How America can revamp its energy infrastructure, recharge its economy and reshape its future by embracing three major green initiatives.

The financial meltdown has rattled the U.S. banking system to its core. The unprecedented increase in the price of oil this summer has wreaked havoc on household budgets. The presidential race has surfaced divisions of class, race and geography among the American people.

But a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The presidential election taking place next week has the potential to set America on a new path. Embracing three massive opportunities presented by eco-related initiatives will help America move closer toward its goals of achieving energy independence, escaping recession and creating a sustainable lifestyle for its citizens.

1. Rebuild the National Grid.

The current power grid is outdated and inefficient. The majority of power plants are more than 30 years old. The aging infrastructure costs the economy between $25 to $180 billion in outages every year. More than 7 percent of energy was lost due to inefficient transmission and distribution methods in 2007 alone.

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Election day is a week away, and voters have dozens of state and city propositions to acquaint themselves with before stepping into that voting booth. This year in California there are three state propositions that affect renewable energy and because they’re so important we decided to dig into the details and help you navigate the deceptively complicated language and make the greenest decisions. Why California? — the state leads the nation in cleantech investing, and, well, we’re based here, too. (So, we threw in a look at a San Francisco proposal for good measure).

Proposition 1A: Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond.

What it proposes: In 1996, the California High-Speed Rail Authority was created to plan and build a high-speed rail system linking California’s major cities. The total cost was estimated at $45 billion, funded by federal, state and local governments, as well as private sources. Proposition 1A proposes raising $9 billion to build the section of the rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco and another $950 million for other state and local rail lines.

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The UK Department for Transport announced today that, as part of the country’s plan to reduce emissions, the government will be putting £100 million ($155 million) into electric car research, development and deployment. The program will make the UK a better place for electric cars, but there’s no word yet if Better Place is bidding on the projects. (Shai Agassi did pitch his idea to the PM Gordon Brown earlier this year, though.)

The money will be divvied up across several initiatives. £20 million has been dedicated to researching technology to lower the costs of EVs, £10 million will go into a 100-vehicle demonstration competition where consumers can test the cars, and another £20 million will be offered up for car companies to make electric vans for government use, including mail delivery. The short list of manufacturers for this project includes Ford, Mercedes Benz, Citroen, Ashwoods, Land Rover, Modec, Smiths, Electric Vehicles, LDV, Nissan and Allied Vehicles.

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As the Western Climate Initiative, the second cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases in the U.S., makes its way toward enforcement by 2010, Western states are rolling out their own plans and regulations aimed at meeting its reduction goals. Earlier this month California released a final proposed scoping plan for implementing AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, and today, Oregon approved the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rules introduced earlier this year. Public comment on the proposed rules closed in May; the state’s Environmental Quality Commission signed off on them this morning.

Beginning in 2010, all facilities that emit more than 2,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide (or equivalent volumes of other greenhouse gases) will be required to report their emissions totals. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) estimates that the new rules will impact 481 small businesses, 126 large businesses and more than 100 local and state government agencies (from hospitals and prisons to county-owned landfills and sewage treatment facilities).

The reporting rules are aimed at developing a statewide strategy for reducing emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and to 75 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. “This new rule will help us obtain the fundamental information we need to target reductions of greenhouse gas emissions by identifying the sources of these global warming pollutants and is the first step in developing a cap-and-trade system that works for Oregon’s economy and our environment,” Gov. Ted Kulongoski said in a release.

As the Western Climate Initiative finalizes its own reporting guidelines, DEQ says it will modify its standards in keeping with those goals.

Add this to the (small) list of things you CAN’T blame the credit crisis for: carbon project delays.

Reuters has an article this morning on the impact of the credit crunch on the global carbon finance market. The upshot: Carbon markets are strong, yet projects are being delayed anyway. But not by finance hurdles. Instead, the problem is an overwhelmed regulatory process.

The global carbon markets grew to $50 billion in the first six months of 2008 and are expected to double by year’s end, according to Reuters. But the original outline of the carbon markets regulatory scheme didn’t anticipate the huge amount of interest in “Clean Development Mechanism” projects. Such projects allow developed nations to purchase credits from carbon-friendly projects in the developing world. Karan Capoor, a World Bank specialist in carbon and environmental finance, told Reuters, “[T]he regulatory infrastructure is not fully geared to handle this high level of interest.”

The article notes that 63 percent of carbon projects are currently “under review,” and Capoor estimates that delays can reduce their potential tradeable credits by as much as 40 percent. As we’ve noted before, if such regulatory hurdles aren’t sorted out, the market is likely to become less attractive to potential investors, even those looking for a safe haven from the credit crisis.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, who recently unveiled a sweeping $4.4 trillion energy plan, will join Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign trail this week to publicly back the Illinois Senator, according to the Wall Street Journal. What a good way to start off a week! I recently wrote an op-ed for the Forbes Energy Genius report that said Obama should consider making Schmidt his chief cleantech officer. I thought it was a long-shot fun idea at the time, but perhaps it wasn’t so wacky after all.

Schmidt tells the WSJ he is personally backing Obama — not representing Google — and will make his first appearance with Obama at an event in Florida on Tuesday. At an EcoForum event in San Francisco in September, Schmidt chided the federal government for a lack of leadership on energy issues, and I personally asked him if, since he was disappointed with energy policy, he was planning on backing either presidential campaign. At that time he said he hadn’t backed one candidate over the other.

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Despite the winds of green job creation starting to blow across the U.S., the UK’s ambitious goal of supplying a third of its electricity from wind by 2020 is starting to look like it could be unachievable. That’s the assessment according to an investigation by the Observer, which also says wind industry leaders will issue the same warning at a high-profile British wind conference this week.

The UK is aiming to meet 15 percent of its energy needs with renewable power by 2020, and that translates into wind power supplying 36 percent of its electricity. The problem is that the U.K. currently generates just 4 percent of its electricity with wind, and as the Observer assesses: “No country has tried to switch its electricity supply so quickly on this scale.”

Even if the growth rate is technically doable, the Observer notes that there’s an overwhelming number of obstacles in the way: escalating costs of offshore wind farms (double the cost of onshore wind), bottlenecks in planning and approving sites, a lack of engineers, backups in the supply chain, potential NIMBY-ism and a lack of grid infrastructure. Any of these limitations could easily derail the extremely aggressive target, and taken together they start to look insurmountable.

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It’s been a pro-solar week in Oregon. German solar maker SolarWorld is set to open its 480,000-square-foot semiconductor plant in Hillsboro today, and Sanyo broke ground at its 861,000-square-foot factory on Wednesday at the Salem (Ore.) Renewable Energy and Technology Park. As we’ve written before, solar manufacturers are moving into Oregon at a brisk pace, thanks in part to the state’s successful Business Energy Tax Credit. But while the new solar facilities may boost clean energy around the world, what’s their impact on Oregon’s energy supply?

Semiconductor manufacturing is an energy intensive business; such facilities can require 20 to 70 MW of power load, according to Tom Guantt, a spokesman for Pacific Power. While that’s a laughably wide range, none of the solar manufacturers were willing to disclose the specific energy footprint of their facilities. Pacific Power’s service territory includes just one of the announced solar manufacturing plants in Oregon — the Peak Sun facility in Millersburg — while Portland General Electric (PGE) is responsible for servicing the other new developments, including the SolarWorld and Sanyo facilities, as well as the Solaicx, XsunX and Spectrawatt factories.

Whether its 20 or 70, a tens-of-megwatts load isn’t easy to for the grid to absorb, especially when it’s concentrated at one site. Much like turning on too many kitchen appliances at once can overtax your home’s circuit breaker, ramping up heavy industrial manufacturing without prior planning would destabilize the local power grid. To avoid this problem, Oregon utilities have had to prepare, by adding new substations, upgrading distribution and transmission lines — and, potentially, building or buying additional generation. (Yes, that means power plants.)

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The Obama campaign’s web site is suggesting that their new economic plan may be eliminating capital gains taxes for venture capital investors, a move that would surely be welcomed as VCs look for strategies that will carry them through a tough economy.

For cleantech startups, such a move could have an impact on freeing up investments, and could be particularly useful in light of the recent financial turmoil.

Dan Primack at peHUB spotted the wording in the campaign’s outline of its economic plan small business rescue plan.

Barack Obama believes that we need to encourage investment in small businesses to help create jobs and turn our economy around. That’s why Obama will eliminate all capital gains taxes on investments made in small and start-up businesses. Unlike John McCain, who wants to give $200 billion in new tax cuts to America’s largest and most profitable businesses, Barack Obama wants to cut taxes for the small businesses that create jobs but struggling with restricted access to credit alongside skyrocketing health care and energy costs.

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Neal Dikeman, CEO of Carbonflow and a partner at Jane Capital, offered up some impassioned words of wisdom for the optimistic cleantech VCs in Silicon Valley over at the Cleantech Blog yesterday: For all the talk of a green boom in the midst of the downturn, don’t expect just any cleantech investment to survive.

His advice was largely to heed the warning contained in the old tortoise-and-the-hare fable: When pitted against the foolish and fast, slow and steady wins the race. Most of today’s hottest cleantech categories are energy related, and Dikeman points out that energy is an old, complex, global business that few entrepreneurs are well-positioned to either understand or navigate:

Beware Silicon Valley, the great fortunes, wars, and economic crises of the world for 100 years are not technology ones, they were energy made. Half the schools you went to were built by oil money. And the entreprenuerial spirit in this industry was born in the hardscrabble oilfields of Pennsylvania and Texas, and grew up in the far reaches of the globe. And the oil companies those entrepreneurs founded have forgotten more about technology in energy than you even know existed.

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