With two laptop-loving children and a Jack Russell terrier hemmed in by an electric fence, Peter Troast figured his household used a lot of power. Just how much did not really hit him until the night the family turned off the overhead lights at their home in Maine and began hunting gadgets that glowed in the dark.

“It was amazing to see all these lights blinking,” Mr. Troast said.

As goes the Troast household, so goes the planet.

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Cell phones and laptops may seem like pretty minor offenders when it comes to energy guzzling. But as they become ubiquitous all over the planet, their growing power consumption is emerging as a major source of concern for those trying to conserve energy and stop global warming.

Communication gadgets and other consumer electronics burn up 15 percent of all the electricity consumed in households around the world, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. If the use of electronics continues to spread at the current pace, their energy draw could double by 2022 and triple by 2030. At that point, they would absorb as much electricity as all houses in the U.S. and Japan today.

But are electric gadgets vampires or saviors? Telecommuters who would otherwise burn gasoline to get to work, or drivers who get to their destination quicker by using a GPS device are actually saving energy, argues the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

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Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid. A whopping 40 percent of all the energy used in the U.S.–be it oil, gas, wind, or solar–is converted into electrons that travel over these wires. Any attempt at energy reform must begin here.

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Because of big screen TVs and home computers, utilities are seeing another peak power problem evolve. Traditional peak power hours–the time during the day when power demand shoots up–run from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., according to Andrew Tang, senior director, smart energy web, at Pacific Gas & Electric. But utilities are now seeing a second surge after the 7:00 p.m. drop in demand; it runs from about 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., he said. That’s when people head toward the electronic entertainment devices.

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These are boom times for wind power. T. Boone Pickens, the wildcatter turned oil baron, is building the world’s biggest wind farm, in the dry scrub of the Texas Panhandle–a $10 billion bet on wind’s future. Twenty-eight states have set ambitious mandates for renewable energy, with wind power shouldering most of the load; many compel electric utilities to get at least 20 percent of their supply from wind and other renewable sources between 2015 and 2025.

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As the age of cheap oil comes to a close, it’s springtime for gloomy futurists. Visions of a brutish world marked by violent squabbles over dwindling reserves, of junkyards littered with abandoned cars, of suburban slums overrun by weeds, of the collapse of industrial agriculture–none of this sounds as outlandish as it once did. Still, most of these horror stories are likely overstated: Energy experts tend to agree that, with a little ingenuity and a generous helping of political will, we could transition away from fossil fuels without being forced to give up our modern lifestyles.

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Towards the close of 1898 a systematic research, carried on for a number of years with the object of perfecting a method of transmission of electrical energy through the natural medium, led me to recognize three important necessities: First, to develop a transmitter of great power; second, to perfect means for individualizing and isolating the energy transmitted; and, third, to ascertain the laws of propagation of currents through the earth and the atmosphere. Various reasons, not the least of which was the help proffered by my friend Leonard E. Curtis and the Colorado Springs Electric Company, determined me to select for my experimental investigations the large plateau, two thousand meters above sea-level, in the vicinity of that delightful resort, which I reached late in May, 1899.

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It’s difficult for us layfolk to gauge the real implications of breakthrough research announcements, but when the scientists start throwing around words like “nirvana,” it does catch the attention. And from the description of the latest work of MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy, it’s easy to get excited. Nocera and team say they’ve come up with an answer to the dark side of solar energy–the difficulty of storing it for when the sun isn’t shining.

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British Telecom made a major bet on renewable energy last October, saying it planned to invest close to half a billion dollars in wind farms to meet 25% of the company’s U.K. power needs by 2016. Now BT’s clean energy goals are crossing the pond, to its U.S. headquarters. The company said today at a press conference in El Segundo, Calif., where company executives, Prince Andrew Duke of York and the mayor of El Segundo spoke, that it’s building a 500-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system for its North American HQ.

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Expect more calls from start-ups promising to reduce the amount of energy your business consumes and fewer about getting your work done faster. That’s because venture capitalists say they’ll invest less in old standbys like software and semiconductors in 2008 and more heavily in environmentally friendly tech.

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