup isn’t revealing much about the products themselves at this point, saying only that they’ll connect home fixtures and appliances like refrigerators to a “simple-to-install system that automatically cuts power consumption” and transmits data to a web-based portal, according to a release from the company. We saw Wang present his startup at the West Coast Green conference in San Francisco, where we learned that People Power is developing a suite of devices that can easily be connected to the major power hogs in a home and then wirelessly transmit energy use over the company’s open-source platform.

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The smart grid rollout is gaining momentum, spurred recently by the announcement of $3.4 billion in stimulus funding for 100 U.S. utilities and cities. Swiss meter maker Landis+Gyr has already benefited from this smart grid activity, but the firm has still grander ambitions and announced yesterday that it raised $100 million from existing private investors to fund its “rapid growth in smart metering,” according to a release.

L+G said most of its recent growth has been coming from U.S. business, citing unsurprisingly the stimulus package. But CEO Cameron O’Reilly also said in the release that the firm is seeing business opportunities in Australia, Canada, China and the EU, which recently announced an Energy Package that requires at least 80 percent of homes to have smart meters by 2020 and 100 percent by 2022.

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Updated with clarification and additional information about the utilities’ stimulus funding: Two major California utilities – Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison — were noticeably absent from the $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus grants announced last week, despite both being widely recognized as leaders in the adoption of technologies to upgrade their networks. “More money should have come to California,” said Thomas Bailek, San Diego Gas & Electric’s chief engineer for the smart grid, while speaking at The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco yesterday.

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The White House wants to see the home energy retrofit market surge, and a new report announced today predicts a growing appetite for energy-efficient heaters, air conditioners and roofing materials, part of a larger trend in the growth of green home renovations. Overall, the U.S. home energy retrofit market will grow about 15 percent per year to $35 billion by 2013, up from $20.7 billion last year, according to SBI Energy. In that same time frame, the U.S. market for energy-efficient heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) retrofits is expected to reach $5.1 billion, growing at about 16 percent a year from $3.1 billion in 2008.

The U.S. market for energy-efficient roofing retrofits will reach $2.5 billion by 2013 from $1.4 billion last year (SBI deems roofing materials efficient if they meet Energy Star criteria, which is based on the amount of solar radiation a roof can reflect away from a home). Metal roofing, accounting for about 8 percent of the residential roofing market last year, up from 4 percent in 2000, is currently the most common type of material used for cool roofs, according to SBI. Green, or living, roofs, where plants cover part of or the entire roof (pictured above), are another option, but the high cost premium (about two times) over metal roofs is a barrier to market penetration.

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Tendril Networks, which makes energy-management technology for consumers and utilities, is partnering with an unnamed “major computer game manufacturer” to build a new computer game whose main character, an “eco-warrior,” will gain power as users reduce their energy consumption in their homes. Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck, who hinted at the partnership during a panel discussion at The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, told us that the game manufacturer is a California subsidiary of a “non-American company.”

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