The United States generates more energy than any other country in the world -- and wastes more than half of it. Efficiency, it turns out, can be a rich resource. In an unassuming strip mall off I-80 in California's Central Valley, those riches are being exploited by a kind of alchemy that combines science with business. Efficient technologies, from sensor-equipped LED lighting to smart electric meters, are flowing at a brisk pace out of labs, attracting capital from Goldman Sachs [0] and Silicon Valley VCs, and support from the likes of Wal-Mart [0], Chevron [0], Samsung [0], and California's major utilities. "In the course of an afternoon, quite literally in this room," says Andrew Hargadon, a business professor at the University of California at Davis, "we've been able to introduce entrepreneurs and their VCs to three different utilities and immediately begin talking about pilot programs." This is UC Davis's Energy Efficiency Center, or EEC, a new nexus for innovation.

"Efficiency," says Ralph Cavanagh, energy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the EEC, "is the unsexy resource." When the EEC was established in 2006, with Hargadon as founding director and a $1 million challenge grant funded from the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric, it was the only such university center in the world, compared to the more than 30 for nuclear power.

But Hargadon, a handsome 45-year-old, is determined to make efficiency if not exactly sexy, then at least marketable. Technology-transfer offices at most universities seem to assume that the institution's role ends when the ink on a new patent is dry. The center works differently, as an ongoing, multidirectional exchange of ideas. "A lot of the original mission and values were based on the notion that what was missing in the puzzle was actually the networks that connected researchers with investors, big companies, utilities, and the public sector," says Hargadon. "So what we could do to have the biggest impact was to foster these network relationships."

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