In the associate partner role, First Solar will contribute expertise to working groups looking at utility-scale PV, while also helping to “prepare the ground for reference projects and a roll-out plan.” The company has signed on for “an initial period of three years.”

Founded in 2009 by a dozen companies, including Germany’s Siemens, Deutsche Bank, insurer Munich Re and utilities RWE and EON, Desertec is estimated to cost a staggering $555 billion. Some of the first major hurdles for implementing the project include developing the business plan (a process expected to take three years), securing financing and permitting.

First Solar has experience in working through these stages for large-scale solar projects. As the company notes, it has built “utility-scale solar power plants in desert conditions” in the U.S. as well as the United Arab Emirates, and it’s working toward development of a 2-gigawatt solar project in Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City.

First Solar may be just the first in a wave of new partners for Desertec. The initiative’s chief executive, Paul van Son, told Reuters last month that five companies hailing from France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Tunisia would be announced in March. “We want to make it more of an international project,” he explained.

“When you look at all the industries you need to have represented in a project like this — finance, insurance, engineering, solar manufacturing, utilities — we have them all,” Christoph Fark, managing director of Schott Solar CS, a founding partner in Desertec, told us last year. “And we have some of the best in each of those areas.” For a project of this scale, timeline, cost and complexity, they’ll need ‘em.

Graphic credit DESERTEC Foundation

Related reports on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

Renewable Energy Charging Up Electrical Transmission Tech

Back in August, utility Southern California Edison (SCE) announced that it had inked a contract with First Solar for 250 megawatts from the Desert Sunlight project, as well as 300 megawatts from the so-called Stateline project in northeastern San Bernadino County. First Solar spokesperson Alan Bernheimer told us this morning that the SCE agreement remains unchanged. “We’ll build the whole project together,” said Bernheimer, with one substation and one interconnection for electricity feeding to the two utilities. “As we complete 10-megawatt blocks, they’ll go online, assuming transmission infrastructure is in place,” he explained, with each utility getting “10 megawatts here, 10 megawatts there.”

First Solar says in its release today that the Desert Sunlight project — which the Bureau of Land Management has fast tracked in the permitting process and which is proposed for a site located on some 4,410 acres of public land — could be completed as early as 2013.

PG&E has recently been rounding up a herd of solar power suppliers as part of an effort to achieve the state-mandated goal of generating 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. That effort has seen a few setbacks, however, as some of the startups contracted by PG&E have struggled in the economic downturn — laying off staff and turning their focus to different markets. Last year, two startups that had deals with PG&E (Optisolar and Ausra) ended up selling off planned projects to First Solar. Ausra was sold to French nuclear giant Areva last month.

As the thin film solar leader and a barometer for solar stocks, First Solar represents one of the sturdier horses in the solar race (although its earnings report last month indicated the company’s seeing rising competition and weaker margins). Today’s deal comes as the latest in a string of utility agreements for the company. In all, First Solar says it now has power purchasing agreements for 1,700 megawatts of utility-scale power projects in North America.

In times of national need, history has shown that countries can innovate fast — with enough funding. The government has been able to say “Deliver the goods now, we need them, quickly,” and has seen successful results, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said in a talk today hosted by Stanford University’s Green Alliance for Innovative Action. The classic example: The Manhattan Project. Asked why the Department of Energy doesn’t launch an initiative like the Manhattan Project for green energy technologies, Chu said, well, we should — but the money isn’t there.

“If you look at the amount of funding for that [the Manhattan Project], and the amount of funding to put a man on the moon, it was a huge spike in funding.” For energy technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Chu said, “you still need I think tens of billions of dollars as a minimum per year invested in these technologies and the associated science.” The agency’s base budget, he said, is a far cry from that — just $3 billion. So it’s up to Congress, he said, to allocate more funds.

Chu, a onetime Stanford professor, began his talk with a rundown of the latest climate data and global temperature records. “This is recent data,” he said. “It’s more than a smoking gun. The carbon in the atmosphere is due to humans.” Bottom line, said Chu, “The question is not will the earth warm up, it’s how much will it warm up.”

The DOE chief made two predictions: 1.) “The price of oil will go up in the coming decades.” He commented that, “If you look at the Shells and BPs, most of their proven reserves are offshore.” Tar sands and other sources of fossil fuels down the road will cost the companies more to extract, and result in more carbon emissions, he said, than today’s sources. 2.) “We will live in a carbon constrained world. I don’t know when. Five years or 10 years. I hope it’s five years, worldwide. I hope it’s two.”

Referencing a quote from hockey player Wayne Gretzky (as he often does, about skating “to where the puck is,”), Chu said, “We have to get people in the United States to skate to where the world will be…Not wishing oil prices will get back to $30 a barrel.” The rest of the world has entered a race “to lead in this technology,” said Chu, citing green automotive technologies like hybrid vehicle batteries in particular as an area where the U.S. is lagging behind.

As for China, he said the country is now “spending over $9 billion a month to diversify and clean up their energy industry.” Noting one particularly pricey green project backed by China’s government, he commented, “A country essentially run by engineers is a good thing. Well, it’s not all good — I’d rather live here. But it has its advantages.”

Addressing students in the audience, Chu urged them to help address climate change by becoming “better informed, and then teach others. Make energy efficiency a social norm.” Heck, just turn off the tap — 20 percent of the energy in California is spent moving water — and activate the hibernate setting on your computer. He went so far as to show the audience how to change their computer power use settings. “Not power source optimize,” he joked, “saving-the-world power scheme.”

Of course, many young scientists could leave a much bigger mark through innovation. For students embarking on a path of greentech entrepreneurship, Chu sprinkled a few words of advice into his talk. Build a killer team (few major energy breakthroughs have come from researchers working solo, he said), and, “Don’t make a business plan on $300 dollar a barrel oil — you won’t get investment.” Pick a realistic price, he said — maybe $70-80 per barrel — and work with that.

Related reports on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

Quarterly Wrap-up: In Q3, Uncle Sam Was the Green IT King Maker

Can Creative Commons Halt Climate Change?

Last year, Basol left his post as chief technology officer and Talieh exited from the chief executive role at the startup, which they founded in 2005. According to a Greentech Media report, Talieh ended up filing a lawsuit against SoloPower investors, alleging that he’d been wrongly pushed out and that the company’s backers were attempting to lower SoloPower’s price.

SoloPower contended that the company had missed deadlines by the time of Talieh’s ouster, but as GTM reported last week, the parties managed to reach a settlement. SoloPower agreed to buy out Talieh’s and Basol’s shares in the company, but until Friday’s filing the size of the deal was unknown.

SoloPower is now working to add an additional 60MW of capacity to its existing manufacturing facility, and planning to submit its first flexible CIGS module for independent certification by April 2010 and enter high-volume production later in the year. SoloPower said in a recent announcement that it expected its next round of funding to help finance that effort, and also meet the equity-share requirements of a Department of Energy loan guarantee, if the long-awaited — and still-pending — award comes through.

Related reports on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Getting Solar Onto the Smart Grid

Renewable Energy Charging Up Electrical Transmission Tech

Like energy and engineering conglomerates General Electric and Siemens, Samsung has a sprawling stake in greentech, and some of the company’s longstanding tech (semiconductors) and services (large-scale and offshore engineering) could find new markets. As Greentech Media has noted, ”The Samsung group includes companies specializing in hotels, construction, chemicals, securities, sugar, etc., all of whom are potential test customers and lab partners.” Here are five (plus one) key greentech plays from Samsung.

Start-to-Finish Wind Projects: Last month the government of Ontario, Canada announced an agreement for Samsung C&T Corp and partner Korea Electric Power Co. (KEPCO) to set up and operate several wind projects throughout the province, for a total capacity of 2,000 megawatts within 20 years (the deal also included 500 megawatts from solar power). According to a release from Samsung, the project — slated for construction in a series of “clusters” — will have generating capacity of at least 2.5 gigawatts by 2016.

Samsung C&T plans to handle multiple steps along the way toward actual construction of these projects. According to the company’s announcement, “Samsung C&T will facilitate all project operations, overseeing the entire process of establishing the wind and solar power cluster, procuring equipment and financing while KEPCO, with its expertise in power generation technology, will be responsible for designing and connecting the transmission and distribution system in operating the plant facilities.”

Samsung has set its sights on a major expansion into the U.S. and EU wind markets in coming years through its Samsung Heavy Industries unit, drawing on decades of work in the shipbuilding industry to produce wind turbine blades and the control systems for wind power generators. By 2015, SHI aims to garner 10 percent of the world market for wind power generators.

Providing Energy Storage for Vehicles & the Grid: Samsung SDI plans to start producing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles next year through a joint venture with Germany-based Robert Bosch. Dubbed SB LiMotive Co., the joint venture was established in 2008 and originally targeted production for 2010, with Samsung SDI working to translate its experience with lithium-ion battery cells for laptops, phones and power tools over to batteries for automotive applications.

Producing Solar Cells & Gear: Samsung Electronics opened a pilot line for crystalline silicon solar cell production in Giheung, South Korea last fall, according to reports from the Korean Herald, claiming cell conversion rates of between 15 and 20 percent. PV-Tech noted that, “Although details remain thin on the ground, Samsung was said to be mulling over when to begin volume production, while reiterating plans to be a solar cell market leader by the end of 2015.”

Samsung has invested in solar technology beyond the cells themselves. Last month, as Renewable Energy World reported, Samsung America and Aspen Aerogels announced an agreement for Samsung to “market and sell Aspen Aerogels’ thermal insulation products to the concentrated solar thermal industry in the U.S. and Europe.” Samsung’s key contributions in this deal? Name recognition and marketing reach in the hydrocarbon processing and energy industries.

Adopting Bio-based Materials: Samsung joined the growing crowd of phone makers and carriers launching new “green” cell phone brands and services last summer with the debut of its “Reclaim” phone, made available to Sprint customers in August 2009. The phone is made of 80 percent recycled materials, with 40 percent of the outer casing produced with bioplastics from corn (not so green) and lacking most of the toxic chemicals usually found in mobile phones.

Building and Operating Solar Power Plants: Samsung’s next move into greentech could come through a deal with California utility Pacific Gas & Electric. As Todd Woody reports today for Green Inc., the utility has requested approval for “a series of 25-year contracts for 130 megawatts’ worth of photovoltaic power plants to be built,” by a Solar Project Solutions — Samsung America’s joint venture with Edison International subsidiary ENCO Utility Services.

These PG&E projects come on the heels of the agreement with the Ontario government to develop 500 megawatts of solar power generating capacity. Together, the deals amount to a huge new push from Samsung, which to date has built only three megawatts of solar projects. According to a filing from PG&E that Woody highlights in his article, the firm has “acted as the main engineering, procurement, and construction contractor for conventional energy projects” totaling more than 5,200 megawatts.

Plus: Improving Energy Efficiency: Efficiency improvements across Samsung’s lineup of electronic devices could make a small but notable dent in notebook energy needs, not to mention battery life. As Pedro Hernandez wrote over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required) earlier this month, the company’s “new 30-nanometer Green DRAM 2 gigabyte DDR3 modules consume 30 percent less power then the current 50-nanometer variety. It’s enough to cut overall power consumption of a typical notebook PC by 3 percent.” Not earth shattering, but a start.

Related GigaOM Pro reports (subscription required):

Green Materials Matter to Gadget Buyers

A Good, Green Smartphone

Better Battery Life Motivates Mobile Chipmakers

Like a gold prospector tracking down a general area likely to hold deposits of the precious metal, the idea with 3TIER’s tool is to help energy developers identify the strongest prospects for generating energy from solar or wind. An online dashboard lets subscribers explore and compare potential sites worldwide via satellite imagery, modeling and a simple point and click interface.

This comes as 3TIER’s latest attempt to extract value from its growing collection of data about wind, solar and hydro resources. Already a major provider of wind forecasting service, 3TIER showed off back in October 2008 a slick map of solar resources in the Western Hemisphere displayed using Google Maps. And by spring of last year, the company launched the FirstLook API, which lets customers (mostly commercial wind turbine and solar panel retailers) call up wind and solar data from the 3TIER servers for their own web applications.

According to 3TIER’s Christian Sarason, chief engineer for the prospecting tool, it holds particular value outside of the U.S. and Europe, which “have a really comprehensive data collection apparatus.” Elsewhere, he said, in developing countries in particular, “That’s not always available.” That can throw up a roadblock for financing. For a “banker figuring out if you want to fund project A or project B or project C,” said Sarason, 3TIER’s prospecting tool could offer an independent estimate of how much energy is likely to be generated at a given site in a certain time frame, and allow the investor to calculate “when he’s likely to get paid back.”

For large energy developers, Sarason said the tool can inform investment strategies as well, helping “bigger players” determine the most lucrative balance of assets in their portfolio. He said the tool will help them “hedge where they put their projects,” so they’re not all clustered in regions affected by El Nino, for example.

All of this data comes at significant cost to 3TIER, which is backed by venture capital firm Good Energies. Todd Stone, the startup’s marketing and communications director, told us last year that the data collection and mapping process, “represents a tremendous investment for an organization of our size.”

So if this new infrastructure gives the company the capability to slice and dice that data into packages and services for different markets and applications, with minimal additional investment, that could be an important step for the company’s growth. As Sarason put it, 3TIER now has a full “renewable energy information services platform,” which will enable the company to “roll out other products more quickly. The startup, he said, has made it “over the hump of developing that infrastructure.”

For the new prospecting dashboard and data set, he said customers can get a 24-hour pass for $150, or pay a subscription fee of $500 per month.” I’d love to say this is going to clean house,” he said. But it’s really just one more piece of a business that’s continuing to seek ways to squeeze value out of energy information.

Because while DuPont, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, has been actively providing critical materials to the solar industry for the last 25 years, solar is one of the last industries that the company’s name conjures up for most people –- well behind, say, chemicals, agriculture or materials like nylon and lycra (commonly called spandex). Now DuPont is looking to change that.

DuPont has an aggressive goal to boost its solar business from $400 million in 2008, to more than $1 billion in solar sales in 2012 — a big number in the solar biz, but a figure that would actually make up less than 4 percent of DuPont’s overall 2009 sales of $27.33 billion. Doyle told us DuPont is on track to meet that goal, and its sales in the solar PV market grew more than 30 percent in 2009, and are expected to grow 25 percent this year.

DuPont has been ramping up its solar production capacity in recent months. The company is spending $295 million to expand its production capacity for Tedlar backsheet films — which provide electrical insulation and protect panels from UV light, moisture and weather — by enough to enable a whopping 10 gigawatts of panels. Earlier this month, DuPont opened a new photovoltaic lab in Geneva, and its thin-film solar factory in Shenzhen, China is now up and running at full capacity.

DuPont has also introduced new substrate materials for thin films, as well. It’s a change for a company that has been providing essentially the same materials – albeit ever new and improved versions – to the solar industry for decades. DuPont claims its polyimide and polyester films, on which thin-film companies deposit conductive solar materials, can handle higher temperatures without expanding as much as other films, leading to potentially greater reliability and productivity.

The solar segment gets “more than our fair share” of research dollars and attention from leadership, Doyle said. As proof, Doyle pointed to the fact that Ellen P Kullman, DuPont’s CEO of four months, recently spent half an hour talking with him about grid parity.

DuPont’s growing commitment to solar is part of a larger trend of massive, multi-faceted manufacturing companies entering clean energy and energy efficiency from other industries, said Ron Pernick, a principal at research firm Clean Edge. Other examples include networking giant Cisco moving into the smart grid and semiconductor-equipment manufacturer Applied Materials, which sells thin-film solar manufacturing equipment.

The company faces its share of challenges, however. With prices for conventional silicon-based solar panels falling steadily, and a risk-averse economic climate making it difficult for new technologies to score financing, thin-film technologies are “really taking it on the chin,” as Doyle put it to us. Even in its conventional solar business, DuPont has the difficult task of trying to predict how much the market is going to grow or shrink and has to prepare for it, often years in advance:

“We have such a significant market share position in some of these materials that we have to be ready if the market goes up 30 percent, 60 percent or 90 percent – and it’s hard for chemical companies to risk sitting around with an empty plant [if we overshoot the target]. It’s not the type of industry where you can get it on the dot.”

Right now, DuPont’s factories are far from sitting empty. After seeing a dip last year, its solar business began to see a pickup in the fourth quarter as manufacturers began ordering in anticipation of increased demand, Doyle said. “Things are really tight for a lot of materials right now, and everyone’s waiting to see if that will continue.”

In spite of its challenges, DuPont has the potential to make an increasingly serious impact on the solar industry if it stays committed, analysts say. Its materials could play a key role in helping to improve both cell and manufacturing efficiency, reducing the price of solar modules. And Pernick says a company like DuPont — with plenty of experience in the construction industry – could be what the industry needs to finally integrate solar into building materials in a way that could make solar power more ubiquitous. And DuPont certainly has more solar plans in the pipeline: You can expect the company to announce a couple of new products and new partnerships in the next few months, Doyle said.

According to a recent notice from the DOE, some grantees for public works efficiency projects, “have encountered difficulties procuring certain manufactured goods,” produced in the U.S. Oops. Now the agency is collecting public comments through next Thursday, February 18, to figure out which categories of equipment — from energy meters to solar panels — should potentially get a waiver on the Buy American provision, which allows exceptions for goods that prove unavailable in sufficient quantity and quality, unreasonably costly or “inconsistent with the public interest.”

The Buy American provision, which extends to not only manufactured goods, but also iron and steel used in stimulus-funded work on public buildings and projects, was a contentious part of Congressional debates over the Recovery Act last year — and it remains so. Critics have called the requirement a protectionist play that could hurt trade relations, while supporters have argued stimulus money should be directed to American firms if the idea is to create jobs on U.S. soil.

Upcoming decisions about whether to waive the requirement for certain goods, and which ones, will affect which greentech manufacturers get to compete for contracts supplying things like high-efficiency lighting systems and controls or photovoltaic systems for public projects — either making the field much tougher for smaller U.S. firms (if a waiver’s granted), or keeping it free of international heavyweights.

The California Energy Commission requested feedback today (it’ll take comments through Tuesday at this address) to incorporate the comments into its response to the DOE next week, explaining that it hopes to determine “what types of equipment are either not manufactured in America, or unavailable as an American product without a significant (over 25%) price premium.”

The commission said it’s “gathering information on what American made equipment is available for efficiency projects, especially for lighting projects.” So if you’re a company selling equipment into this space, now’s the time to pipe up and make yourself known.

1BOG aggregates customers by neighborhood and negotiates deals with installers on their behalf, charging installers a referral fee of 25 cents per watt of a contracted system. Founded in late 2008, 1BOG brought solar systems to some 600 homes last year alone, negotiating discounts of 10-15 percent in some cases. For 2010, the company has the ambitious goal of delivering 10 times as many deals in 10 regions, while more than doubling its staff to 40 people from 15. Dave Llorens, co-founder and general manager of 1BOG, told us last year that the company could contract a megawatt of solar power per city each year, starting in 2010.

1BOG got its start in the Quest Venture Partners-backed incubator Virgance, which tries to align for-profit motives with socially-minded initiatives. Llorens told Green Inc. earlier this month that the startup is now “profitable,” while declining to specify financial figures.

But the company is starting to expand beyond its solar roots. With energy retrofit firm Sustainable Spaces, for example, 1BOG launched a pilot program last summer in which 1BOG agreed to organize neighborhoods of customers (essentially assuming marketing and consumer education for its partner) who would then get a group rate on home energy retrofits from Sustainable Spaces. (Update: Sustainable Spaces is now called Recurve.)

More recently, 1BOG reached even further afield from the residential energy market to launch a group purchasing program for conversions of Prius hybrids (2004-2009 model years) to plug-in hybrids. According to the 1BOG web site, 217 Prius owners have signed up for the program since it kicked off last month. Like 1BOG’s solar initiative, the two-month plug-in conversion program is locally focused — in this case, the San Francisco, Bay Area. As 1BOG grows and expands further beyond early adopter markets, it will be interesting to see if it can maintain the aura of a do-gooder grassroots campaign and what new partners tap into the power of community organizing.

Founded in 2004, Ze-gen once expected to begin construction on a commercial-scale facility by the end of 2008, and launch commercial production before the end of 2009. But by early last year, the Boston, Mass.-based startup told us it had bumped that benchmark to the latter half of 2010. The $20 million Series B round was supposed to help Ze-gen move into commercial production.

At this point the company has a research and demonstration facility in New Bedford, Mass. that opened in 2007, but it has not announced any big customers. Ze-gen CEO and president Bill Davis described to CNET’s Martin LaMonica recently some of Ze-gen’s challenges as an outsider in the green energy business, trying to sell the idea of making energy from garbage:

“The problem is nobody really cares. The Department of Energy is primarily concerned with technologies that can deliver a quadrillion units of energy and we’re not one of them. We’re not solar, not wind, not clean coal, and not ethanol…It’s easy to have a technology category that basically falls through the cracks of the traditional funding mechanism.”

But while Ze-gen’s technology may hold some unique challenges, the company has plenty of company from other gasification and biofuel startups racing to show they have more than a good idea — but also a technology and business model that will be competitive at commercial scale.

As Lux Research put it in a report released yesterday, which compared the strengths and risks of various biofuel startups, Ze-gen’s processes could potentially lower costs and “increase gasification’s feedstock flexibility,” enabling the company to “follow the highest-margin markets downstream.” That’s the theory. But, according to Lux, Ze-gen’s processes, “haven’t yet realized those cost savings in real-world large-scale installations,” so “proof of their value is still forthcoming.” Lux ranked the company as “wait and see.”

“I’m hopeful that 2010 will be the year that we actually break a gigawatt for just the photovoltaic industry alone,” he said. “We all thought 2009 was going to be a dreadful year in terms of installations and jobs,” and yet the sector created nearly 20,000 jobs. “We are just starting to regain our foothold to become a leading country in solar. This was not by accident,” he said, but largely because of provisions in the Recovery Act.

Resch anticipates this year could bring another 35,000-45,000 jobs — if Congress enacts several key policies, including a national renewable energy standard and an extension of tax credits. Noting that the Recovery Act “is not a one-year shot in the arm,” he said, “I think 2010 is going to be a bigger year than 2009.”

Soon enough, however, incentives rolled into the stimulus package will end, and that could dramatically slow the solar industry’s momentum. “There are several provisions that expire at the end of this year from the Recovery Act. If those provisions aren’t extended,” said Resch, “you’ll have a push that reaches a cliff.”

While Resch cited gains for the U.S. solar industry on the global market, recent analysis of 2009 wind market data held a surprise that American Wind Energy Association CEO Denise Bode said should “add urgency for Congress to act” and establish long-term policies: China finished the year with more new wind installations (13 gigawatts) than any other country. “We thought we would still be number one for the second year in a row,” said Bode. “We need to move forward into 2010 to not just doing this on-again-off-again tax policy.” If strong policies come into place, she said, “We’re ready to rock and roll.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user Itiro (Creative Commons)

This move into the executive role for Gelbaum, who was already Chairman and a major shareholder for Entech Solar, comes on the heels of a rough year for the investor. In December 2009, he revealed that “a shift in my financial circumstances” had forced him to rein in philanthropic donations to organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Sierra Club and Iraq-Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund of the California Community Foundation.

It will be interesting to see what other shifts come about for this famously low-profile investor as a result of his new, more visible role at the helm of a publicly traded company.

Quercus Trust, according to the Cleantech Group, was the third-most active venture fund investing in cleantech in all of 2008. As of December 2007, Gelbuam had a 20-company portfolio of clean energy stocks worth more than $400 million, consisting mainly of small- and micro-cap clean energy stocks (check out our list of 10 Cleantech Deals from Quiet Quercus). The portfolio has reportedly expanded by now to at least 48 companies.

In other words, the group is charged with tackling the controversial question of how to deal with nuclear fuel and waste in a safe and environmentally responsible way — delivering an interim report with recommendations within 18 months and a final report six months later. That report is meant to include advice on how to store, process and dispose of nuclear fuel and waste from both nuclear and civilian use. Former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served as Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission and will co-chair the nuclear commission, said in a call with reporters today his team will be “open to all options,” whether “interim or permanent.”

Hamilton, along with co-chair and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and 13 commission members, will report to Secretary Chu, who will then report findings to Congress. Members of the Obama administration and the new commission emphasized today that while the group plans to approach its work “without any preconceived notions,” one plan is off the table: Yucca Mountain — the long-planned (and delayed) nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada that finally bit the dust in Obama’s budget last year. “Science has advanced dramatically,” since the site was selected some 20 years ago, said Hamilton. So now, said White House climate advisor Carol Browner, ”It’s time to move on.”

In addition, Chu underscored that the commission is not looking for the next Yucca. “This isn’t about picking another site. As my boss would say, let me be perfectly clear: This is not a siting commission.”

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of President Obama giving a nod to nuclear energy in his State of the Union speech Wednesday, calling for the buildout of a new generation of nuclear as part of an effort to establish leadership in “the clean energy economy.” Asked about relations with environmental groups who have advocated against nuclear energy and might feel betrayed by today’s move, Chu replied, “I regard myself as an environmentalist,” and described nuclear power plants as a necessary part of the energy mix and the national response to climate change.

Growing support for nuclear energy in the U.S. has hinged on three key arguments in recent years: It offers a carbon-free alternative to coal; a domestic alternative to petroleum; and a supposedly cheaper, more reliable alternative to renewable sources like wind and solar. But while nuclear power plants have relatively low operating costs once they’re paid off, new facilities are hugely expensive. According to an analysis from Climate Progress last year, existing nuclear power plant technology can generate electricity at no less than $0.25 to $0.30 per kilowatt-hour for the first year of operation.

That’s significantly higher than today’s average utility rate (about $0.10 per kilowatt-hour for all sectors and $0.11 for the residential sector in 2009). It’s also many times the estimated per-kilowatt-hour cost of efficiency-boosting measures, and more than some generation costs for existing renewable energy technologies. Chu declined to discuss financing for the technology in today’s call.

Scientists and professors from several universities, including UCLA, UC Berkeley, MIT, and George Mason University, hold four seats on the commission. The DOE has also tapped current and former leaders from World Resources Institute (an environmental think tank), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the labor organization AFL-CIO and the country’s largest nuclear utility, Exelon.

The partnership with Waste Management represents a major milestone for Harvest Power, which was founded in 2008 and so far has just one facility up and running: its Fraser Richmond plant near Vancouver, Canada. The deal gives Harvest Power a well-established partner in the waste businesses, and it paves the way for the startup to access organic waste (feedstock for its recycling processes) from Waste Management’s operations across the United States and Canada. Waste Management serves more than 20 million customers through a network of 367 collection operations, 273 active landfill disposal sites and 134 recycling plants.

Harvest Power chief executive Paul Sellew told us that the two companies are still working out the details of their agreement, but it likely will involve the startup building and operating recycling plants at select Waste Management facilities. “They have a great infrastructure in place, and it only makes sense to utilize that,” Sellew said.

Harvest Power’s business is to convert renewable organic materials from municipal and other waste streams into fuels such as biogas and compressed natural gas, as well as composted soil. The startup plans to use onsite combined heat and power systems to convert much of the fuel into electricty, which would be sold to utilities. The compost would be marketed to communities near the processing plants. Yard trimmings and food residuals account for about a quarter of the total U.S. municipal solid waste stream, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Harvest, which has some proprietary technology around composting but uses processes developed by Germany’s Bekon Energy Technology and others for converting the waste into renewable forms of energy, aims to build as many as 50 facilities in North America over the next 4-6 years, Sellew told us. Each facility would be able to process at least 30,000 tons of organic waste – or about what a community of 100,000 produces – per year, depending on the availability of feedstock. The startup has so far raised $40 million in equity, debt and grants, including this latest round of funding.

Image courtesy of Harvest Power. It shows steaming at a composting vessel at the Fraser Richmond plant.

This new funding — which comes in addition to $15 million that ClearEdge secured as part of this round in August 2009 – brings the startup’s latest round to $26 million. ClearEdge’s regulatory filing, submitted on Friday, also shows an uptick in revenue, to between $1 million and $5 million, up from the $1 million or less indicated on the August filing.

Based in Hillsboro, Ore., ClearEdge says its ClearEdge5 device converts natural gas into hydrogen, ultimately producing electricity and heat for a large home (more than 4,000 square feet) or small business, at only half the cost of typical utility rates. Smaller than a refrigerator, the device is designed to connect with natural gas lines in existing or newly constructed buildings, and it reportedly can generate up to five kilowatts of power per hour.

Rather than burning natural gas, the ClearEdge5 chemically converts it into hydrogen, which then goes through a fuel cell stack to create direct current power and heat. That electricity goes through another component to produce alternating current for the building. Heat resulting from the chemical conversion can be used for water or space heating.

All of this happens with up to 90 percent efficiency (or about 35-40 percent efficiency if you exclude the captured heat and look at electricity generation alone). VP of marketing Mike Upp told Greentech Media recently, the process produces fewer emissions than if you were burning gas at home or getting electricity from a natural gas-fired power plant. Bloom Energy’s device, Upp said, is very similar.

ClearEdge has been focusing mainly on the California market, where customers can qualify for a rebate of $2.50 per watt on fuel cell equipment — or $12,500 for a ClearEdge5 unit. It seems to be in serious ramp-up mode these days, more than tripling in size to 150 employees at the end of last year, up from just 40 in May 2009, the Portland Business Journal reports. By the end of this year, CEO Russell Ford (brought on last spring) aims to double the staff again and hit $50 million in annual sales.

As of late last month, ClearEdge had raised $55 million in venture capital. As much as 95 percent of that funding, the Business Journal noted at the time, had come from Kohlberg Ventures, while Applied Ventures and Big Basin Partners have also invested in the startup.