Palo Alto’s Better Place company has vowed to bring a $1 billion electric vehicle grid to the Bay Area, California. The company has already set up similar grids in Australia, Denmark and Israel.

The plan has just been endorsed by the San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco mayors. They’ve also agreed to offer incentives to companies that install plug-in stations. The plan will result in 250,000 charging ports, 200 battery-swap stations and a driver service center. Everything should be up and running by 2012. Network planning and permitting will begin in earnest next year and infrastructure deployment will kickoff in 2010.

Here is how it is planned to work: You will receive a discounted price on an electric vehicle when you subscribe to drive a certain number of miles. Better Place will own the batteries. You’ll be, in a sense, renting. This will be America’s first infrastructure of the sort.

Watch the inspirational video below from Better Place to get excited about shedding your old-fangled gas guzzler:

Black and Decker will be releasing the LightsOut, an IR gadget that turns out lights when it stops detecting movement in front of it’s sensor. The device is fairly straightforward and mounts directly on to a light switch, as shown in the photo above. It’s battery powered and instantly turns the lights back on once motion is again detected. The unit also offers the ability to set the time for shut-off, so you can have lights go out thirty minutes after it stops detecting motion instead of just one or two. This could be useful for those that move very, very slowly. The company has yet to issue word on pricing. Click here for more information.

BMW is readying the all-electric MINI E automobile. The motor offers 204 hp of pure electric power. The auto boasts a 150 mile range off of it’s 35 kWh lithium-ion battery pack. It can hit 62 mph in 8.5 seconds and completes a full charge in just 2.5 hours. In other words, it’s perfect.

BMW plans on leasing 500 of these bad boys in California, New York and New jersey sometime in 2009. We should wait in line like it’s 1985 and we are trying to snag some Cabbage Patch Dolls.

Sources indicate that the car may get a public unveiling at the upcoming LA Auto Show next month.

Never mind SUVs, everybody knows the real energy hogs of our modern culture. Street lamps. Those insipid gas guzzlers may look inconspicuous, but they are standing there all night every night. Ruining the world one flicker at a time. Philips Simplicity has had enough of that. They’ve unveiled their Light Blossom, a self-sustainable street lamp that is filled with energy-efficient LEDs. It powers itself via solar panels located on top of the lamp. You may have noticed it also looks like a surreal blossoming flower. Once they get enough of these on the streets the world will finally look like a Willy Wonka wonderland. Thank goodness for that.

Mi Casa Verde’s new home automation system hopes to prove to the world that it actually can be easy being green. Sorry Kermit. Vera, a Z-Wave / 802.11 hub with a robust web interface for monitoring energy usage of devices in your home, is the kind of simple gadget we could all use to do our part to reduce energy consumption. The device shuts your gadgets down if they are burning too much power. You can also use it to set any of the devices to power on and off with a timer. Pretty handy.

Vera runs using a modified Linux format and also is touted as being able to operate locks and security cameras. The company also boasts that the system actually saves more power than it uses. Wait a minute, really? Somebody call Obama or McCain. We may finally have a forerunner for endless energy.

The street date is October 31st and the retail price for the unit is set at $299 with a secure remote access gateway running $8 a month. Mi Casa Verde is offering a pre-sale price of $149 with one free year of gateway access, though. Get on it! You carbon footprint is gigantic. Really. It’s huge. People have been talking.