It’s official: New TVs sold in California will be more energy efficient in coming years. The hotly debated state energy efficiency standards for televisions — the first of their kind in the nation — have just been approved by the California Energy Commission (hat tip our friends at sister site NewTeeVee). The standards say that new TVs sold in 2011 (58 inches and smaller) need to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent by 2011 and 49 percent by 2013.

Many TV makers have opposed the rules, while the state’s utilities support it. Groups like the Consumer Electronics Association say that the efficiency standards will result in higher prices of TVs in California, closings of stores that sell TVs in California (because those customers will go online or out of state to buy TVs), and unhappy customers who won’t be able to find certain popular TV models in California because they won’t be economic to produce there. The CEA says that the industry has been getting more energy efficient on its own and doesn’t need regulation, which will lead to “decreased industry competition and less innovation.”

But as Amy Westervelt pointed out over on Solve Climate earlier this week, the ruling could lead to a boost in sales in the state for manufacturers that specialize in energy-efficient screens, using LCDs backlit with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and next generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED). Consumer electronics giants from Sony to LG to Samsung are working on OLED TVs and the technology is supposed to be more widely deployed by 2012 — just in time to meet Cali’s new green TV rule.

While the debate over how — or if — consumers will want to manage their home energy consumption makes a lot of headlines, commercial buildings suck up 18 percent of the total energy consumption in the U.S. and represent one of the biggest opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and carbon reduction. According to Pike Research, the market for energy management systems — stuff like wireless sensor networks, lighting controls, and heating and cooling management in buildings — will turn into a $6.8 billion-a-year market by 2020 and will generate investment of $67.6 billion between 2010 and 2020.

Startups know those metrics pretty well already. Lucid Design Group, for example, has been selling its energy management system for years to the commercial sector, as well as governments and universities. But while the company has always discussed plans to eventually work in the residential market, Lucid Design has yet to make a big push into homes. As Michael Murray, Lucid Design’s CEO, has maintained in conversations with me over the past couple of years, the energy management market for large commercial buildings is much more accessible compared to energy management in homes.

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Duke Energy, a utility that has 4 million customers across the Midwest and the Carolinas, doesn’t want to be in the business of selling and making consumer electronics. The utility is not interested in helping sell iPhones, selecting the devices that consumers want to use for energy management, or rolling out trucks to neighborhoods to repair gadgets, explained Duke CTO David Mohler at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy conference this morning. Instead Duke is working on getting the smart grid network buildout right, and “opening up the end of the wire to products and new services and letting other players get into interacting around energy with our customers.” In this way, Mohler said, Duke hopes to “let a thousand flowers bloom” at the edge of the network.

In other words, Duke plans to enable its customers to choose from a variety of home devices and services that will be developed by third parties, including startups, consumer electronics makers and software developers. “This is one of the most exciting areas ,” said Mohler, adding that he doesn’t think we’ll even know what possible innovations will emerge at the edge of the network. In that way it’ll be like the early days of the Internet, said Mohler: “Who knew the Internet would produce the iPhone?”

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Number eight on our list of 10 Things to Know About Smart Grid Security was this: Utilities need much better privacy safeguards. While the massive amount of data that will be unleashed by adding digital intelligence to the power grid needs to be kept out of the hands of cyber-hackers who would use it to harm the network, just as important is making sure that consumers can keep their personal information private. This morning Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian released research in collaboration with the Future of Privacy Forum that focuses on how privacy, like security, needs to be built into the foundation of the smart grid.

“Smart grid security” is most often discussed in the terms of national security — a hacker develops a worm that can jump across smart meters and black out neighborhoods, for example, or can make a generator blow up remotely. Privacy — keeping personal information in the hands of the consumer and away from advertisers, the utility or any other third party — is an entirely different concern that utilities have to be prepared for with the buildout of the smart grid. Most importantly it will shape the relationship between the consumer and the utility.

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While we put conglomerate General Electric on our list of “Tech Vendors That Will Cash in On the Smart Grid Stimulus Funds,” we didn’t get the full impact the funds could have on GE in the days after the awards were announced. But the Wall Street Journal’s got that this morning, and says that around a third of the smart grid stimulus awardees are GE customers. The conglomerate, which makes smart meters, smart appliances, and in home energy management products, expects these customers to “use a good chunk of that money to buy its [GE] equipment.” Already, GE has announced utility customers including Florida Power and Light, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, and Pepco Holdings.

What’s as interesting as the size of the impact of the smart grid stimulus funds on GE, is the method in which GE looked to influence the smart grid stimulus funds. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, a longtime Republican, sits on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board alongside Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr. According to the Journal article, Immelt was a “driving force” behind stimulus funding gains for smart grid initiatives. GE invested $7.55 million in lobbying efforts in the second quarter of this year, a 34 percent increase from the company’s lobbying spending in the prior year second quarter. The investments — in initiatives including promoting the Democratic stimulus package, lobbying for smart grid stimulus fund increases, lobbying for the max smart grid stimulus award to be $200 million, helping customers apply for the stimulus funds, and developing “a colorful two-page fact sheet” on the stimulus for its customers — have apparently paid off.

More specifically GE’s fun-filled fact sheet told its customers that GE would “be involved with setting national standards and energy-transmission policy,” and said that GE could “help regional utilities and governments win federal stimulus money earmarked for making the power grids more efficient,” says the article. Although, GE General Counsel Brackett Denniston III explains that just because GE provided counseling on the Recovery Act legislation “does not ensure its clients will win the resulting contracts.” But with a third of its customers winning the smart grid stimulus funds, clearly GE’s counseling didn’t hurt.

When news breaks that a company is in talks to be acquired, pundits are often quick to point to it as a positive sign. But in reality, it all depends on the valuation and the price of the deal. Over the past couple of days the Financial Times and Reuters have reported that Ausra, the solar thermal startup with a Silicon Valley pedigree, is in talks to be acquired by three potential companies. Both reports cite sources that say the potential buyers are global conglomerates in the power generation business and that the discussions could result in a buyout or a majority investment. No word on a valuation or potential price.

At this point I agree with the Financial Times when it says the news is part of “the consolidation that’s sweeping through the solar industry.” Siemens announced last month that it’s buying solar thermal firm Solel and firms in other solar sectors are being snapped up as well (MEMC Electronic Materials, a company that makes silicon wafers for the solar industry, announced that it plans to buy up SunEdison, a pioneer of the solar as a service business model).

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Amid heated debates over clean power sources, how to build out the smart grid, and the future of advanced transportation, one thing’s clear: Energy storage technology will play a key role in all of these transformations. Energy storage — from batteries to ultracapacitors to pumped hydro to compressed air — will be crucial for the development of electric vehicles, will make sporadic clean power (solar and wind) more reliable, and enable the utilities to more smartly manage power grid loads.

Energy storage provides the key to these innovations and will be the cornerstone of the economy that will emerge around the next generation of energy. Here are three questions for three experts — Rick Luebbe, CEO, EnerG2; Jill Watz, senior adviser, Vulcan Capital; and Ahmad Pesaran, principal engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory — that have spent years digging into the technologies, the chemistries, the economics, and the future hurdles for the deployment of energy storage. The following are edited excerpts of their answers:

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Data center managers aren’t the only ones suddenly charmed by solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing storage needs. A growing number of VCs are also warming to the green, high-performance potential of the storage technology (GigaOM Pro Research, subscription required).

With no moving parts to speak of, a solid-state drive is far and away more energy efficient than its disk-based counterpart, the hard drive. Generally speaking, it also delivers better performance, resulting in a combination that’s proving increasingly attractive to data center operators. That edge helps IT shops overlook storage capacities that fall short of hard drives and helps justify the lofty price tags attached to SSD-based storage systems. It’s also an edge that’s attracting VC investment.

The latest news comes from XtremIO. This week the company announced that it had scored a Series A funding of an undisclosed amount from two Israeli venture firms, Giza and JVP. Heading up this early-stage storage player is CEO Rokach Ehud, with over a decade of experience in the telecommunications industry, including a stint as the CEO of Corrigent Systems, a carrier Ethernet switching provider. Details are scarce (the companies web site says it’s in stealth), but the company’s announcement makes clear that XtremIO has enterprise IT ambitions for its storage systems.

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At this point, the number of creative ways that companies have developed to help home owners monitor and manage their energy consumption, seems to far surpass the volume of consumer interest. That’s OK, though, because the home energy management market is so new, and it’s still unclear which services and technologies will be the most successful. Here’s another new startup which had some funding news this morning: PowerHouse Dynamics, a year-old Newton, Mass.-based company, which has built the energy management tool “eMonitor.”

According to VentureWire, which chatted with the CEO Martin Flusberg at the GreenBuild conference this week, the company is in the process of raising $2 million from undisclosed investors. PowerHouse Chairman and CMO Dan Kaplan confirmed the planned funding with us this morning, and according to a regulatory filing, the company has already raised $225,000 out of a planned $750,000 round.

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On Friday Microsoft plans to announce that its energy management online tool Hohm is now live and available to utility Xcel Energy’s 3.4 million customers. Troy Batterberry, Microsoft’s product unit manager of its Energy Management & Home Automation division, plans to break the news at an event tomorrow at the Microsoft Fargo campus, which is supposed to host the likes of North Dakota Governor John Hoeven, U.S. Congressman Earl Pomeroy, North Dakota Public Service Commissioner Tony Clark, and Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker.

While Microsoft announced that Xcel Energy was one of its utility partners — in addition to Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, and a “half a dozen” utilities in the queue — back when Hohm was revealed in June, the fact that the utility’s large customer footprint can now test out Hohm is a big step for the computing company’s energy tool. The news is also important because it shows how companies are building ways for customers to start monitoring and managing energy consumption before smart meters get installed in larger numbers.

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