In honor of Earth Day on April 22, lots of businesses are teaming up to do good, offering giveaways and hawking Earth-friendly items or programs to attract your attention.

Sears is hoping to catch the eye of Maryland residents looking to save some green — that is, getting rebates for buying Energy Star-qualified appliances when the state’s program kicks off next week. Maryland has $5,405,000 up for grabs in rebates in its “Cash for Appliances” mail-in rebate program.

Sears will open at 6 a.m. on April 22, and have extra staffers on the floor to help people sort out appliance purchases and get rebates sent in electronically while they’re in the store, so that rebate doesn’t get forgotten in a pile of papers on the kitchen counter.

Sears is also the “2010 ENERGY STAR Retail Partner of the Year,” so it has revamped its Web site with all of the relevant information on rebates, credits, disposing of old appliances and buying new ones.

They have a handy section that shows you how much money you’d save buying a new appliance based on what you already have, the cost of electricity in Maryland and what model you plan to swap in (for refrigerators, think side-by-side fridge and freezer vs. freezer on top).

The company will also haul away your old appliance and make sure it’s disposed of in an environmentally friendly way, recycling the parts that can be reused.

In Maryland, here are the rebates available for buying Energy Star-qualified products:

– $50 for refrigerators
– $100 for clothes washers
– $300 for heat pump water heaters

Through the state’s EmPower Maryland program, residents can also get additional rebates on appliances offered by their utilities. For more info, check out the Maryland Energy Administration’s list of extra rebates.

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A budding business from the mind of a University of Maryland student is in the running for seed funding from the Dell Social Innovation Competition.

Tseai Energy Unlimited works to empower communities through agriculture. The company develops bioprocessing plants to bring electricity to underdeveloped countries — with a focus on Africa, where many of the countries lack access to reliable and consistent electricity — and boost their economies at the same time.

Trevor Young, a University of Maryland Hillman Entrepreneurs Program student originally from Sierra Leone, established the company in May 2009. He named it after his daughter Tseai, which means sunshine.

Using abundant local crops and employing local farmers, the company installs small-scale agricultural processing plants.  Much of the revenue from the sale of the products goes back into the community through economic development and social services, including a free or low-cost health care clinic and free access to educational courses.

To get the energy piece of the project, Tseai converts waste from the mill into fertilizer and biogas to generate electricity. The first plant will be launched in Sierra Leone, where the company plans to process palm fruit into palm oil, and convert the waste into methane to generate electricity.

Dell whittled down the initial  pool of 700 applicants from 200 universities, and now Tseai is competing with 60 companies for the $50,000 grand prize. Three finalists will be chosen to travel to the University of Texas at Austin in May to present their business plans to the judges. Tseai is up against several other projects looking to bring change to Africa.

Tseai has already won $25,000 in other competitions. It’s also looking to nab winnings as a finalist in the Wake Forest Elevator Competition this weekend, where students get two minutes to make the pitch of their lives.

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On the surface, companies with coal-fired power plants and organizations that protect ecologically important land and water don’t seem like an obvious love connection.

So it could have caught me off guard when I saw that Constellation Energy Group is donating $1 to The Nature Conservancy every time a post on its EcoStar Grants program gets re-tweeted — up to $5,000 worth.

But over the last few years Constellation has upped its eco-friendliness, lighting up the courts at the U.S. Open with wind power,  winning awards for its solar installation at Patriot Place (retail/dining area across from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play) and its energy conservation program at a New England college. Not to mention its plans for solar and wind projects in Maryland and the recent upgrade to its Brandon Shores plant.

The EcoStar grants of up to $5,000 are for projects being completed near areas where Constellation does business, and according to the Nature Conservancy, it has helped to preserve more than 160,000 acres of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Instead of being surprised, I hit the re-tweet button. What can I say? I like spending other people’s money, especially when it’s for a good cause.

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February’s record-breaking snow fall knocked out power in many Maryland neighborhoods, leading loads of people to escape to hotels or to stay with friends and family.

Some — call them brave, stubborn or stupid — chose to stick it out at home, layering up and huddling together for warmth for days on end.

Most people said they understood that Mother Nature was at fault and that the power companies were doing their best to restore electricity to their homes, but others got a little heated over the wait, especially because some delays were caused by a lack of coordination with plowing crews.

Now the state’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, is calling for most of the regional power companies to submit reports on their performances during the storm, apparently as a result of a request by House Majority Leader Kumar Barve, who was unhappy with how long his 83-year-old mother was without power in Montgomery County. (Now some people aren’t happy with Barve’s focus on MoCo.)

Utilities are required to do this anyway within three weeks of a major storm that knocks out power for the lesser of 10 percent or 100,000 of that utility’s customers when it takes more than 24 hours to restore power.

Some utilities didn’t think the storm caused those types of outages for their customers, and they hadn’t planned on submitting reports, so the PSC is requiring it. The commission will also hold a legislative-style hearing on March 23 to review the reports and go over any “lessons learned” by the utilities.

I was lucky not to lose power during February’s monster storms while many of my neighbors in Montgomery County shivered in cold, dark homes, so I can’t complain. But I’m sure those of you out there who did suffer through the storm without power are hoping the utilities learned enough to keep your homes warm and toasty next time another storm rolls around.

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Nuclear energy supporters got a boost Monday.

Companies like Baltimore’s Constellation Energy Group Inc. have their sights set on building new nuclear power plants, but getting the funding for the multi-billion dollar projects hasn’t been easy. Wall Street investors want some serious assurances that they’ll be paid back if they loan out the money and the companies default.

Enter President Obama.

On Monday he submitted his fiscal 2011 budget and it included an increase to the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. The president’s budget called for tripling the program from $18.5 billion to $54 billion, a move that could give larger guarantees to the companies already on the DoE’s loan guarantee shortlist (including Constellation), or it could add more companies into the mix.

Congress approved the $18.5 program in 2005 to kick start the industry, but the Energy Department has not doled out any loan guarantees. Most say that’s because the government and the nuclear industry can’t agree on how much money industry should have to put up.

The Hill caught up with Constellation’s James Connaughton on the topic, who said there have been ongoing negotiations over what percentage a company should pay the DoE to keep risk at a minimum.

The industry wants to keep the “credit cost” at 1 percent or below the anticipated total cost to build a new plant. A company would be required to pay DoE $100 million to reduce the risks for a $10 billion project, but industry critics have sought a much higher percentage. The guarantees would mean the government would step in to repay 80 percent of a loan should a company default.

Advocates say the loan guarantees do not amount to appropriations, so they don’t require an outlay of taxpayer dollars when projects are successfully completed. But opponents say that the projects often run over on time and cost, putting taxpayer money on the line for 80 percent of the project if it’s unsuccessful.

Looks like Congress will have to decide.

(photo above is a nuclear power plant at Cattenom, in Lorraine, France)

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Want to save the planet? Then stop “going green.”

That’s the message from Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post’s Outlook section Sunday, Tidwell says Americans should drop their “faddish” and small, voluntary efforts to be environmentally friendly, like installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, using eco-friendly detergent and washing clothes in cold water.

The little things aren’t getting us anywhere, he says. Instead, media coverage of “green gestures” are making us believe that most of America is embracing change, when only 10 percent of our light bulbs are CFLs and 2.5 percent of cars are hybrids.

To get beyond our small victories, Congress needs to act.

Ours is a nation of laws; if we want to alter our practices in a deep and lasting way, this is where we must start. After years of delay and denial and green half-measures, we must legislate a stop to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Instead of action, we’ve gotten a House bill passed “riddled with loopholes” and the Senate hasn’t voted on a bill yet.

So what’s the problem? There’s lots of blame to go around, but the distraction of the “go green” movement has played a significant role. Taking their cues from the popular media and cautious politicians, many Americans have come to believe that they are personally to blame for global warming and that they must fix it, one by one, at home. And so they either do as they’re told — a little of this, a little of that — or they feel overwhelmed and do nothing.

How do we fix the issue? Tidwell says before you spend the day caulking leaky windows, you should pick up the phone or get on the computer to contact your senator and demand action. Here’s his plea:

So join me: Put off the attic insulation job till January. Stop searching online for recycled gift wrapping paper and sustainably farmed Christmas trees. Go beyond green fads for a month, and instead help make green history.

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The holiday lights that adorn Baltimore’s Washington Monument each December are getting an efficiency makeover. The lights will twinkle festively just as they did before, but they’ll use 90 percent less energy.

Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. will provide the energy efficient LEDs (light emitting diodes), which burn brighter and last longer than the incandescent lights that have heralded the holiday season for the last 37 years.

The company says using the LEDs for lighting the monument is part of its effort to meet the state’s EmPower Maryland goals — reducing power consumption 15 percent by 2015 — and to encourage Maryland residents to do the same.

The city will get its first glimpse of the new lights Thursday night during “A Monumental Occasion: The Annual Lighting of Baltimore’s Washington Monument.”

Nearly 17,000 bulbs on 84 strands of lights will decorate the Washington Monument this year. The monument’s old incandescent bulbs used approximately 40 watts per bulb, while one strand of LEDs contains 200 bulbs and uses 12 watts of energy.

The amount of electricity we use is measured by consumption over an hour through kilowatt-hours (1,000 watts = 1 kWh, so a 100 watt incandescent light bulb used for 730 hours – or all month long – would use 73 kWh).

Even if the city leaves the Washington Monument’s lights on all month long, electricity use would be about 735 kWh, well below the 1,000 kWh the average home uses each month. At 40 watts per bulb, if last year’s display also had 16,800 bulbs, lighting the monument for the month would have used 490,560 kWh.

Looks like the switch to LEDs should go a long way toward cutting electricity consumption at the monument…it remains to be seen if your neighbors will swap their North Pole lawn extravaganza lit by incandescent bulbs for LEDs.

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If you’re like most people in Maryland, chances are you haven’t switched your business or home over from your regular power supplier — BGE, Pepco, Delmarva, etc. — to a competitive supplier.

As of the end of August, the Public Service Commission reports that 28.8 percent of the state’s 239,031 commercial and industrial businesses prefer competitive supply and that 4.1 percent of the state’s nearly 2 million residential customers are shopping for power (that’s an increase from 2.8 percent of homeowners who had switched as of January).

With so many options and little effort by the state to educate consumers, it’s not too surprising that Marylanders haven’t jumped on the competitive supply bandwagon.

To clear up all that confusion,  a company called BidURenergy.com has created a service that lets businesses and residents plug in their information and do little other work to get a good deal.

The staff at BidURenergy.com will analyze electricity and gas use over the last 12 to 24 months, identify incorrect charges from the utility and recoup any overcharges, and then issue a request for proposals to suppliers licensed in the customer’s state within a few days.

The service is free, and the company says it doesn’t get paid based on getting contracts signed between suppliers and customers — suppliers pay a uniform fee — so there’s no bias when it zeroes in on the best contract for the customer.

I haven’t tried it, but it sounds like an easy way to see if competitive supply might save you or your business money.

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The Maryland Public Service Commission kicked off  a week-long round of hearings on Monday over the proposed Constellation Energy – EdF deal. The French power giant wants to buy just shy of 50 percent of the Baltimore company’s nuclear power holdings.

No stranger to the dance, as Constellation’s earlier attempts at a full merger with FPL in 2006 and MidAmerican in 2008 were scrutinized by state regulators.

With the $4.5B EDF deal, Constellation is using the web to make its case to the public. The company has set up a web site that has fact sheets covering everything from executive compensation to one called “Myths vs Facts.”

The hearings are also being followed via Twitter from Constellation’s account. Excerpts of testimony were being doled out all day, including one that said, “J. Morris of EDF said at PSC hearing just now that EDF will look for opportunities elsewhere if not a welcomed investor in Maryland.”

In addition to the tweets, fact sheets and position papers, Constellation also launched an online petition for people to sign and let the Public Service Commission know they support the deal. According to Constellation’s count, the petition had 5,113 signatures as of 4:40 on Monday.

What’s your take on Constellation’s strategy – too aggressive,  just right or not enough?

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File this under visions of the future.

Life as the cartoon family the Jetsons knew it could be coming to a home near you relatively soon.

That doesn’t mean flying cars or robots that do your laundry, more like a computer that is hooked up to all the circuits in your home, that can turn down your heat or cooling system remotely, communicate with your appliances, generate your bills and show you where you use most of your energy each month.

“You’ll have the ability to come in and say ‘Between my gas and electric I normally pay $300, but this month I want it to be $225,’ and the system will automatically adjust for that. You’ll come back and say, ‘Well, that’s a little warm when I come home and I want to have X,Y and Z done,’” said Ray Gogel, the new president of Germantown-based Current Group LLC.

I sat down with Gogel for an interview on the company’s efforts to make the electricity grid more efficient through technology on Tuesday morning. When I told Gogel that the idea seemed a little far fetched, he and colleague Jim Mollenkopf insisted that it shouldn’t.

“It maybe sounds like the Jetsons, but in so many other industries we’re used to that, and in electricity our expectations haven’t caught up with that,” Mollenkopf said.

Both men said they envision a future where there’s a sophisticated computer system that does the dirty work for you once you’ve entered all of your desired specifications. Want your dishwasher to run at 2 a.m. when power is the cheapest? The computer will eventually be able to make that happen.

“That will be when we don’t have to think about it again, which is how we as Americans want to deal with electricity,” Gogel said.  “We don’t want to think about it.”

Sounds good, but I’m still waiting for someone to bring to life the computerized conveyor belt system that got the Jetsons ready for school and work every morning.

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