Environmental campaigners say they are astonished at the government's decision to suspend a scheme which gave grants to schools, hospitals and other public buildings to switch to renewable energy. Renewable energy experts say it has all been disastrous and could leave the UK at a competitive disadvantage in the future.

Seeking to boost the US clean-energy industry, President Obama on Monday announced US$1.2 billion for science research at national labs and a proposal to extend a business tax credit for investments in research and development. Obama told researchers and green-technology business people that their work was vital to revitalizing the US economy and cutting the country's dependence on foreign oil.

The European Commission and Japan are going to deepen their collaboration in energy research. The primal areas for cooperation are photovoltaics, power storage and carbon capture and storage.

Germany's Siemens AG (SI) Tuesday said that Siemens Energy is to acquire a 28% stake in Italian solar company Archimede Solar Energy S.p.A. and thus expand its competencies for solar thermal power plants.

German solar technology company Q-Cells SE, the world's largest producer of solar cells, announced a rise of 28% in its 2008 net profit, as the growing demand for renewable energy leveraged sales for its solar panels.

Installed solar power capacity in the US rose by 17% to 8,775 megawatts in 2008, the strongest growth in a single year, solar advocate Solar Energy Industries Association said in an annual review issued on Friday.

A wave of consolidation is sweeping the solar power industry.

Energy Conversion Devices' shares plummeted 30.3% in morning trading on Tuesday, after the solar-equipment maker warned investors that its third-quarter earnings would fall short of earlier projections amid a weakening economic environment.

To Emanuel Sachs, September 11 was a reminder of the perils of an oil-dependent U.S. energy policy. The events that transpired that day were jarring enough to prompt him to restart his solar research. Nearly eight years later, he is CEO at 1366 Technologies, a company formed two years ago to commercialize the work he had done at MIT.

First Solar has agreed to acquire the solar-project pipeline of US peer OptiSolar for US$400 million in stock, a deal that will give the solar-panel maker a bigger foothold in the US utility segment.

Wacker Chemie AG, a German chemical company, announced Thursday that it will build a $1 billion plant with 500 jobs in southeastern Tennessee to produce hyperpure polycrystalline silicon, a product used to make solar panels and semiconductors.

VLSI Research predicted overall solar equipment growth of 8% this year. Suppliers of equipment for silicon wafer-based solar cell manufacturing are expected to see declining revenues this year, but thin-film equipment vendors will more than offset that with strong growth.

The largest series of solar installations in history, more than 1,300 megawatts, is planned for the desert outside Los Angeles, according to a new deal between the utility Southern California Edison and solar power plant maker, BrightSource.

German technology company Infineon Technologies AG has said it would expand a Hungarian production facility which makes components for solar and wind power systems, as a result of strong demand for the products.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has launched an initiative to boost the development of solar energy technology, in a bid to turn it into a major energy source in China by 2050. The plan will be carried out in three phases, including "utilization in selective areas" by 2015, "utilization as an alternative energy" by 2025 and "large-scale utilization" by 2035, respectively.

As the price of oil plunged from its peak last summer, solar and other forms of renewable energy became relatively less cost-competitive—dampening demand from industrial, commercial, and residential customers. At the same time, the credit squeeze has made it harder for customers, whether power companies or energy-conscious homeowners, to finance solar projects. Some also are holding back in anticipation that solar equipment prices will fall even further.

In his usual no-nonsense manner, CEO TJ Rodgers described how he is navigating Cypress Semiconductor through bad economic conditions, and denied that the solar industry is losing competiveness as oil prices decline.

Toshiba, a company best known for making laptops and consumer electronics, on Monday said that it will enter the solar-photovoltaics business. Toshiba's photovoltaics business will be part of the conglomerate's Transmission Distribution & Industrial Systems business, which makes equipment for natural-gas power plants.

The ministry said Japan aims to have solar power systems installed on more than 70 percent of new homes. The new efforts will also include solar power education in schools, the development of refined deep cycle battery technologies and the installation of grid connections.

"My ministry will provide financial assistance amounting to 12 rupees (30 cents) per kilowatt hour in case of solar photovoltaic and 10 rupees per kilowatt hour in case of solar thermal power fed to the electricity grid," Vilas Muttemwar said in a press conference.

A 500-megawatt solar energy development quota set by the Spanish government for 2009 might already be filled. That's because an ongoing government investigation has uncovered widespread fraud that could in effect reward those who falsely claimed to have completed solar power projects by a September deadline when they didn't, wrote Jeff Osborne, an equity analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, in a research note Monday.

Separately, Dow Corning will begin producing monosilane gas that is used to make thin-film solar panels and liquid crystal displays in a facility adjacent to the polysilicon factory in Hemlock, Mich. The companies will invest US$1.2 billion to add 10,000 metric tons of annual production to their polysilicon factory in Hemlock, which currently has 19,000 tons of capacity. They will also start building a new polys

First Solar's thin-film panels might be piling up in European warehouses, a bad omen for a company envied by many in the solar industry. A ThinkEquity research note on Friday estimated that six key First Solar customers aren't able to install the solar panels quick enough.

Dark economic clouds shadowing businesses worldwide aren't discouraging solar companies from considering manufacturing in Oregon. A large European solar company has picked Gresham as its top US candidate while seeking a site for multiple factories that could employ more than 2,000, public officials confirm.

The growth pace of China's new energy industry is seriously dented by oil price slump and demand shrinkage due to the global financial crisis, according to analysts.

Shares in Norwegian solar industry group Renewable Energy Corporation (REC) plunged more than 12% after it reported a smaller rise than expected in core earnings for the third quarter and said turmoil would hit demand in the short and medium term. But the group, one of the world's biggest producers of solar-grade silicon and wafers for solar energy systems, said its long-term market demand remained strong.

...PV support is shaky in the European Union. In Spain, a new cap on solar electric installations of 300 MWp in 2009 could maroon more than a gigawatt worth of product. Other than Germany, which has implemented market controls, there's nowhere else for these stranded megawatts to go. In the United States, incentives remain weak in what is essentially a one-state market: California. However, even there, government incentives are necessary to fuel the willingness to deploy what remains a costly technology.

The finding, reported on Sunday in the journal Nature Materials, offers a new way to process conventional silicon by slicing the brittle wafers into ultrathin bits and carefully transferring them onto a flexible surface. "We can make it thin enough that we can put it on plastic to make a rollable system. You can make it gray in the form of a film that could be added to architectural glass," said John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led the research.

Legislation extending tax credits for the solar, wind and biodiesel industries gained new life on Wednesday as Senate leaders said they plan to attach the tax bill to a US$700 billion economic rescue package.

In 2007, the sector attracted US$2.2 billion in venture-backed investments, up 45% from 2006. Biofuels production jumped from 4.9 billion gallons in 2006 to roughly 6.5 billion gallons last year. Meanwhile, in 2007 the US added 314 megawatts of new solar energy systems to the grid, up by 125% from the previous year.