Concentrating photovoltaic technologies, which magnify sunlight and direct it onto solar cells, hold potential to increase the efficiency of a solar-power system. But several analysts — including Jenny Chase, head of solar research at New Energy Finance — say that CPV is likely to be more expensive than conventional solar-panel systems, which have been rapidly falling in price. And because CPV systems have a shorter track record and include moving parts to track the sun, some industry insiders are concerned about reliability. Spokane, Wash.-based startup Solarmation thinks it has come up with a technology that can help solve these issues.

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As utilities start to build large solar projects and solar power makes up an increasingly larger portion of the electricity mix, integrating this energy into the grid will be a challenge. Solar, like wind, is intermittent — power from the sun fluctuates when clouds pass overhead and wind doesn’t blow consistently. Now General Electric, which has been a major player in helping to integrate wind into the world’s power grids, wants to do the same for solar.

The company has turned a 1.5 MW wind converter into a new, 600 kW solar inverter for utility projects, Rick Robertson, an inverter program manager at GE, told us at this week’s Solar Power International. The inverter, pictured above, is targeted at multimegawatt solar projects with multiple installations on a single site, he said. GE is now taking orders for the inverter, which was introduced at the conference, and plans to ship its first units by the end of this year, he added.

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Think of rooftop solar and you likely envision photovoltaic panels. But a group of solar startups are working to put concentrating solar-thermal systems – more commonly seen in large solar projects in the desert – on roofs too. One such startup, San Jose, Calif.-based Chromasun, unveiled its first collector at the Solar Power International conference in Anaheim, Calif., this week.

The 4-by-10-foot collector, called the Chromasun Micro-Concentrator, is intended for commercial roofs. It includes strips of shiny aluminum, made by Alanod Solar, that look like window blinds and use sensors to automatically track the sun. These strips concentrate light 25 times and reflect it upon two pipes to generate temperatures of up to 428 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Companies like Applied Materials and Oerlikon are building businesses out of selling so-called “turnkey” (ready to use) thin-film solar manufacturing equipment to would-be solar developers. The idea is that instead of developing the technology itself, a solar maker can just buy the gear and start churning out panels with relative ease. But the reality is, it’s not always that easy.

Masdar PV, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy initiative, delivered its first thin-film panels from its factory in Ichtershausen, Germany, this week using an Applied Materials SunFab line, but according to CEO Rainer Gegenwart, the line wasn’t exactly plug and play. Instead — at least initially — Masdar PV ended up with a lot of broken glass.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no stranger to controversy. The environmental lawyer and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance served jail time in 2001 for trespassing after joining a protest at a U.S. Navy training facility in Puerto Rico, and wrote an article in Rolling Stone claiming the 2004 U.S. presidential election might have been “stolen” as eligible voters were prevented from casting ballots. But at the Solar Power International conference in Anaheim, Calif., on Wednesday, Kennedy called his support of greentech “the most subversive thing I’ve ever done.”

He underlined the power of the coal and oil lobbies in Washington and urged solar and other renewable-energy advocates to start showing their strength on Capitol Hill. The most important thing people can do is get involved in the government, he said. “It’s much more important to change your politician than it is to change your lightbulb,” he said to laughter from the audience. “We need to show our muscle and get tough, aggressive people on Capitol Hill, flying around in solar-power Lear jets or whatever it is. We need to be demanding, ‘Hey, we are patriotic, we are saving this country…and we need to fight these enemies.’ If a foreign enemy poisoned 600,000 children every year, we’d consider that an act of war. We shouldn’t put up with this, and we can’t put up with this.”

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With increased awareness — and regulation — of issues such as energy security and climate change, more and more corporations are working to reduce their carbon emissions and consumption of energy and natural resources. But how do you know if your efforts are paying off? Software company CA hopes to help answer this question with a new line of products, called ecoSoftware, officially unveiled Monday. The line includes ecoGovernance, which helps evaluate and track companies’ sustainability initiatives, and ecoMeter, which manages energy use from data centers and other facilities.

EcoGovernance helps manage a company’s sustainability strategy by comparing how well different potential initiatives would help meet companies’ goals, as well as existing and coming regulations, said Terrence Clark, CA’s senior vice president and general manager for ecoSoftware. It sounds simple, but it can be a major task considering that some companies have thousands of ideas to capture, categorize and sift through, and different departments can make individual decisions about what to do.

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GE is upping its stake in technologies designed to make and use electricity more efficiently. The company’s investment arm, GE Energy Financial Services, today announced it has invested in three startups: SolarEdge, which has developed electronics to monitor solar panels and maximize their production, Tendril, which has developed energy-management technology for utilities and consumers, and Grid Net, a smart-meter software company.

The investment in Boulder, Colo.-based Tendril comes on top of a $30 million round that the 5-year-old company announced back in June. GE and Tendril said in July they would partner to develop software that would connect GE’s smart appliances to the grid, sending energy information between the appliances and the utility. This latest investment expands the partnership, according to the release, which didn’t disclose the size of the deal.

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Ocean power is managing to float forward during the recession, thanks in large part to government programs and to a lesser extent, private funding. The latest example is 10-year-old wave power company Wavebob, with CEO Andrew Parish telling us this week that it’s raised €3 million ($4.4 million) in a mix of equity funding and grants. Parish views the funds as an interim round that will give the Maynooth, Ireland-based company some breathing room as it works to raise a larger one (Business & Leadership reported that Wavebob was seeking €25 million back in June).

The smaller round is “a reflection of the current climate,” Parish said. “We started the year with the ambition to raise a lot of money and realized it was going to be difficult and expensive.” WaveBob plans to start raising another round of roughly $20 million in the first quarter of next year, by which time Parish predicts fundraising conditions will improve. For one thing, he expects stimulus funding for marine power to start flowing next year.

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For years, the U.S. solar-installation market has been driven mainly by independent developers and contractors who initiated most of the projects to put solar panels on rooftops and on the ground. But now, as some have predicted, it looks like utilities are starting to take the lead. Sempra Energy and PG&E both announced large new solar commitments this week, with Sempra planning to build up to 500MW of its own new solar-power plants in the next few years and PG&E signing contracts to buy a whopping 830MW of new solar generation from developers.

These new commitments come on top of the large distributed-solar-generation projects both companies already have under development. PG&E wants to add 500MW of ground-mounted solar-power systems and Sempra subsidiary San Diego Gas & Electric has applied for approval for 70-80MW of ground-mounted solar panels. Another California utility, Southern California Edison, has gotten approval to add 500MW of rooftop solar projects, and both SCE and PG&E have signed deals for huge solar-thermal projects, including 1.3GW and 1.31GW contracts from BrightSource, respectively.

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Standard-household-sized LED bulbs have long raised a common complaint: They don’t dim easily. Yeah, some can be dimmed by controlling the current instead of the voltage, or by making them flicker at high speeds undetectable by the human eye, but homeowners can’t just plug them into their normal light sockets and expect their dimmers to work. But that looks to be changing, with the launch of an LED bulb to replace a standard 60-watt incandescent bulb from Netherlands-based Lemnis Lighting on Friday.

The company claims the bulb, called Pharox60, is up to 90 percent more energy-efficient — and lasts up to 25 times longer — than an incandescent bulb, and six times longer than a compact fluorescent bulb, with an estimated 25-year lifespan. According to the press announcement, the bulb features “technologically advanced” dimming capabilities, and a warm, soft glow, and is made of non-toxic materials than can be recycled with other metals and glass.

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