It looks like any other business park construction site: mounds of dirt pushed around by graders belching diesel smoke, concrete structures in various stages of completion, surveyors adjusting the tripods of their transits while simultaneously poring over blueprints. But this complex isn't your everyday business-as-usual business park. For one thing, it's in Sonoma County, a region better known for superb wines and dainty artisanal foods than dreary corporate developments. Indeed, large vineyards stretch just west of the construction site, and nature intrudes in unexpected ways. Two red-tailed hawks spar overhead, and a black-tailed jackrabbit crouches under a clump of mustard near a cyclone fence. Among the cattails, oaks, and willows cloaking a nearby creek, red-winged blackbirds, Pacific-slope flycatchers, and black phoebes squabble over nesting territory.

The park reflects local concern for this arcadian environment by incorporating an energy system that will slash power consumption, saving approximately 30 percent of heating and 60 percent of cooling costs. But this project is more than the latest permutation of "green" development. It's an experiment as big as the county itself, largely conceived by UC scientists collaborating with other researchers and county staffers. And it's an experiment that resonates far beyond the leafy frontiers of Sonoma County.

Under the plan, which has the working title of the Sonoma County Sustainability Initiative, the county will be transformed into a landscape-scale laboratory to test and refine technologies to combat global warming. Contemplated separately, some of the initiative's goals, such as delivering water to farms and cities without any net release of carbon to the atmosphere, seem wonky to the point of brain death. But consider: Water delivery can account for up to one-fifth of the electrical power consumed in the western United States. Much of that electricity is derived from fossil fuel–burning power plants, which release copious amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. If a practical system can be devised to offset the carbon produced by water transport, it could be a big step toward cooling the planet.

Researchers from around the world have been invited to come to the Wine Country, reach into their black boxes, and subject their pet notions to grueling road tests. Already on the drawing boards are commercial and residential geothermal heating systems, the widespread use of photovoltaic panels, wind and wave energy complexes, fleets of plug-in hybrid cars, and "carbon reservoirs"—large tree plantations that draw carbon from the air and store it in the woody tissues of growing redwoods and firs. "We'll be able to see what works and what doesn't under field conditions," says Randy Poole, the general manager of the Sonoma County Water Agency and a prime mover in the initiative. "Things that look promising under controlled laboratory conditions don't necessarily pan out in the real world. Sonoma County has an incredibly varied topography and multiple microclimates—large plains and steep mountains, cool coastal regions and hot inland interiors. We can provide the scale needed to identify the truly practical systems and winnow out the inferior ones."

Cordel Stillman, deputy chief engineer of the water agency, leads me up a grassy berm to reveal the technology behind the nascent business park's energy-saving secrets. Long and lanky as an NBA star, Stillman has a career engineer's unsentimental point of view and laconic, somewhat didactic conversational style, mitigated by large, dark eyes that seem to vibrate when he's making a point. At the top of the mound, he gestures to a sizable reservoir of greenish water. Several mallards are paddling around the middle of it, quacking idly and grooming their plumage. "This holds, oh, about 100 million gallons," Stillman says. He nods to another levee, across a small, marshy creek. "We have another reservoir over there, holding about the same amount. That should provide all the capacity we need." By capacity, he means latent energy. The reservoirs hold treated wastewater, provided, conveniently, by a nearby sewage treatment plant operated by the water agency. In the most basic terms, these reservoirs will replace the standard heating and cooling units employed in typical commercial buildings. When the business park is completed, Stillman explains, the reservoirs will serve as heat sinks, with temperatures hovering between 55° and 60°F, regardless of season.

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