With the stimulus package proposed for next year lurching toward $850 billion, or 6 percent of the U.S. economy (last year’s $14 trillion economy, that is, not this year’s slimmed-down version), the discussion is heating up. One thing that hasn’t changed: much of that cash will go toward a smarter grid (or at least bettering the current power-transmission system) as well as rebuilding schools and other buildings with an eye on energy efficiency.

Tom Konrad at Alt Energy Stocks compiled a list of potential beneficiaries that ran from building retrofits to grid infrastructure. Among the retrofitters, he says:

Companies which sell services and equipment for building retrofits should be well placed to take advantage of these programs. Such companies include Johnson Controls (JCI), General Electric (GE), Owens Corning (OC), Philips (PHG), United Technologies (UTX), Waste Management (WMI), and Honeywell, Inc. (HON).

Konrad says he believes that even if an initial stimulus package doesn’t focus very much on improving power transmission, some smart-grid-related companies could see some money later on.

From my list of Solid, Clean picks, those companies best positioned to benefit from this sort of spending are Quanta Services (PWR), General Cable (BGC), Siemens (SI), The ABB Group (ABB), and National Grid (NGG). Quanta and General Cable perhaps the best positioned of these.

His colleague, Charles Morand, has some ideas that he believes are central to a smart grid. But he sees risk alongside opportunity. He favors three smart meter companies — EnerNOC (ENOC), Itron (ITRI) and Comverge (COMV) — and on the subject of the only one with a profit so far (Itron), he says:

This company is a leading maker of smart meters, the key tool on the consumer end of a smart grid. ITRI is a stock that I’ve found richly-priced for as long as I’ve followed the alt energy sector, and at a trailing PE of about 70x, I continue to find it very expensive.

Cleantech investors wary of awaiting a rally in solar stocks might be relieved to hear of some alternative that may have better prospects under a stimulus plan. All this talk of cleantech stocks with growing profits must sound refreshing.

Still, doing homework on companies before committing to invest is as true now as it’s ever been. Even brand-name GE is exposed to financial risks, and deserves a careful study of its financial health by investors, large and small alike.

Zensys, also based in California, makes single-chip radio frequency (RF) systems using its proprietary Z-Wave communications protocol, which Sigma says has already been used in more than 250 smart products around the world. Wirelessly networked devices can be monitored and controlled for energy management, helping to lower energy costs by controlling lighting, heating, cooling and other systems in buildings.

Many other startups in the smart energy device market, including Trilliant, Tendril, and Adura Technologies, are using the ZigBee protocol, part of an industry-wide collaboration. ZigBee is a formidable competitor for Z-Wave; today, we hear that CenterPoint Energy has received approval from the Texas Public Utilities Commission to roll out 2.2 million ZigBee-enabled smart meters. And in late July, the Texas PUC approved a similar plan from Texas utility Oncor, which will add 7 milliion ZigBee-enabled Landis+Gyr smart meters by 2012.

Zensys started its own industry consortium, the Z-Wave Alliance, with members including heating and cooling systems manufacturer Danfoss International; climate control, industrial and security technologies company Ingersoll-Rand; and Leviton Manufacturing, which makes electrical and electronic components. According to Sigma, Zensys is currently shipping more than a million RF chips per year.

Zensys is backed by some big names in the electronics industry, with its latest investment coming from Japan’s Panasonic in March. The size of that investment was not disclosed, but Bessemer Venture Partners led a $16 million third round for Zensys in 2005. Other investors include Intel Capital, the investment arm of Intel; Cisco Systems; Palamon Capital Partners, and Sunstone Capital.

With the acquisition, Zensys’ headquarters in Fremont will be merged into Sigma’s head office in neighboring Milpitas. Sigma said the Zensys research and development center in Copenhagen, where most of Zensys’ workers are based, will remain in place. Zensys has 33 employees, including 23 engineers. Sigma said the deal, which is subject to standard closing conditions, is expected to close by the end of this year.

Stacey Higginbotham and Celeste LeCompte provided additional reporting for this story.

The Kansas State Researchers — Professor Bill Kuhn and master’s student Xiaohu Zhang — decided to use solar for the energy-harvesting radio and they’ve developed a device using a board made of solar cells taken from low-end calculators. The rest of the setup (see photo) includes a low-power integrated chip — originally developed for a NASA Mars project — to store the data, and a radio to transmit the data every five seconds. Technology like this could be used in a variety of sensor networks and control systems, including a building thermostat or lighting system, as well as temperature and stress gauges for bridges and other structures.

There are other ways to harvest energy for devices, and the Kansas State researchers are also looking at methods like electrochemical, mechanical or thermal energy.

Peregrine’s not the only company interested in the space. Intel is also working on a variety of energy-harvesting technologies for both sensor networks and consumer electronics and cell phones, which would draw power from their environment, including the sun and vibrations. Intel’s CTO Justin Rattner detailed some of the company’s more blue-sky lab plans at an event earlier this month.

Startups are moving quickly in the battery-free energy-harvesting space, too. Netherlands-based startup GreenPeak, which was formed in July 2007 through a merger of two wireless companies, is selling battery-free wireless chips and network hardware that rely on harnessing tiny amounts of energy from movement or solar. GreenPeak CEO and founder Cees Links told us that batteries are the barrier to more buildings having wireless sensor networks that can help cut energy consumption. Expect to see the company, which is backed by €10 million ($14.3 million) from investors like DFJ Esprit and Motorola Ventures, moving more into the U.S. market next year.

Image courtesy of Kansas State.

SuperBulbs: With investment from VantagePoint Venture Partners, this stealth startup is working on LED bulbs that look like conventional incandescents and use 30 percent less energy than compact fluorescent light bulbs. While SuperBulbs has named the standard 4″x2″ A19 bulb as its first product, it plans to develop a family of bulbs for the $12 billion replacement market.

Oree: Israel-based Oree added $4 million in venture loans last month to $7 million raised in its Series A round of equity financing. In the two years since its founding, the company has secured funding from Silicon Valley Bank, Kreos Capital, Genesis Partners and Gimv for development of flexible, credit-card-sized LEDs for office or retail spaces and LCD displays.

HID Laboratories: American River Ventures, Big Sky Ventures, Greenhouse Capital Partners and the CalCEF Angel Fund have invested in HID Labs, which is working on a demand-response platform to control and dim high-intensity-discharge lighting, often used for large areas (think stadiums, warehouses, big-box retail stores). The company says its digital ballast can boost efficiency by 40 percent over existing magnetic-ballast options.

Adura: Funded by VantagePoint Venture Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures, Adura has developed a wireless lighting management system already in use at UC Berkeley and the Alameda County Water District headquarters. The company’s software combines timers with motion and ambient light sensors to automatically turn off unused lights, delivering savings of 40 to 70 percent.

Vu1: Vu1, which announced the close of a $5 million round of financing last week, is working on a technology that accelerates electrons toward phosphor-coated glass to produce light in a standard bulb casing. The company says it’s aiming for efficiency on par with today’s compact fluorescent light bulbs. Reflector bulbs — floodlights often used for recessed kitchen lighting — are first in line for production.

Bridgelux: One of the older kids on the block, six-year-old Bridgelux raised a Series D round of $40 million in April, bringing its total financing to more than $70 million. The company makes LED chips (the light-emitting part of light emitting diodes), mostly for electronics and vehicles. Bridgelux’s other claim to fame: Patent litigation from Cree.

Luxim: Luxim works with solid-state plasma for studio and stage lighting, producing high-intensity light with 50 percent less energy than conventional HID options. Sequoia Capital joined the $21 million round of financing the company announced earlier this year.

The Biomechanical Energy Harvester: The blogosphere dubbed Canadian professor Max Donelan’s biomechanical energy harvester “knee-brace power” earlier this year. While it’s an interesting idea, we think more compact devices that harvest smaller mechanical movement — everyday motion and vibrations — will have a chance of being adopted on a larger scale. For example, M2E Power could soon be selling a device that, when tossed in a backpack or purse, can provide an hour of talk time for some six hours of normal movement (about two days), and will cost somewhere between $25 to $40.

Brickley’s Internal Combustion Engine: Mike Brickley tossed out some parts of the internal combustion engine to cut down on friction by 35 percent and his tweaking could potentially deliver an engine that gets 20 percent better mileage than a standard car.

Carbon Emissions Are a Pain: Swiss inventor Annina Rüst developed a translucent leg band that detects your daily energy usage wirelessly (I don’t really get how, and slowly pokes out stainless steel thorns in your leg — ouch! The point is to remind you that you’re over-consuming and potentially relieve some global warming guilt.

Necessity Defense for Global Warming?: Some Greenpeace activists painted England Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s name on an E.ON power plant smoke stack, and a British jury declared the activists justified in the name of global warming. Pretty unusual, and it likely won’t hold up in other courts.

A Kangaroo A Day Keeps Global Warming Away?: If 11 percent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from methane produced by cattle and sheep, then Australian Wildlife Service’s George Wilson contends that boosting the kangaroo-as-food population and reducing the cattle and sheep population would do a lot. For the international community that doesn’t regularly eat ‘roos, it sounds weird, but hey, whatever works.

An Alternative to Gallons Per Mile: Instead of gallons per mile, a couple of Duke professors are arguing for gallons consumed per 10,000 miles, which they say would help car owners better realize the gains in efficiency and clear up some of the confusion in the counterintuitive MPG system.

Fight for the Rights of Plants: Ecuador recently declared that nature should have constitutional rights, and the result, as the Times puts it, could be “a raft of new lawsuits against oil and gas companies.”

Smart Idea in Boulder: Boulder, Colo., is getting a city-sized smart grid dubbed SmartGridCity courtesy of Xcel Energy; it’ll cost around $100 million.

That’s just what GE plans to do. The company is expected to announce tomorrow that it will start selling a CFL bulb — the GE Energy Smart CFL bulb — which is shaped like an incandescent; the company has basically shrunk and scrunched the twisty CFL shape right into the rounded glass bulb form factor. Developed by engineers in the GE’s consumer and industrial division, the bulb will go on sale at Target on Dec. 28th, at Ace Hardware in January, and at other outlets like Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart sometime in April, in time for Earth Day. It’s GE, so they already have a massive retailer partnership footprint.

The idea to make CLFs, and even the more efficient LEDs, look like regular bulbs isn’t new. Philips has more bulby-looking CFLs. Silicon Valley startup SuperBulbs is trying to tackle more difficult task of making an LED look like a regular bulb.

But GE calls their smart bulb the “first truly incandescent-shaped” CFL bulb, and the company says it has more than a dozen U.S. patent applications to protect the design. The bulb does look more like a traditional bulb than, say, the Philips rounded CFL. GE spokesperson David Schuellerman explains the difference as:

Over the past several years, lots of manufacturers, including GE, have sold “A-shaped” CFLs that feature a plastic ballast housing. The one we’re announcing this week is the world’s first truly incandescent-shaped CFL. It mirrors the shape and size of a traditional incandescent light bulb. There’s no plastic ballast housing. It’s all glass.

But perhaps getting the exact bulb shape perfect isn’t key to cracking this market. The twisty form of the regular CFL has come to signify a greener consumer choice. It could be that, like the Prius, a more alternative design could also drive sales.

The more important factor will be the cost. And GE’s product is priced pretty well — in an estimated range of $5.99 to $7.99, depending on the retailer — particularly if any kind of programs were implemented to bring down the cost even more (like the PG&E CFL program). A $6 energy efficient bulb is not a bad deal, given it’s guaranteed for five years (based on four hours of daily use). GE’s current smart bulb version is 15-watt, but the company will eventually start selling 9-watt, 20-watt, 40-watt, 75-watt and 100-watt versions. If you’re interested in the seeing a close-up of the smart bulb design, check out the video.

Boston Power thinks the upgrade will be well worth it for customers. The company says Sonata lasts for three years, runs for about four hours on a charge and that the charge fades less than comparable lithium-ion batteries. HP’s massive marketshare is a game-changing win for such a young company, and Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud tells us that the last three years of hard work are culminating in this deal.

While this is Boston Power’s first major deal, Onnerud hopes that potentially next year the Sonata batteries will be the standard option sold for laptops with other partnerships. Onnerud also said that the startup recently created a transportation division to explore how the lithium-ion batteries could be used for vehicles. Boston Power is backed by a total of $70 million from Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital and Gabriel Venture Partners.

It now sounds like the inability to raise either debt or equity for his plan is making him downright nervous, and he has shaken that initial positivity. Pickens told a group of reporters in New York yesterday that he is “anxious” over the financing.

“Where’s the money is the question. I don’t know how we’ll do it. I’m anxious to see what Obama comes up with. There is no money to finance a wind project now . . . I’m a little anxious.”

I mean, what’s there to be worried about? Just that $2 billion his firm already spent on the wind farm, the $58 million spent on promoting the Pickens Plan, the fact that his hedge fund is down $2 billion this year, and the massive global recession.

With those words, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, wrapped up two days of testimony from auto executives intended to be something like a truth commission for the incompetent but ending up more like sado-masochism in bespoke suits. It leaves one wondering what happens if we aren’t lucky — and generally not looking forward to this week.

It also raises a question. What kind of solution would everyone like?

Enter Chad Holliday, CEO not of a Detroit automaker, but of Delaware’s DuPont. It shows just how far the U.S. auto industry has fallen when it’s getting schooled by a guy who makes freon and spandex. DuPont gets a fifth of its revenue from its automotive division, so Holliday urged executives at a luncheon in Detroit’s storied Book Cadillac Hotel to consider a “Detroit Project” — a new Manhattan Project with all the innovations and none of the bombs.

Holliday says his idea is “not totally crazy” — which these days is another way of saying it’s a pretty good idea. As the Free Press reported, he envisions

[a] new-generation car as very safe and environmentally sensitive, perhaps using solar cells. The $5-billion project would be paid for through the public sale of bonds and would be operated on a tight timeline. It would involve the best scientists and engineers from the Detroit auto companies as well as Microsoft, Intel, Google, Boeing and DuPont.

Two days later in Washington, Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla) was making the same pitch to the Big Three themselves, only with an open-source twist. According to the New York Times’ Tom Zeller, Klein suggested:

that American automakers ought to form an research-and-development collective — a “Manhattan Project” of sorts, he says — to conceive and develop the very best concepts toward creating clean, efficient automotive technology. That body, Mr. Klein says, would then share and distribute this knowledge base and innovations, among all automakers.

Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli piped up that he would “totally subscribe to the concept,” although you have to wonder whether he wouldn’t totally subscribe to In These Times if it would help him get his piece of that $34 billion.

So why not a Motor City Project? A few reasons. While nothing is preventing the companies from such an ambitious transition, it’s just not in the DNA of the current management to oversee it. The notion of them relaxing their paranoid instincts to share the best research is hard to imagine. Also, the Big Three have already received a commitment of $25 billion for just such next-gen cars, but with no provision that they share information — or any strings attached, really.

A Detroit Project would mean a bailout with accountability: Take this money, share the engineering, and do something useful. The problem with the Big 3 is not the economy; it’s that this simple task is beyond them. So I guess we’re stuck with that bill that nobody likes.

For each configuration of atoms, IBM Master Inventor Viktors Berstis told us on Friday, the program will calculate “what would happen if sunlight hit this thing,” and then enter information about the properties in a database. The goal is to find a configuration that turns a greater percentage of light into electricity than is possible with current plastic (also called polymer) solar technology. The distributed computing process could cut the time needed to run the planned calculations by about two decades, said Berstis, a senior software engineer and chief scientist for the World Community Grid.

Even at the cutting edge of solar research (we wrote about some coming out of UCLA last week), scientists today can achieve only a little more than 5 percent efficiency with plastic, compared with more than 10 percent efficiency with thin-film silicon. Researchers continue to pursue polymer solar cells, however, because of the potential for much cheaper and more flexible materials that could be used on more varied surfaces than today’s solar arrays.

The World Community Grid platform itself (which like SETI@home runs on UC Berkeley’s open-source BOINC software) is not new. Since 2004, IBM has put it to work on five projects, including a search for new anti-HIV drugs and an attempt to identify more nutritious strains of rice based on protein structures.

As with previous projects, Berstis said that, beyond commercial applications, IBM has philanthropic aims, and its findings will ultimately enter the public domain. He said a breakthrough in this research could help bring down the cost of solar significantly and change the economics of clean power.

But this project isn’t all about doing good. It also represents an opportunity for Big Blue to demonstrate its distributed-systems and cloud-computing services, since it plans to bolster volunteers’ computing power with an internal cloud and invite clients of related services to join the effort. “We’ll go through and try to synthesize all kinds of exotic materials,” he said. “It’s not guaranteed that we’ll find something — but there is a good chance we will.”

Sent last week, this message came as global leaders made final preparations for another set of climate change talks, known as COP-14, that kicked off today in Poland. As the first international conference on the issue since the election, COP-14 represents a re-entry for the U.S. into global climate change talks largely neglected since the country walked away from the Kyoto Protocol.

Signed by leaders of the Western Governors’ Association, which represents governors from 19 states (including Alaska, of “Drill Baby Drill” fame), plus Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, the letter includes calls for tens of billions of dollars in annual investment in clean energy and vehicle technologies, assistance for industries transitioning to renewable fuels and more efficient technologies, and rewards for utilities that reduce customers’ energy usage.

The governors’ vision extends beyond public funding for cleantech. The group also suggests making “maximum use” of market-based mechanisms for slashing emissions, and encouraging (though not requiring) the private sector to invest at least as much as the federal government into energy technologies. The governors don’t specify a regulatory scheme for carbon emissions, but they are clear on how revenue from something like a carbon tax should be spent. “Revenue raised should support the energy policy principles in this letter,” the governors write, “and not be used as a means of sustaining or expanding general governmental operations.”

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal industry group, has announced support for the governors’ stance — or a skewed version of it, at least: Instead of renewable fuels, the coalition suggests the governors have come out swinging for so-called “clean coal” technology.

For Consumers Energy, which has about 6.5 million customers in Michigan, IBM says it will implement advanced metering technology and a smart grid field pilot network that will start being built in 2009. For AEP, which has 5 million customers across 11 states, IBM will deploy smart grid technology for customer programs in at least three cities, and provide technology, storage devices and energy-efficiency technology. Utilities are increasingly taking the plunge and deploying smart grid technology in an attempt to both increase the efficiency of existing power plants (which in turn can help avoid adding more expensive power generation), as well as get the grid ready for the addition of clean power generation. U.S. utilities plan to add 40 gigawatts of clean energy generation by 2030 and to ensure that the grid can handle that load utilities need to implement technologies like smart meters, networking software and hardware, and energy storage and grid power.

IBM has been working in the smart grid field for years. It is a member of industry groups including GridWise Alliance, Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition, and the Demand and Response Smart Grid Coalition (which Google also recently joined), and it has also been working with smart-grid startups like Gridpoint through its venture capital group.

So what would Car 2.0 look like? The next generation of cars will be networked — both to the power grid and to communication networks — and will have the ease and functionality of our consumer electronics. And as startups and companies in Silicon Valley start working on the next generation of vehicles, IT and software tools will be used to deliver vehicle innovation. Tesla has already been trying to brand its cars as being developed in the Valley and aimed at disrupting Detroit, while Better Place has gone a step further, pulling some of the top talent from the software industry — including Agassi himself, who hails from SAP.

Gadi Amit, the founder and principal designer for San Francisco-based NewDealDesign, which is helping design Better Place’s charging stations, battery swap stations and vehicle plug interfaces, says his firm is taking a cue from the user experience of gadgets and cell phones. The company already has a long history of designing consumer electronics like Dell’s eco PC, Fujitsu cell phones and the mobile device the Ogo 2.0. For Better Place’s charging stations that means using things like blinking LED lights and making the charging experience a couple-click “painless” process.

The electric cars themselves will largely look like regular cars but will plug into charging stations — about half the height of a parking meter — throughout the Bay Area, which will be able to charge two cars at a time. The charge will be controlled by smart software and a communication network, which will determine how much electricity will be used at any given time so that the utility can manage the load on the power grid. We’re not sure exactly what standards Better Place will use, but so-called smart charging is being worked on by several companies. V2Green, which was recently acquired by GridPoint, is currently using cellular networks to connect information between the vehicle and the utility.

While software like V2Green’s and Better Place’s will help usher in the next-generation of networked vehicle, the car becoming digital and smart has been a growing trend over the past couple of years. In-car GPS systems have grown in popularity and have become standard in new cars. As consumers have grown accustomed to always-on electronics, startups like Dash Navigation and big tech companies like Microsoft have been working with car companies to build web-type experiences for vehicles. And every year at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, there are more car companies and vehicle gear than the year before.

But are consumers ready to embrace Car 2.0? According to a report from UC Berkeley’s Global Venture Lab, “The Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Rollout Strategy,” in the Bay Area, the first users of a network like Better Place’s will live in densely populated areas, and will drive a high number of miles per day, likely via long-distance commutes.

Those users are also likely be sensitive to environmental decisions — and costs — but will have a significant amount of disposable income. A good indicator of whether someone would sign up for the network is if they’ve participated in a carpool, says the report. These early adopters will be the most likely to start using an EV network, but will also offer Better Place the best return on investment.

In the Bay Area, the report suggests that Santa Clara, Alameda and San Mateo would be good first options for an EV network. San Francisco, meanwhile, is unlikely to be one of the first locations to get a lot of charging stations because the driving distances within the city are shorter, and most residents live in apartment buildings. San Francisco residents might be a good candidates to buy electric vehicles, but could be more attracted to charging the cars at their workplaces, which are often in the Silicon Valley and Santa Clara regions.

Ultimately Amit says Better Place wants to focus on making the charging stations, vehicles and battery swap stations low-cost, yet well-designed. These chargers are for “mass deployment,” he says, and are “not just for the rich and famous.” We’ll see how much Better Place’s cars and subscription plans cost before seeing if they could reach mass adoption. And when/if Better Place’s $1 billion network gets built, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are going to get the first crack at Car 2.0.

At a Credit Suisse party last month, John Argo, vice president of operations for Bloo Solar, said he would like to see the formation of an independent body to come up with an objective standard more reflective of the sunlight a panel would get on an average day.

“No standards measure for that,” he said. “It should be possible to come up with an equation to do this.” He argues that what really matters is the total kilowatt-hours a panel produces, not the cost per watt. (This is in contrast to the viewpoints of people like Suntech Power CEO Zhengrong Shi, who has said that cost per watt is the only metric that matters.)

What’s the problem with the current efficiency measurement? Commercially available thin films aren’t as efficient as conventional silicon-based solar cells, at least the way efficiency is measured today. The standard of measurement is based on peak power, or the maximum amount of electricity that a panel can produce in ideal conditions.

For comparison, take a look at these numbers. First Solar, the world’s No. 1 thin-film solar manufacturer, said it had reached an average cell efficiency of 10.6 percent at the end of last year. Meanwhile, SunPower Corp., which makes the most efficient commercially available silicon-based cell, sells panels with 22-percent efficiency.

Thin film manufacturers claim their panels produce more electricity in actual conditions, even though the efficiency number makes it look like they produce less.

That’s partly because as traditional panels heat up (as they tend to do when they absorb sunlight all day), they become less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, while thin films lose less efficiency at higher temperatures.

Another reason is that thin films can make electricity in diffuse light, while regular silicon-based panels need more direct light, which advocates say means that means thin films can produce more electricity throughout the day.

Thin-film technologies such as Bloo’s might deliver the same or higher cost per watt as a monocrystalline panel, but a lower cost per kilowatt-hour, Argo said, adding that his company is already getting contracts that agree to pay more per watt, as long as the technology meets its performance goals.

Keshav Prasad, vice president of business development for Signet Solar Inc., thinks the total system output is most important, and says the current efficiency numbers don’t matter when it comes to customer purchases: “I do not believe anybody buys panels based on efficiency numbers,” he said last month. “I don’t know if it’s an important criteria. It’s [certainly] not the only criteria.”

Marcelino Susas, vice president of strategic marketing for Energy Conversion Devices Inc. agrees on the total output being the key metric: “On the measurement of kilowatt-hours per kilowatt installed, we perform better than triple-junction,” he said. “Installations around the world are seeing this. We want to say, ‘Think of thin film a little differently.’”

But as you’d expect, not everyone agrees with this idea, particularly manufacturers of traditional silicon-based solar panels. Take SolarWorld AG, for example.

“What they are trying to push here is where they believe they have an advantage – the only tiny advantage they have – to try to get customers’ trust,” said Boris Klebensberger, chief operating officer of SolarWorld and president of SolarWorld Industries America, speaking of thin-film manufacturers (read more about his views on thin film and other topics here).

It’s unlikely crystalline-silicon manufacturers will go along with a new measurement that could put them at less of an advantage – and crystalline-silicon manufacturers still own the bulk of the market.

Thin-film manufacturers’ best bet might be to come up with a new standardized calculation they can use — in addition to, not instead of — the current efficiency number to help customers more easily suss out what technology would make the most sense for them, depending on where they live.

After all, as Prasad said, efficiency is one gauge – but it’s not everything customers need to know to make their decision.

American automakers have been producing a mediocre product for decades, and have fought cleantech at every turn (remember the EV1?). They’ve earned their failure, and should be allowed to go into bankruptcy so that their assets and workers can be reallocated to companies that are not freighted with old baggage.

The government should send a clear message that it will bail out soon-to-be-idled auto workers and their suppliers, but not the companies themselves. Let’s look at where the real value is in the American auto manufacturing base.

The value is not in the upper layers of management or the corporations themselves. The value is in the millions of people who are employed by the auto industry, in their institutional knowledge and skills, and in the factories in which they work. Those people will still know how to build cars even if they are out of work for a year, and if supported during this interval, most will find work with new and more dynamic companies. Meanwhile, the factories will still be there. Such assets that can be sold in liquidation to entrepreneurs seeking to build new car companies.

I view this chapter of the economic crisis as a great opportunity, a chance to drive a stake through slow-moving companies that have done more to retard innovation than anyone. Get rid of the corporate shells and the bloated management and start anew. Provide special programs to support idled workers, fast-track universal health care so company-sponsored health insurance is rendered moot, and spend the rest on funding and incentives for new car companies to scale and bring hybrid and electric cars to mass production.

Remember, it took the U.S. just months to retool the auto industry in response to WWII. This may be the best opportunity in half a century to restart what was once the pride of this country’s manufacturing sector. It’s called creative destruction. The U.S. car companies have earned it.

“Oil is finite, but information is infinite,” said Schmidt explaining that the goal was “to take the structures of information and apply it to what is the life blood” of the economy ie. energy and oil. Schmidt pointed to how the power of the Internet in bringing information to the world, saying that one day, “almost all of the world’s people will have access to almost all of the world’s information.” That, he said, can create both transparency — helping to deliver the truth in a wisdom-of-the-crowds type of way — as well as “engagement” and a two-way dialogue over important issues like energy.

In the same way that Obama used the Internet and web sites like YouTube to create engagement and passionate supporters, the Internet can help the energy crisis by creating an informed — and action-oriented — user base, said Schmidt. Al Gore expressed a similar sentiment at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this month when he said we need to use the latest web tools to organize a social movement in order to help rescue the Earth from climate change.

And given that the Internet was founded on an openness that spurred innovation, why, wondered Schmidt, don’t we apply that model to the energy grid? More specifically, the Internet was created to let any devices connect to it, and any applications to run over it — as long they play by the rules. So it should be used to design the power grid to allow for distributed power generation, a smart two-way connection, and distributed energy storage in plug-in vehicles, Schmidt said. The only reason the grid is not this way now is because of “a design problem,” he said, adding, “It’s just a matter of will.”

Schmidt’s suggestion is to first and foremost start building out the grid and making it smarter. “[T]he simplest thing we have to do is address the grid problem,” he said. And he suggests using part of the bailout program to help fund this buildout.

Ultimately getting the grid built out is dependent on first laying out the necessary infrastructure, so that clean power can be generated, and utilities can invest in energy efficiency programs. Broadband networks are needed before people can access the Internet, use web sites like Facebook, or create email accounts; the underlying infrastructure for the power grid needs to be built out, too.

As Schmidt put it, “[I]nfrastructure is the foundation upon which wealth is created.” He should know, without high-speed broadband there would be no Google.

Image courtesy of the New America Foundation.