Skyline Solar wouldn’t seem to have the best timing. The startup, which makes concentrating photovoltaic systems, launched out of stealth mode in the midst of a solar shakeout. But the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup is finding the silver lining of the economic downturn: reduced demand in the automotive industry, which has opened up manufacturing capacity at plants that require minimal retooling to produce Skyline’s systems.

This morning Skyline announced its first commercial manufacturing deal with auto supplier Cosma International (part of Magna International), which will make Skyline’s reflective racking and structural components at a factory in Michigan with machines used to stamp out auto frames, bodies and chassis. As the company told us last summer, it is looking to produce equipment for “multiple megawatts” on automobile lines.

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A new report published this week by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab offers valuable insight culled from a decade’s worth of data into perhaps the most important metric in the PV industry: installed system costs before financial incentives. Because these incentives, like government tax rebates, can’t be counted on forever, installed costs — or the total cost of a PV system including panels, inverters, labor and more — will have to fall over time if the industry hopes to be a significant, long-term player in the U.S. energy mix.

The study, summarized in a 50-page document titled “Tracking the Sun II,” found that that the average installed cost in the U.S. has declined in the last decade (no surprise there), but the pace of that decline and other findings, such as the impact of economies of scale, might be surprising to some readers. Average U.S. installed system costs declined to $7.50 per watt in 2008 from $10.80 per watt in 1998, a 30 percent drop over the 10-year period, according to the report. That translates into a 3.6 percent, or 30 cents per watt, per year decline, on average, during that time.

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Solar thermal power company Solel Solar Systems has found an exit. Less than a year after Solel raised a gigantic $105 million investment from London-based firm Ecofin to help finance a plant in California’s Mojave Desert, Siemens has announced today that it is buying the Israeli company from Ecofin (and another unnamed major shareholder) for $418 million.

In a time when the merger and acquisition market for cleantech startups is about as dry as the Mojave, today’s deal is a head turner. And with Siemens angling to expand its role in solar thermal, the raft of startups now leading this space — companies like BrightSource, eSolar, Ausra and SkyFuel — could find themselves with a tough, deep-pocketed new competitor.

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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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Hundreds of bills escaped California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto power last night ahead of a midnight deadline to act on a mountain of legislation — but not a pair of long-debated clean energy bills. As expected, the governor killed two items, which would have required utilities in California to get at least a third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, but with limits for how much of that goal they could meet with power generated out of state (at an Arizona solar farm, for example).

In Schwarzenegger’s view, those limits made the proposed laws overly “protectionist” and lacking in pragmatism, since development of renewable energy projects and transmission infrastructure within California has been relatively slow going. The governor’s veto last night, and the controversy over his executive order last month to have the California Air Resources Board (rather than the legislature) determine how utilities can meet the renewable portfolio standard, highlight a major choke point in the effort to clean up the national power supply: the approval process for transmission lines.

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While it might seem like the spigot of stimulus money has just opened up — with new funding solicitations and announcements coming out every week and companies spending significant time and money in an effort to grab some of it — don’t get too accustomed to thinking of Uncle Sam as cleantech’s Mr. Moneybags. Speakers at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum West in San Francisco on Tuesday reminded cleantech companies and financiers that the government money won’t keep flowing forever — and actually for not that much longer.

Dan Reicher, director of Google’s climate change and energy initiative, said that in the midst of unprecedented government support, “we’re staring at the biggest cliff we’ve ever faced in renewables when the stimulus runs out in 18 months.” John Geesman, a former California energy commissioner and writer of the Green Energy War blog, also warned that the stimulus might have been “the high-water mark” for government support. After that, “the fiscal cabinet is bare,” he said.

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Intel Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based chip company, today announced a range of low-power chips aimed at driving down the power requirements inside data centers. Among them were two new Xeon 3400 chips; a version that consumes only 45 watts will be released this year while the company is going to start selling a 30-watt version in 2010.

“This is a brand-new segment for us,” said Sean Maloney, executive vice president at Intel, which also announced a new Microserver reference design that would allow hardware makers to cram as many as six low-power Xeons into a single 1u rack — which translates into about 228 servers per cabinet. The servers are targeted at providers of web services, Intel said.

Maloney pointed out that in a few years, power is going account for nearly 25 percent of a data center’s costs — a situation Intel, with these new chips, is looking to address. Intel has already started shipping these chips to its OEM partners, such as Silicon Graphics. (More details on Intel’s web site.)

Sungevity, a Berkeley-based startup that uses Internet and satellite images to reduce the cost of installing solar power on homes, says it’s ready to take on the rest of the state. The company, which has focused mainly on installing solar in Northern California so far, announced Tuesday it has raised $6 million to expand its business in Southern California and the Central Valley.

Greener Capital, a new cleantech venture capital firm, led the round. Sungevity, which launched last year, previously raised $2.5 million from German solar companies Isolventures and Solon, as well as angel investors including actress Cate Blanchett.

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Solar panels are getting cheaper, and as prices decline, companies are looking for ways to reduce manufacturing costs to stay competitive. Here’s the latest innovation from Applied Materials: on Monday the chip and solar equipment maker announced two new technologies that it claims can reduce the costs of conventional crystalline-silicon-based solar.

Both of the technologies are aimed at more efficiently turning silicon ingots — the silicon slices that solar cells are made of — into wafers. The first, the Applied HCT Diamond Squarer system (see image above), uses diamond particles – instead of the usual abrasive slurry – bonded to a metallic wire core to slice silicon ingots into bricks. Applied claims the technology can cut up to one-third of the cost of producing silicon ingots, partly by using half of the electricity of a conventional slicing process, while also doubling the cutting speed, which saves manufacturers’ money. Customers such as Silicio Solar, a Spanish solar manufacturer owned by Dutch holding company Pillar Group, have tested the technology, according to the company’s press release.

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If California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has his way, utilities in the state will get at least a third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020 — and they’ll have free reign to import it from out of the state. The move, which has been under discussion for more than a year, would create the largest renewable portfolio standard in the country — with some caveats — and could be a major boon for big solar farms in the Arizona and Nevada deserts.

That provision for imports is part of what sets the executive order, which Schwarzenegger is expected to sign this week, apart from a bill approved this weekend in the California legislature. The Governor plans to veto that bill largely because of limits on how much energy can come from out of state to meet the renewable requirement.

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