Energy innovations to save you money (and keep you warm at work!)

The office is never the right temperature. Too hot? Too cold? How do you keep everyone happy?

The Center for the Built Environment -- a research collaboration with UC Berkeley -- came up with a solution: Make everyone's office chair a personal heating and cooling system.

The chairs can reduce energy consumption by as much 60% and are a low-power alternative to keeping the entire space at a "room temperature" that not everyone agrees on. (It runs on a battery that's recharged about twice a week.)

A prototype of the chair was showed off at the ARPA-E conference, but Personal Comfort Systems has a license to produce a commercially available version, David Lehrer at CBE said.

It was previously manufactured by Tempronics and retailed for about $1,000, according to the company.