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When the Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis., was considering how to light its new factory last year, the company's president, Michael Farrell, decided to try something new: light emitting diodes, or L.E.D.'s.

ON a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a futuristic experiment posing as an ordinary fuel station may be bringing the world one step closer to the hydrogen age. From the moment engineers started dreaming about hydrogen as an alternative to oil, they faced a nagging question: What should come first - the fuel-cell car or the hydrogen pump?

Retailers are typically obsessed with what to put under their roofs, not on them. Yet the nation's biggest store chains are coming to see their immense, flat roofs as an untapped resource.

The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons - maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on - how do I say this delicately - what exactly you're flushing. A two-gear toilet! I've never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of electric power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.

JUST three years ago, with oil trading at a seemingly frothy $66 a barrel, David J. O'Reilly made what many experts considered a risky bet. Outmaneuvering Chinese bidders and ignoring critics who said he overpaid, Mr. O'Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, forked over $18 billion to buy Unocal, a giant whose riches date back to oil fields made famous in the film "There Will Be Blood."

Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google's co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing. The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that "prints" photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.