As the economy continues to do laps in the toilet, and tech jobs keep evaporating, a handful of visionaries are bucking the trend. The next decade may well belong to these "eco-preneurs" who build their empires on "green" technologies that conserve, recycle or replace the many natural resources we've taken for granted.

The "low-hanging fruit" in green tech lies in the generation, and the conservation, of energy. Even as most of America's captains of industry are still trying desperately to ignore the recently discovered natural gas shortage, and other signs of shrinking resources, some far-sighted entrepreneurs are cashing in.

One example is the embryonic solid-state lighting industry. A visit to "Blue 2003," the world's first global LED-fest, organized by Compound Semiconductor News, convinced me that LED-based lighting has the potential to help reduce our energy consumption and improve the quality of our lives.

While LED-based lamps still face many challenges to bring their efficiencies up, and their prices down, they hold the promise of delivering high-quality light while consuming as much as 75 percent less power than their incandescent cousins. And given that lighting consumes 23 percent of electrical energy, or 7 percent to 10 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S., it's easy to understand how this could influence our energy imports.

LED-based lamps are already popular in applications where their long life and versatility make up for their high cost. The first LED-based equivalent to a 60-W bulb soon will hit the market at a hefty $125, but that should change quickly. It's expected that improvements in materials, processes, and scale of production will allow solid-state lights to begin to approach a price where their 100,000+-hour life makes them very competitive with 10,000-hour compact fluorescent lamps.

Although they are not yet as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, LED-based lamps are durable and offer colors and spectral options that are not available with other devices. And, unless the compact fluorescent industry develops a program for eliminating or recycling the mercury used in their bulbs, we'll be facing serious contamination in the near future.

Not counting the millions of cell phones, dashboards and PDA screens they illuminate, lighting-oriented LEDs are expected to enjoy $141 million in sales this year. And that's expected to rise to more than $1 billion by 2007.

LED-based lighting will not save the world by itself, but it can make a difference. It could eventually shave 5 percent of the total baseline energy load in America. That would be much more than the ill-conceived plan to drill in Alaska's National Wilderness Area would ever produce. And it should create jobs, too.

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