America's 120 million buildings consume a prodigious amount of energy – 42 percent of the nation's primary energy, 72 percent of its electricity and 34 percent of its directly used natural gas. They use more energy than any country except China and the United States as a whole.

Just those numbers suggest that businesses have a lot to gain if they can naivigate their way through the flood of information about "energy efficiency."

The Rocky Mountain Institute think tank hopes to get commercial builders and owners interested in its work on efficiency, "Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era." The organization calculates the total possible savings at $1.4 trillion.

GreenBiz.com reports that the strategy has three primary steps:

• Know your short- and long-term goals.
• Understand that timing is the biggest driver of the capital cost of efficiency.
• Reward best-practice design.