President Jimmy Carter was on to something. During some chilly Washington winter nights of the late '70s, the president would wrap himself in a wool sweater and cozy up to the White House fireplace, using his unfettered access to national television to encourage Americans to turn down their thermostats.

Energy management has come a long way since the Carter era. Turning down the thermostat might work fine in a living room -- even one in the nation's capitol -- but it doesn's cut the mustard in a workplace lunchroom. Instead, thanks to improvement in design and technology, energy efficiency has evolved into a reliable way to cut energy use and reduce costs without requiring workers to don sweaters. That's why so many facilities jumped on the incentives that utilities and state energy offices offered throughout the 1990s for those organizations that switched to high-efficiency lighting, HVAC and other technologies.

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