May 21--SANTA BARBARA -- New strides are being made in energy-saving technologies, but future gains will depend on how consumers put those technologies to use in their lives.

That's why factors such as cost, standards and even the familiarity in the shape of a light bulb are so important.

The Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency, which started Wednesday and continues today at UC Santa Barbara, brings together experts to discuss energy efficiency in lighting, energy production and storage, buildings and design, computing, and electronics and photonics.

Speakers from industry, government and academia covered technological advancements and challenges, as well as the economic and policy imperatives to bring those technologies into everyday use.

More than 260 people registered for the event, which the university plans to hold annually.

UC Santa Barbara has a commitment to energy efficiency through its Institute for Energy Efficiency, launched last year.

That commitment has grown since the White House announced last month that the institute would house one of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers around the nation, noted Henry Yang, UCSB chancellor.

A five-year $19 million grant for the Center on Materials for Energy Efficiency Applications will further research in photovoltaics, thermoelectrics and solid state lighting -- topics important to the institute and to this week's summit.

Efficiency is a growing part of the energy discussion, which has often focused on supply, said Matthew Tirrell, dean of the college of engineering. It's also an area that will lead to the creation of businesses and jobs, he said.

The summit kicked off with Justin Rattner, vice president and chief technology officer for Intel Corp., discussing the company's efforts to increase processor speeds while decreasing power needs.

He talked about how the company, once driven by increasing performance with little thought to energy, had to shift gears, even canceling one project just short of design completion because the energy cost was too high.

Now, the company is producing processors used in netbooks that use less power, and it plans to introduce a high-power processor that can handle more than a trillion operations a second at power levels comparable to today's microprocessors.

But Rattner said achieving true efficiency goes beyond Intel, it requires looking at the entire computing platform.

Beyond computers, there are the data centers, which are often singled out for their high energy consumption.

"That's another case where efficient operations requires a total system approach," Rattner said.