It’s a cloudy day for the solar photovoltaic maker SunPower. The company announced its fourth quarter and 2009 year results this afternoon and let loose a triple-whammy of bad news: a drop in fourth quarter profits, a lower-than-expected earnings guidance for 2010 and a restating of its earnings for 2008 and the first three quarters of 2009. Ouch.

SunPower says it brought in a net income of $8.67 million for the three months that ended Jan. 3, 2010, which was a drop from $29.5 million from the restated year earlier fourth quarter net income. Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 were $547 million, up from $398 million in revenues from the same period a year earlier.

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Make it familiar and compelling — that’s the idea behind the design of energy management startup Tendril’s new gadget dubbed the Vision, which the company plans to unveil next week. The dashboard, designed by design firm IDEO, and based on the form of a digital clock, is intended to help consumers really engage with managing their energy consumption by using captivating design elements. Because, let’s face it, managing home energy consumption isn’t exactly the sexiest activity. (Read our interview with IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, subscription required).

Tendril’s Scott Ballantyne, Vice President of Marketing, told me that IDEO and Tendril spent eight months studying and researching human behavior in order to create the Vision. They found that by adding design elements like the familiarity of the clock design, they could keep users engaged enough to reduce their energy consumption by an average of 10-15 percent. The Vision is also able to provide real time data for pricing fluctuations (energy rates go up during peak demand times) if a utility is providing that to the customer, which helps a customer manage energy consumption.

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A heaping pile of pounds will be injected into Britain’s green car industry over the coming years, with automakers and the government both throwing cash into a major buildout of manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries, fuel-efficient engines and other parts for lower-emission vehicles. Japanese automaker Nissan announced today that it plans to invest 420 million pounds (about $642 million) into expanding its plant in Sunderland, UK, to produce the upcoming LEAF electric sedan as well as lithium-ion batteries for vehicles from both it and alliance partner Renault.

Also today, Ford Motor said its European division will pour 1.5 billion pounds into lower-emission vehicle technologies at its four UK facilities over the next five years. The Detroit automaker will also receive a 360 million-pound loan guarantee from the UK government.

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OpenADR — the Berkeley Labs open source system for automating the way utilities do demand response — is already being used to control some 70 megawatts of capacity for big industrial and commercial customers of California’s biggest utilities. Could it expand its reach into homes and small businesses? Mary Ann Piette, research director at Berkeley Labs’ Demand Response Research Center, believes it can and mentioned a list of interested parties on Wednesday during a California Public Utilities Commission workshop in San Francisco.

Energy management startup Tendril Networks has been involved in testing out the possibility of bringing OpenADR, which stands for Open Automated Demand Response, to residential. Sacramento’s utility, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, has tested OpenADR in small business HVAC systems in a way that might offer an analog to connecting home thermostats. Pacific Gas & Electric has also been mulling a test of OpenADR over its smart meter networks, Piette said. (We reached out to PG&E for more details and we’re waiting to hear back).

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The deadline to submit an application for our Green:Net launchpad is just around the corner — this Friday at 5PM! If you’re part of a new startup that leverages information technology — the Internet, computing and communication networks — to help remake the energy industry and fight climate change, submit an application to launch your company or product at our Green:Net conference. Green:Net 2010 will be held on April 29 in San Francisco and will focus on how IT can be used to fight climate change — from the smart grid, to connected cars, to carbon software.

During the Launchpad section of our Green:Net 2010 event 10 hot startups will show off their products on the main stage. The Launchpad winners will receive a lot of visibility — and likely interest from investors. Check out last year’s Judge’s Winner, Wattbot.

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Across the auto industry, companies are on the hunt for electric vehicle launchpads: cities and regions most likely to give the upcoming generation of plug-in cars the smoothest possible entry into the market, and help them move into the mainstream. Many of the factors that come under consideration — a willingness to adopt new technologies, a forward-thinking utility and EV-friendly policies, for example — tend to reflect well on a city, and end up being touted the loudest (e.g. the race among some mayors to make their cities the world’s “EV capital”). Should part of a city’s darker side — its air pollution levels, which electric vehicles could help to reduce — also factor into the rollout plan?

French automaker Renault suggests today that it should, saying in a release that it has found in a city once dubbed the pollution capital of Europe what it calls the “perfect” place for an early trial of plug-in vehicles. “Milan in particular and Lombardy in general,” Renault said today, “are perfect testing grounds for the electric vehicles,” due not only to the government and population’s “pronounced enthusiasm for sustainable development,” but also the fact that this is “a region confronted with high levels of pollution.”

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kWhOURS Takes Aim at Old Skool Energy Auditing: On March 21, startup kWhOURS, Inc., “is releasing its first product: software that will enable energy auditors to perform commercial audits more efficiently and cheaply.” — Greentech Media

Smart Grid’s Big Unknown: Customer Acceptance: “The technology is maturing and there’s significant investment on the way, but the smart grid still lacks the regulations and consumer demand for it to take off like the Internet did.” — CNET’s Green Tech

Newfound Exoplanet: COROT 9 b: “A French spacecraft designed to discover new worlds beyond our solar system has made one of its most significant finds yet—a planet that looks like a cousin to those in our own celestial backyard.” — Scientific American

Industry Groups Get a Peak at Climate Bill: “Lawmakers at the heart of Senate energy and climate negotiations revealed key details today of their legislative proposal during a closed-door meeting with major industry groups they are courting in hopes of winning over Senate moderates and avoiding an expensive advertising war.” — Greenwire via NYT

GM Finances Looking Up: “General Motors Co. has a reasonable chance of becoming profitable in 2010 and a ‘remarkably strong’ balance sheet eight months after emerging from bankruptcy, GM Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said Wednesday in his first public comments since taking the job.” — WSJ

Nissan, one of the automakers betting most heavily on the nascent electric vehicle market, will price its upcoming LEAF plug-in sedan in the range of 3.5 million to 4 million yen (about $38,600-$44,100) in Japan, according to a Mainichi Shimbun report picked up by MarketWatch on Wednesday.

Last month Nissan said it will begin accepting reservations in April, and will set a final price for the car “shortly” before that. Well, April is just two weeks away. But the price of the LEAF has been a subject of much speculation almost since Nissan announced plans for the model, and the company tells us that this latest estimate is no different. A spokesperson for the automaker told us this morning that Nissan remains firm on its plan to hold off on releasing the retail price for the U.S. market until “the springtime.”

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Updated with comments from Google: There’s a battle looming in California over smart meters and energy prices. Google says the state should require its big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter-enabled customer by the end of next year. California’s big three utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — have raised plenty of objections to that deadline, and the California Public Utilities Commission is holding a workshop in San Francisco on Friday to talk about it.

The debate, which could influence smart grid policies across the country, underscores an important difference between the two things Google wants utilities to provide — energy “usage” data versus “pricing information.” Electricity usage is a real thing that can be measured in real time with magnets and wires, either by a smart meter or lots of other devices. Electricity prices, on the other hand, are contrived, during or after the fact, by a convoluted market that has to keep demand and supply perfectly balanced at all times. Delivering pricing data in real time will be challenging for smart meter networks as they’re currently being deployed. So in other words, for utilities, delivering power comes first, figuring out who pays for it (and how much) comes later.

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