HP and Boston Power have just released their new Enviro Series notebook battery. The environmentally-friendly laptop battery battery has a steep price at $150. Will people cough a little extra dough on behalf of the environment in the current economic climate? HP seems to be is betting they will.

But based on the HP Enviro battery information, it’s boasting more than just using less power. It also claims to be the industry’s first battery that lasts three years and backs it up with a three-year warranty.

It will run for about four hours on a single charge and promises to fade much slower over time than a typical laptop battery.

Green gadgets and electronics have been hitting the market in droves lately. From solar-powered cell phones, to the latest MacBook which is claiming to be “the world’s greenest family of notebooks.”

A large part of the environmental future of our planet depends on consumers and how they vote with their dollars. Currently, according to Forrester Research, although two-thirds of consumer claim to decide on what they will buy with social responsibility in mind, only 18 percent say they are willing to spend extra for socially responsible products.

Hopefully that percentage will rise in the future, which if it hits a critical threshold, will make the mass production of green gadgets cheaper.

Among the many wonderful things to come out of this year’s Greener Gadget Conference was the Greener Gadget Design Competition.

Fifty green gadgets were voted for online and live at the conference to come up with a winner, the Tweet-a-Watt.

The Tweet-a-Watt works like a Kill-a-Watt except that it’s also rigged to broadcast your energy usage over Twitter so your friends, coworkers and relatives can mock or jeer you depending on your usage. One of the cool things about the Tweet-a-Watt entry was that it is not only a design but it’s a working prototype that the designers are already using. If you’re interested you can see follow their Tweet-a-Watt Twitter feed right now.

Peer pressure seems to be playing an ever-increasing role in upcoming green gadgets. One of our favorite entries into this year’s green gadget competition was the Guilty Wallet, which is designed to shame wasteful spenders.

The Tweet-a-Watt designers receive $3,000 for the first place design while the runner-up, the Power Hog, will receive $2,000 while the third place and $1,000 went to the designers of the Indoor Drying Rack.

Check out the complete list of the 50 Greener Gadget Design entries.

Japanese electronics manufacturer Funai has developed an LCD technology that doesn’t need a backlight. Regular LCDs produce images by shining a light through each liquid crystal pixel, and so the light source is mounted from behind. Funai’s technology, however, allows outside light (sunlight, for example) to enter the LCD and reflect back out. As the light exits, the display lights up as if it were lit from behind.

Funai says that this reduces electricity consumption to .16 mW per square centimeter – only 1% of the electricity consumed by a conventional LCD. The clarity of the image is apparently quite good, and the reflective technology means that this new display is significantly clearer in sunlight, which is a challenge with most LCDs.