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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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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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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Building materials typically don’t arise as examples of high technology. In the green building sector, energy management systems and building-integrated renewable power generation have drawn much of the attention from tech-oriented innovators, with less activity around green building materials. But the authors of a new report on green building innovation from San Francisco, Calif.-based venture capital firm Nth Power and the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems see a series of “revolutionary innovations” on the horizon for building materials.

This comes at a time when the global market for green building materials is expected to grow 5 percent a year to reach $571 billion by 2013, up from $455 billion last year, forecasts NexGen Research. And the stimulus package, which includes more than $10 billion in funding to make buildings more energy efficient, should drive demand, at least in the near term, for these technologies. The Fraunhofer Center and Nth Power say these five innovations, all of which are in the “pipeline” (though no specific dates were given), could make structures easier and cheaper to build and more energy efficient.

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ZETA Communities, a San Francisco-based green prefab builder, has been quietly developing an energy management system that it says will be ready to be installed in all the startup’s projects starting next year. The system, called zTherm, automatically opens vents, draws heat from thermal mass, and takes other low-cost measures to cool or heat a house without cranking up the air conditioner or furnace. While ZETA, founded in 2007 and backed with $5 million in venture capital, has so far built just one structure and is in the process of completing another, CEO Naomi Porat tells us the firm has a pipeline of projects totaling more than 1,000 units that are scheduled to be built in 2010 and 2011.

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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 White House believes it’s found the political version of a double whammy in the home energy efficiency retrofit market. There are about 130 million homes in the U.S. and a sizable chunk of them are good candidates for energy-saving projects, like air-duct sealing, insulation and double-panned windows. In promoting retrofits, the White House hopes to help reduce domestic energy bills (and the related carbon emissions) and create jobs in this relatively nascent industry. That’s the logic behind a new report released today by the White House Council on Environmental Quality that outlines a strategy for bolstering a “self-sustaining” home energy retrofit industry.

The 14-page document, titled “Recovery Through Retrofit,” identifies three broad barriers to growth of the industry: limited information for consumers about the energy performance of homes, difficulties accessing finance for energy retrofits, and a lack of skilled workers in the field. The report also proposes a number of strategies for overcoming them, some of which are summarized below.

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Green building geeks now have a more powerful tool for developing next-gen building designs with minimal environmental impact. Software engineers at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory launched this week an update of their plug-in for SketchUp, Google’s open-source 3D building modeling tool. With a growing list of features, the latest version of the free OpenStudio plug-in, will enable architects to create more detailed simulations of their designs’ energy efficiency, and marks another step in the effort to make advanced green building design tools widely available at low or no cost.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu spoke earlier this year about the need to provide this kind of technology via open source. “We should be inventing a new way of designing buildings,” he said at an event in San Francisco, describing an idea for a program that would pinpoint things like the most efficient window orientation for a particular site, and help architects tweak their designs to maximize a building’s energy performance. Google SketchUp, with NREL’s ongoing work on the OpenStudio plug-in, is a step in that direction (see a video demo below the break).

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Michelle Kaufmann has been called the high priestess of green “prefab” design. The architect, who worked for Frank Gehry early in her career, was one of the first to make a persuasive case that prefabricated design — which saves time and reduces waste compared with conventional home building, among other benefits — could be green and chic. Her old firm, Oakland, Calif.-based mkDesigns, designed and built 51 prefab homes since 2004, more than any other architectural firm, according to Kaufmann. Each structure was built as a series of boxes in a factory that were then shipped and assembled out in the field.

In May, amid the economic downturn, Kaufmann closed mkDesigns after two factory partners went under and several clients lost financing for projects. The experience was “devastating,” Kaufmann said, but after some soul searching she committed to pursuing her passion for making “thoughtful, sustainable design accessible.” Kaufmann launched a new firm, Sausalito, Calif.-based Michelle Kaufmann Studio, and sold the assets of mkDesigns to Waltham, Mass.-based Blu Homes. Her new firm will design prefab homes, but now Kaufmann is focusing more on larger community developments, which she says will benefit from economies of scale. We sat down with Kaufmann during last week’s West Coast Green conference in San Francisco to discuss the prefab industry.

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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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