SunRun, a startup that finances solar power for homeowners, says it has secured a tax equity commitment of around $105 million from an affiliate of US Bancorp to buy about 2,000 residential solar facilities. SunRun is one of the first companies to attempt to create a business model where homeowners can buy solar power off their roofs, while a third party owns the panels.

That business model, called a power purchase agreement, is what has helped the commercial solar industry grow. Building owners get a fixed, flat rate to purchase solar electricity, and don’t have to pay for the hardware itself. In September SunRun’s service had its year anniversary, though it’s unclear how successful converting the commercial model to residential homes has actually been.

SunRun has managed to raise venture financing and has made some significant partnerships in the past. Back in June SunRun raised $12 million in financing from venture firm Foundation Capital. And a couple months before that SunRun said it had partnered up with solar installer Akeena Solar. In a market where project financing is hard to come by, the funding from US Bancorp seems like it’s a recognition that’s PPA’s for residential customers, could be showing some promise.

Here’s a pop quiz: Biofuels were A) largely responsible for the jump in food prices earlier this year, B) had very little to do with the food price sticker shock, or C) the effects of biofuels are unclear and complex. If you picked ‘C’ then you’re way too reasonable to write press releases for either of the two partisan trade groups that issued statements this week — one calling for the end of U.S. biofuels subsidies and the other lauding their economic benefits.

The Food Before Fuel organization, which includes companies that rely on food prices for their livelihood, like the Grocery Manufacturers Organization, the American Beverage Association and the American Meat Institute, say that subsidies for ethanol should be phased out.

The group’s proposal is based on a national study it commissioned from Ipsos Public Affairs, which found that when those surveyed were told of the USDA’s claim that corn ethanol was responsible for 10 percent of food price inflation, about half of them said they were less likely to support policies backing corn ethanol. And a little over half of those surveyed said that Congress should reduce or eliminate mandates and subsidies for corn ethanol.

Well, the problem with their study is that there is a lot of conflicting data out there. Some, like the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, have said that food price increases can thank biofuels for a 3 percent of bump, while a formerly secret, and then not-at-all secret, World Bank report claimed that biofuels were responsible for as much as three-fourths of the former jump in food prices. And from looking at the recent drop in oil prices, which coincided with a drop in food prices, some are speculating that the main contributor is the price of crude.

That’s what the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) — a trade group that includes biofuel sellers — are saying:

American consumers should not be fooled by ongoing attempts to misplace blame for this year’s rise in food prices on biofuels. The evidence before consumers is clear: crop prices have fallen dramatically in the past few months as oil and gas prices have declined…This connection between oil and crop prices has been noted by agricultural economists throughout the year. Yet many policymakers continue to be distracted by a spurious food vs. fuel debate.

BIO says it thinks that the current federal mandates that call for the production of 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2022 is “a tremendous opportunity for jobs and growth,” that will “replace 4.1 percent of U.S. oil imports” and keep “$8.4 billion in the U.S. economy rather than sending it overseas.” Well, when you put it that way, that sounds pretty good.

It’s all rather depressing for someone trying to figure out how to effectively fight climate change. The data is so conflicting that we’re compelled to do the following: Call 50 people and tell them that biofuels are responsible for poverty, hunger, and high food prices and ask them if they back policies that support them. Call another 50 and tell them that biofuels can reduce carbon emissions and oil imports and have no effect on food prices, and ask if they would back policies that would support them. Take the results and line your cat’s litter box and you’re all set.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is holding a press conference Thursday afternoon which will discuss “the latest news” from electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place. Does this mean San Francisco, or even California, is going to make a deal with Shai Agassi’s company, which has managed to sign on Israel, Denmark and Australia? We’re not sure, but Better Place has been making a major effort in the U.S. lately, and states like Michigan have been showing interest.

Agassi has said that to build out the infrastructure throughout California it would cost $1.5 billion, or about two weeks of oil imports. That would include car charging spots in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and battery swap stations every 25 miles that would connect these hubs. For 100 miles, the system would need four switch stations, which would cost $2 million; for 400 miles, the network would need 16 stations, which would cost $8 million.

Because the press conference is Mayor’s Newsom’s, we’re guessing if it is about a deal with Better Place, it’s not yet a statewide effort. But regardless we’re eager to hear what the city and the Better Place folks have to say — we’ll bring you the full report.

Electric Mini at the LA Auto Show: BMW has sent about 200 electric minis to the U.S., and they’re showing one off at the LA Auto Show. Someone snap a photo and send it to us! — MIT Tech Review.

China’s AutoMakers Want Bailout, too: The New York Times asks “Do Chinese automakers need a bailout?” Given chinese car companies have seen flat or slightly negative sales this fall, Chinese executives are thinking they need “emergency measures.” — New York Times.

The Plug-In Hybrid Battery that Keeps Going: Utility Southern California Edison says it has demonstrated performance of a plug-in hybrid battery to more than 180,000 miles in a commercial delivery van powered by a lithium-ion battery subpack from Johnson Controls and Saft. — GoodCleanTech.

Bummer for Ethanol Producers: “An Omaha investment banker said the current roster of 16 bankrupt ethanol plants, five of them in Iowa, will grow to as many as 40 by early next year as the industry is squeezed by falling prices and volatile markets.” — DesMoinesRegister.com.

Can a solar company run a carmaker? And do we really want to find out? Well, Germany’s SolarWorld announced today that it wants to take the plunge into the auto industry with a bid for Adam Opel, the well-known German brand and a subsidiary of struggling General Motors since 1929. But analysts are very skeptical, and GM has flat-out denied the possibility.

“It’s pure speculation,” Geri Lama, a spokeswoman for GM, told us. “Opel is not for sale.”

SolarWorld, which makes solar modules for residences as well as large-scale solar plants, believes it can get Opel to go green, turning the automaker into a producer of more energy-efficient and low-emission vehicles.

SolarWorld said it’s planning to offer €250 million ($313.5 million) in cash, plus another €750 million in bank credit lines. But the company has put some high demands on the deal, saying that the credit lines are conditional on getting German government guarantees, and that a core prerequisite is the complete separation of Opel from GM, as well as compensation payments for all of Opel’s German jobs, totaling €1 billion. It’s not clear from SolarWorld’s statement whether GM is expected to cough up that compensation cash, or if it would come from the government.

Despite the detail SolarWorld is providing, however, industry watchers remain unconvinced such an offer will come to fruition. “This is a great gag,” Juergen Pieper, a car analyst at Bankhaus Metzler, told Reuters, alleging that the company is only making the bid to get itself into the news.

Prior to making a move for the auto industry, SolarWorld has kept itself busy in the world of solar. Last month, it opened a 480,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Oregon, and in June, SolarWorld signed a deal to deliver over €750 million worth of crystalline silicon wafers to Solar Semiconductor.

With its owner, GM — along with Chrysler and Ford Motor — back on Capitol Hill today with the hopes of securing a bailout from Washington, Opel is seeking help at home. Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the German government will conduct a constructive review on the possibility of extending a state liquidity guarantee to Opel. But the chancellor said that the government needs to ensure that any funds from a state guarantee remain in Germany and don’t end up in the U.S.

SolarWorld said that if a deal goes through, Opel would continue to produce its current models, but would extend its offerings to include electric and hybrid vehicles. According to SolarWorld, Opel is already working on the development of electric and hybrid drive cars at its research center in Rüsselsheim.

And SolarWorld said it has its own experience to offer for the carmaker from the years it’s spent working on the development and testing of solar-powered vehicles. SolarWorld said some of those vehicles have participated in motor racing, although most cars that are completely solar-powered are extremely lightweight, tiny vehicles that bear little resemblance to anything that Opel produces.

GM’s largest subsidiary outside of North America, Opel got its start making sewing machines back in 1862 and has been producing cars since 1899. Its passenger cars include the Astra, Corsa and Vectra, with light commercial vehicles including the Combo and Movano.

By now Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has said several times that he’s not interested in the position of Chief Technology Officer in the next administration, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped giving politically tinged speeches on the topic of energy. Schmidt gave a talk yesterday for the New America Foundation on how the power of information and the open model of the Internet can help solve the oil and energy crisis.

“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.

Corn-based ethanol has been crashing with the economy, but the prospects for cellulosic ethanol seem a little brighter — SunEthanol, based in Hadley, Mass., says it’s pulled in $25 million in a Series B round, and changed its name to boot. Now known as Qteros, after its Q microbe technology, the company raised the cash from a group including billionaire George Soros and big oil.

Noticeably absent from the list of investors is South Dakota’s VeraSun Energy, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October. VeraSun took a minority stake in Qteros, then SunEthanol, in August 2007. (Qteros CEO William Frey tells us via email that despite not participating in this round VeraSun continues as a shareholder in the company.)

The Series B financing was led by new investor Venrock, along with previous investor Battery Ventures. Other new investors include London’s BP, no stranger to cleantech fundings, and Soros Fund Management. Series A backers Long River Ventures and Camros Capital also participated.

BP already has a hand in cellulosic ethanol, putting $90 million into Cambridge-based Verenium, another Massachusetts-based biofuel firm, in August. BP has also invested cash in the Energy Biosciences Institute, an academic and industry collaboration, as well as California biofuel startup Synthetic Genomics.

Qteros has what it says is a unique microbial solution for converting non-food plants and waste into biofuel; its Q microbe simplifies the process, eliminating the need for a separate enzymatic breakdown step. The technology was originally seeded and spun out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst by Battery Ventures.

Earlier this year, Qteros picked up some talent from chemical giant DuPont for its executive team, naming William Frey as its new CEO in June. Frey previously led DuPont’s work in advanced biofuels and cellulosic process technologies. Former Qteros CEO Jef Sharp, who continues to sit on the board of directors, now serves as executive V-P at the company.

That same month, Qteros signed a deal to work with Harvard University on developing new strains of the company’s Q microbe, with Harvard researchers looking to boost the amount of ethanol that can be produced with the microbe. And Qteros made another deal in August, announcing that it would work with MBI International to scale up its Q microbe process.

Qteros said it’s ready to scale up with this latest funding, with plans to build a pilot plant and eventually move to commercial operations, and said it’s hiring additional engineers and scientists as part of the expansion. The company is getting new digs for all those new people, opening up a research center in Marlborough, just outside of Boston. Qteros currently has its research center in Amherst.

The company has yet to pick a location for the pilot plant, but according to its web site, Qteros is looking at its home state of Massachusetts as well as neighboring Connecticut for the new facility.

President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to addressing climate change this week, asserting that, “[F]ew challenges facing America — and the world — are more urgent.” But the speech was notable for skirting that other urgent challenge facing the world: its tanking economy.

Sandwiched between an American flag and a heavily autographed basketball, Obama sent a videogram (transcript here) to the Governorpalooza summit that California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger is hosting this Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the world’s climate. The message: America’s stance on climate change is about to change.

No, it isn’t new, but it’s probably a welcome message to many, especially with Obama urging leaders at home and abroad to work with him. Gov. Schwarzenegger is hosting his climate summit at the Beverly Hills Hilton (because nothing says conservation quite like Beverly Hills) for U.S. governors as well as leaders from China, the European Union, Brazil and other countries.

Here’s the gist of Obama’s invitation to them:

My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. I promise you this: When I am president, any governor who’s willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that’s willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America.

Not mentioned is how Obama, and other leaders, can manage these changes without adding to a severe recession or slow its likely fragile recovery.

This isn’t to say that addressing climate change will necessarily hurt the economy — the right investments and stimulus can help both goals. Everyone from Al Gore to Thomas Friedman to Van Jones are calling for investment in clean energy sectors to produce green jobs. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk from Obama on how he plans to balance climate policies with the economic recovery. Gov. Schwarzennegger’s summit will hopefully start the conversation.

The recent decades of economic growth has helped hurt the climate, but restoring some of that economic growth can potentially help undo the damage. The question is, which specific actions would work? No one expects the President to have all the answers two months before he even takes office. But it still wouldn’t hurt to hear him think out loud a little on that question.

Who says corporate blogs can’t be informative? Sometimes what is deemed worthy of a blog post can speak volumes about the companies publishing them.

Let’s look at two companies and their posts. Both employ a lot of U.S. autoworkers. One of them is seeking a massive bailout from the U.S. government. The other is managing OK on its own. Can you tell from their blogs which one is which?

First up is Company No. 1, which announced on its blog today a new hybrid car running on natural gas that will be displayed at the Los Angeles Auto Show this week. The car replaces a gas hybrid’s fuel system with a compressed natural-gas system, giving it a range of up to 250 miles on a fuel whose price has been much less volatile than gas.

And while Company No. 1 stresses it’s just a concept car, it’s one of many alternative fuel applications under study.

This concept vehicle is a statement that we intend to include CNG in our diverse portfolio of future alternative-fuel R&D. Our purpose in building it as a concept is to demonstrate the efficiency and adaptability of Hybrid Synergy Drive, and to demonstrate that we continue to work with a variety of power-train concepts to ensure that we have products that meet the current and future needs of our customers on a global basis.

Not bad! Now, let’s look at Company No. 2. It also posted on its blog today, a rather sneery “open letter” to a national columnist who has been critical of it. This company points to an electric car that also doesn’t rely on gasoline, but goes only 40 miles. It’s an uneasy read: defensive and arrogant in tone, and unwilling to admit to missteps.

What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup, or our business plan, or our long-term strategy. What exposes us to failure now is the global financial crisis. Please know that you have an open invitation to come and visit…We’ll be happy to brief you and we’ll even show you the cool stuff. Please give us a call. We’re looking forward to your visit.

Company 1, of course, is Toyota. And No. 2 is GM (the columnist is the NY Times’ Thomas Friedman). It’s telling that Toyota’s message is centered on innovation while GM’s is centered on lashing out at critics and deflecting blame.

True, GM is on the ropes, wanting to be heard above the crowd that is against giving it a bailout. But this glimpse at both companies illustrates why the market has been favoring Toyota.

J.P. Morgan analyst Christopher Blansett created some buzz in the solar sector Monday with a note urging investors to make a “flight to safety” — noting that companies will have to weather “reduced solar subsidies next year, higher solar system borrowing costs and increasing competition at all levels of the solar PV food chain.”

Those factors, combined together, could damage the weaker players in the industry.

And investors, having stomached several months of volatility — most of it downward — are surely craving some safety. Just this week, MEMC cut its own forecast for this quarter. The solar-wafer manufacturer expects $500 million in revenue (down from $570 million) and its gross profit to be 48 percent of profit (down from 50 percent).

MEMC’s darker forecast follows another one that made even bigger waves last week: JA Solar (JASO), whose executives weren’t content with slashing its own guidance but went a big step further and used a word that can trigger a cascade of sell orders: “At this moment the market reaction has been panic,” JA’s CEO Samuel Yang said.

Yang meant to say solar manufacturers had ramped up spending right before the global economic turmoil, causing a solar goods glut. But all people heard was that word “panic.”

Hence the deeper appetite for safety in a sector once beloved for its high-risk/high-return potential.

Morgan’s Blansett recommends companies like First Solar and SunPower for their strong balance sheets and ability to stay cash flow positive in a tough market. He suggests avoiding companies like Evergreen Solar and Ascent Solar, both of which he downgraded.

Evergreen tumbled 9 percent to $2.91 Monday and Ascent descended 4 percent to $3.69. But oddly, First Solar and SunPower also declined, respectively, 4 percent to $110.56 and 3 percent to $27, respectively.

That might have something to do with Blansett. As Eric Savitz at Barron’s noticed, Blansett is recommending First Solar and SunPower, but at much lower prices.

One slightly odd aspect to Blansett’s call is that he has price targets on the stocks he likes that are near or below current levels: for FSLR, his target is $102, while for SPWRA, his target is $28.50. By way of explanation, he writes in his research note that “we do not see First Solar shares as completely immune” from the issues facing the industry, and that he remains cautious on overall sector fundamentals, but that FSLR should be a relative outperformer.

Sun Shining In India: Azure Power, a solar developer in India said it has raised its first round of financing from Helion Venture Partners and Foundation Capital — peHub.

Extreme Makeover, Nuclear to Green Data Center: “Web-host company 1&1 this week announced plans to build one of Europe’s largest datacenters within a never-before-used nuclear fuel facility called New MOX.” — Infoworld.

Auto Makers Grilled Over Bailout: A congressional hearing portrayed the auto makers as “short-sighted”; tell us something we don’t know — CNNMoney.

There’s Still Money Out There for Hybrid EVs: Hybrid-electric vehicle drive system maker ISE completed a $17.5 million Series D equity investment from Siemens Venture Capital, Macquarie Clean Technology Fund, DTE Energy Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners and NGP Energy Technology Partners — Green Car Congress.

New York’s Ener1 today announced a deal with Japan’s Kyushu Electric Power to develop rapid recharging stations for electric vehicles. Ener1 said that Kyushu Electric has already done work on an advanced rapid charging stand and plans to customize the system with a battery pack from Ener1’s lithium-ion battery subsidiary, EnerDel. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

With a rapid recharge system, Ener1 said drivers can plug in and recharge up to 80 percent of the vehicle’s battery capacity in under 20 minutes. Kyushu Electric serves more than 8 million customers on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, which includes the cities of Nagasaki and Fukuoka.

Ener1 and Kyushu Electric plan to move quickly on the systems, with the first integrated charging station from the two companies due to be available by March 2009. But additional details weren’t disclosed, so it’s not clear how many, if any, of the new charging stations will be set up on Kyushu.

There are already some significant players in the electric car-charging field, with California’s Better Place holding talks this week with the governor of Michigan. Better Place, which is developing its own car-charging network, is already working on projects in Israel, Denmark and Australia. Better Place’s vehicle partner, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, also has a project in Japan, in the Kanagawa Prefecture on Honshu, Japan’s largest island, as well as deals in Portugal, France, and the state of Tennessee in the U.S.

Ener1’s deal with Kyushu Electric comes just a few weeks after the company made another move in Asia. In October, Ener1 took an 83-percent stake in South Korea’s Enertech International, a producer of lithium-ion battery cells. Ener1’s EnerDel unit has worked with Enertech before, supplying prototype and preproduction battery systems for Norway’s Think Global, which is working on an electric vehicle to be launched this year.

In addition to lithium-ion batteries, Ener1 also has operations in fuel cell development and nanomaterials.

Japan’s Nissan Motor is heading to China with new plans for electric vehicles. The president of the car maker’s China division says that the company will start selling electric cars in the country by 2012, according to Bloomberg.

The news comes the same day that Detroit’s Big Three are in Washington to get more money for their faltering businesses, suffering in part from a dependence on sales of the now-unpopular gas-guzzling SUVs.

At the Guangzhou International Auto Show today, Yasuaki Hashimoto, president of Nissan Motor (China) Ltd., said that China is one of the most important markets for electric cars. According to Bloomberg, the Chinese government is helping to push more environmentally friendly cars in the country by cutting taxes on fuel-efficient vehicles and plans to support domestic research in greener cars.

Nissan already has some significant electric vehicle deals lined up with its French partner Renault, under the Renault-Nissan Alliance. The Alliance is working with California’s Better Place, a car-charging network developer, on projects in Israel, Denmark and Australia, and has also cut deals of its own with Portugal, France, the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan and, in the U.S., Tennessee. More deals could be on the way; the governor of Michigan met with Better Place in Israel this week.

The battery packs for the planned Renault-Nissan electric cars will come from Automotive Energy Supply, a joint venture between Nissan and NEC. The cars are expected to hit the road in Israel and Denmark in 2011, and Australia the following year.

In August, Nissan unveiled an all-electric prototype based on its Cube model, but at the time the company said the production version will have a unique bodystyle and won’t be based on any existing Nissan models. Renault also showed off its electric concept car in October, based on the Renault Kangoo.

There’s at least one good outcome of the current power grid being inefficient, wasteful and unintelligent: The market opportunity for a smarter power grid will create a $65 billion industry by 2013, according to a new report out from Lux Research.

Lux’s definition of the “power web” market includes smart-metering hardware and software, networking technologies, energy storage (including batteries for both the grid and electric vehicles), flywheels and supercapacitors, and alternative grid-connected power sources, including fuel cells; the definition excludes renewable generation systems like solar, wind and tidal power, or the electric vehicles themselves.

As utilities in the U.S. are set to add nearly 40 gigawatts of clean energy generation by 2030, spurred by state mandates, the grid will need an upgrade to withstand the change. A recent report from the North American Electric Reliability (NERC) said that a lack of investment in the proper transmission infrastructure to accompany the increase of green power will result in an unreliable power grid. The Brattle Group predicts that to build out the power grid, including transmission lines, will need a $2 trillion investment, and Al Gore is calling for an investment of $400 billion over 10 years to build a national smart grid.

The bulk of the $65 billion market identified by Lux will be made up of energy storage and alternative grid power. We’re thinking batteries, particularly the ones found in electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, will consist of a significant part of that estimate (Lux is getting back to us on that). In comparison, the market for smart-metering hardware and software and for networking technologies — which commonly are thought of as “smart grid technology” — is relatively small; Lux predicts it will grow to $4.7 billion in 2013, up from $2.7 billion this year.

Could Detroit be the first region in the U.S. to sign on with Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place? Michigan’s governor Jennifer Granholm is certainly giving appearances that she’s looking into the idea of how the electric charging and battery swap stations would work in Michigan. Electrifying Detroit, if not Michigan as a whole, could be an interesting option, considering the tumultuous times and the questions over the auto bailout.

This weekend Granholm travelled to Israel and met with Agassi and took a well-photographed ride in one of Better Place’s electric vehicles. Granholm blogged about the trip as well, and of the meeting with Agassi said:

We want to reduce our state’s and our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, and the advanced battery has the potential to do just that. We [She and Shai] talked about future partnerships that might be viable for Michigan, and in Michigan, we know that new energy means new jobs.

Building out Better Place across Michigan probably wouldn’t make sense, given that the state has low population densities in many northern regions, but setting up the system in just Detroit could give the almost 1 million population city a new electric option. Then again Detroit residents have one of the lowest median incomes according to the U.S. Census, so they might not be eager to snap up high-end electric vehicles. The big auto industries aren’t that keen on the idea of Better Place, either — with General Motor’s vice chairman Bob Lutz actively making negative comments about the startup. So, we’re not sure traditional Detroit is ready for the idea.

Last month, Better Place announced that it is heading Down Under to deploy its electric car infrastructure in Australia, which is the third partnership the startup has signed after Israel and Denmark. But Better Place seems to be itching to find a pilot site in the U.S. to prove the business model can work stateside; Agassi said last month at a talk in San Francisco that for just California, the infrastructure setup would cost $1.5 billion, or about two weeks of oil imports. To set up the entire U.S. with the electric vehicle charging infrastructure, it would cost $100 billion.

Schwarzenegger Executive Order to Boost Clean Power: California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order today calling for an increase in the state’s Renewable Energy Standard to 33 percent renewable power by 2020; up from 20 percent in 2010 — release.

Greenhouse Gas Reductions Are Slow Going in Industrialized Nations: You probably knew as much, but the UN says that GHG emissions only dropped 0.1 percent during 2006 in industrialized nations. Even worse in the greater developed world a large amount of GHG reductions came from the collapse of the economies of Russia and Eastern European countries post Soviet Union — Bloomberg.

Wesley Clark Says Help Detroit But Demand Electric Car Innovation: “We should insist that Detroit’s goals include putting America in first place in hybrid and electric automotive technology, reducing the emissions of the country’s transportation fleet, and strengthening our competitiveness abroad.” — NYT.

Wondering About the Auto Bailout? Look Back at IT: John Addison in the Cleantech Blog says back in the 1970’s “makers of mainframe computers were in trouble, including IBM. If the government had done a massive bailout and protected their businesses, the United States would not have transitioned into the global giant of information technology. Lacking a bailout, IBM reinvented themselves into a global leader in IT services — Cleantech Blog.

Wind Hit By Credit Crunch: According to New Energy Finance the wind industry is getting hit by the global recession but will offer medium and long term growth — Forbes.

Dell Shooting for Energy Star 5.0: Dell says a few of its computing products already meet the Energy Star 5.0 requirements — a step up from the current Energy 4.0. — Infoworld’s Sustainable IT.