Something’s gotta give. In a time of uncertainty about the future supply and demand for fossil fuels, a surge of activity in energy technology and the prospect of stricter emission regulations barreling down the pike, the global market for transportation fuels is poised for disruption.

According to a new report out this week from technology and consultancy giant Accenture, one or more — but almost certainly not all — of a dozen low-carbon transportation fuels now under development could transform that market (which accounts for about half of global primary oil consumption and up to 30 percent of global carbon emissions) within a decade.

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People Power, the latest Silicon Valley venture focused on the home energy management space, will officially launch today, hoping its consumer-friendly product design and open-source home area network platform will make it stand out in an increasingly crowded industry. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup has raised an undisclosed amount in its first venture round from New Cycle Capital and several angel investors to support the commercialization of the company’s product launch. “We think we can build something that is significantly better than what we’ve seen on the market so far,” founder and CEO Gene Wang told us.

The startup isn’t revealing much about the products themselves at this point, saying only that they’ll connect home fixtures and appliances like refrigerators to a “simple-to-install system that automatically cuts power consumption” and transmits data to a web-based portal, according to a release from the company. We saw Wang present his startup at the West Coast Green conference in San Francisco, where we learned that People Power is developing a suite of devices that can easily be connected to the major power hogs in a home and then wirelessly transmit energy use over the company’s open-source platform.

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Facebook’s 300 million users, logging 8 billion minutes per day on the site, leave the social network with a massive — and growing — appetite for data center real estate, and energy bills to match. According to Richard Miller at Data Center Knowledge, Facebook has just leased more data center space at Fortune Data Centers’ new facility in San Jose, Calif., bringing the number of leases signed in 2009 to four, including deals with Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros. Specifics are shrouded in secrecy, but Facebook did let slip that the facility provides somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 MW of power to the new servers and IT infrastructure that will help Facebook cope with the site’s growth.

Energy efficiency will be key to Facebook’s expansion plans, allowing it to stuff more computing capacity into tighter confines and maximize available power, thereby reducing cost. Fortune’s data center makes use of hot/cold air containment, water-side economizers and environmental monitoring, features that analyst Katherine Austin identifies as hallmarks of efficient, money-saving computing centers in her Green Data Center Design Strategies report on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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Chip equipment maker Applied Materials announced this afternoon that it is acquiring 7-year-old startup Advent Solar. Applied’s solar acquisition investments now total more than $1 billion, including $330 million for Italy’s Baccini and $483 million for Swiss solar wafer equipment company HCT Shaping Systems. But today’s announcement probably doesn’t represent a big uptick in total investments, according to Lux Research analyst Ted Sullivan. While the amount for the Advent deal is not being disclosed, it “was done very cheaply,” said Sullivan. “Investors did not get their money back — pennies on the dollar is a very safe assumption.”

That’s because Advent took a big hit at a bad time as a result of the credit crunch. “It was effectively acknowledged that Advent was a failed company,” said Sullivan. Right when the startup was ready to start manufacturing its cells for solar panels, the crunch hit. “They had to lay everyone off, shut down the fab, and switch to a quote-unquote licensing model,” Sullivan explained, which meant, “We’re essentially out of cash, let us recoup some of the cash and we’ll package up an IP portfolio for you.”

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One year ago, two key trends dominated the solar industry: economic uncertainty and scarce credit. If solar companies were to survive, they needed to scramble to adapt their strategies to both. Today, the economy is more stable and credit is freer, and so the industry faces two different trends. The first — a supply glut of solar products — has been in the making for years, and it keeps pushing prices down. The second is only beginning to emerge, but could take root: Demand has picked up for solar installations, especially in homes.

That’s the picture being portrayed in solar earnings reports, and the conference calls to discuss them this week. Real Goods Solar said on Thursday that its revenue in the third quarter rose 122 percent compared with the same period last year, including the addition of companies it’s acquired in the past year. Excluding those acquisitions, revenue still grew 41 percent. John Schaeffer, Real Goods Solar’s president, said a lot of the increase came from homeowners. In a statement, he noted that the company saw “the return of strong demand for residential solar” during the third quarter.

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Updated with additional comments from Ausra and First Solar: Ausra, the solar thermal startup backed by Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, said today it is selling its Carrizo Energy Solar Farm project, a proposed 177MW project still under development, to industry giant First Solar. Sale of the project, which is in San Luis Obispo, Calif., represents part of a major strategy shift Ausra announced earlier this year to focus on supplying equipment and technology, rather than developing massive solar plants.

Ausra secured a power purchasing agreement with California utility PG&E two years ago to sell 177MW of solar power from the planned Carrizo plant (it was expected to come online at partial capacity in 2010), but according to a release from Ausra, that deal is now “withdrawn.”

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“Inventing disruptive manufacturing innovations is every bit as hard as inventing new materials,” says Frank van Mierlo, President and co-founder of 1366 Technologies. Solar power, if it’s going to compete on cost with coal and other fossil fuels, needs both. It’s on that premise that 1366, a developer of new machines and processes that can be easily integrated into solar companies’ existing manufacturing lines, has based its business model.

Based in Lexington, Mass., 1366 spun out of MIT in 2007 and raised $12.4 million from Polaris Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners the following year. It now has the distinction of being the sole photovoltaic company selected for the first round of grants under the Department of Energy’s high-risk energy tech fund, the highly competitive ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) program.

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Waste Management, one of the country’s largest landfill operators, today is opening what it says it the world’s largest facility to convert landfill gas to liquefied natural gas (LNG). Once at full capacity, the $13.5 million facility, located at Waste Management’s landfill site near Livermore, Calif., will purify and liquefy up to 4 million gallons per year of the alternative fuel, which produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum when combusted.

The plant is a joint venture between Houston-based Waste Management and Linde North America, a Murray Hill, N.J.-based subsidiary of The Linde Group, a global gas and engineering company. Linde built and will operate the plant, which has produced 200,000 gallons of LNG since the commissioning process began in September. Landfill gas, which is generated from the natural decomposition of organic waste, is about 50 percent methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Refining that gas for use as a transportation fuel or to generate electricity reuses what otherwise would have been a wasted resource and reduces its greenhouse gas contribution.

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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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