The good thing about the Solar Power International show is that every year it’s packed with companies showing off the latest solar tech advances, like prototypes of cutting edge thin film material and lightening quick robots that can stack solar panels. That’s also the difficult part: the massive three-room show floor is stuffed wall-to-wall with [...]

  Game On for Climate Policy: The Obama administration today presented “an energetic unified front on behalf of climate change,” in Congressional testimony and two stimulus funding announcements. Obama will need to bring more of that A-game in order “to make good on his promise to act against global warming by the end of 2010.” — [...]

  The kick off speech for the Solar Power International 2009 convention on Tuesday could have been mistaken for a UC Berkeley plaza circa the ’60s. In a rallying speech Rhone Resch, President and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), attacked the oil and coal lobbies for actively discrediting the solar industry, and asked [...]

  Project Nina — the $47,400 plug-in hybrid vehicle that startup Fisker Automotive aims to launch in 2012 — has a home. The Irvine, Calif.-based startup announced this morning that it will buy an old General Motors assembly plant in Wilmington, Del., for $18 million drawing funds from the $528.7 million conditional loan it received from [...]

  The $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus fund awards were announced this morning and close to 100 recipients woke up today to the equivalent of Christmas morning. At the same time, another 300 or so utilities and cities missed the boat and will have to find their own funds to get their smart grid projects [...]

  UPDATED As we wrote on Monday, Tuesday is the day of reckoning for the smart grid biz. The Department of Energy this morning has announced the recipients of the $3.4 billion in stimulus grants for 100 smart grid projects (25 large and 75 small) that are meant create “tens of thousands of jobs,” and lead [...]

  The Solar Power International Conference, which is the largest solar industry-focused event in the U.S., kicks off on Tuesday in Anaheim, Calif, and comes at an interesting time for the solar industry. The U.S. solar biz is in the midst of a yearlong shakeout, significant government spending from the U.S. stimulus package, and growing influence [...]

  Cap and Trade’s Biggest Losers: A new report by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie finds “cap-and-trade legislation will cost U.S. refiners about $100 billion a year by 2015 and put them at a competitive disadvantage to refiners in Europe.” — WSJ’s Environemental CapitalBright Automotive Bags $1.4M Army Demo Deal: Anderson, Ind.-based Bright Automotive said today the [...]

  Renovating the power grid requires big ideas from startups, major technology companies, manufacturers, and university labs. Innovations will range from technologies that increase the grid’s capabilities and efficiency to new business models taking advantage of these new abilities. To find out more about GreenBeat’s Innovation Competition and to apply, click here. The deadline to enter [...]

  Carbon capture technology is like a half-baked web tool, according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: in need of some “debugging.” The chief of the search engine giant made the comments at Google’s headquarters this morning, where he interviewed Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Chu, who was visiting the Googleplex to talk about today’s ARPA-E funding [...]

  Is tomorrow the day of reckoning for the smart grid industry in the U.S., when utilities and companies will finally learn whether or not they will receive part of the close to $4 billion in stimulus funds? It’s starting to look like it. According to suggestions from media reports, a planned Department of Energy press [...]

  If there’s one thing to be said about plug-in hybrid vehicle developer Fisker, it’s that the young startup moves quickly. A month after securing a $528.7 million loan from the Department of Energy, Fisker is reportedly in advanced talks to buy an old 3.2 million-square-foot General Motors assembly plant in Wilmington, Del., to build its [...]

  It’s not often that the Department of Energy gets to go far out on a limb with its investments. But that’s exactly the point of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) — a program funded under the stimulus package to support moonshot technologies that might be too risky for other investors. Today the DOE has announced [...]

  This is looking like a packed week for climate change regulation and government spending meant to remake the energy industry — the Department of Energy just announced new funding for very early stage energy projects, and there will be major debates in the Senate over the climate bill in the coming days. And to kick [...]