Here's something everyone angling for an energy retrofit will endorse: Congressman Chris Van Hollen has introduced the National Home Energy Savings Revolving Fund Act (or NHESRFA, in case you're counting) that, if passed, would allow local governments, through a $10 billion fund sponsored created by the Department of Energy, to issue up to $10,000 interest free to homeowners for energy retrofits. The payment plans could also be structured so that the payments could be repaid through property taxes. Additionally, the payment amounts will come to less than the amount people save on utility bills. In theory. Will it pass? Who knows. It seems a bit dreamy, but it underscores one of the big issues finally being touted this year. Namely: We can save a lot more energy for less money through efficiency than by erecting solar panels or wind farms. Thus, even if this bill doesn't pass, something like it might. I just had a preliminary energy audit done on my home. (see embarrassing video here.). It changed my mind on certain repairs. Retrofits will be one of the major issues at the Green Building Summit on June 11. One of the speakers will be Matt Golden, a founder of Sustainable Spaces. Golden has proposed that states offer tax credits for retrofits that are equal to the tax credits given to solar.

Buying theft insurance might be a good idea for solar panel owners.

Police in Chico, Calif., have found some of the 46 solar panels were stolen from Little Chico Creek School last month, reported the Chico Enterprise-Record Tuesday. The system at the school had 730 panels before the theft.

Investigators found 17 solar panels in one of the two storage lockers that they said belong to the thieves. Police, who received a tip about the two lockers after releasing images of the car and trailer they said were used in stealing the solar panels, expect to arrest a suspect in the case this week.

Police already have arrested Christopher Bess, 32, last month for allegedly burglarizing Caring Veterans Inc., a nonprofit group that helps military veterans. Caring Veterans reported a theft of up to $200,000 in what the newspaper said were cold weather gear. The gear also turned up in one of the two storage lockers.

Investigators said they are looking for the rest of the stolen panels, which might already be sold to unsuspecting customers.

For quite a while, small wind turbines have been in the "kinda crazy" segment of the greentech industry. Not the "We can replace all of the world's oil imports with deep fat fryer grease and dryer lint" crazy. But more like hydrogen crazy: an interesting idea that has to take a backseat to more immediate and practical ideas like solar panels. How impractical are some of these ideas? There's the flying sausage from Magenn or the kites from Makani Power, a company I'm convinced is actually a day spa. A week ago, an exec from a company that performs energy retrofits derided them as "eye candy." They are visible, tangible proof that companies are doing the right thing, but add little (particularly when compared with better insulation or turning off lights) in terms of reducing energy consumption. And this is someone who sells them. Nonetheless, the technology from companies like Marquiss Wind Power and Southwest Wind Power has been improving. $30 million in VC funds was invested last year. Now, the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust says that, in a study of 21 small wind turbines, the estimates of power production are three times higher than the actual output. The main culprit isn't the turbines themselves: it is the implementation. It's tough to find a windy spot. Buildings, after all, aren't built with maximum wind exposure in mind. Read more at the News.com link. If anything, this report could in the long run help companies, like Marquiss and Southwest that have invested considerable time in testing the output in different circumstances.

The question I am most often asked while giving presentations about falling module prices and disproportionately strong policy support in the United States is some variant of, "Yes, but if the banks are all seized up, how can any solar be deployed at all?" While seemingly urgent and important, the implicit view is heavily skewed by the current hip social meme that has emerged around the economic "collapse" and "depression" economics. It is far too influenced by the evening news and Hollywood stars dressing down at the Oscars to reflect the current scarcity (only diamond earrings, not the necklace too). Puh-leeze!

The fact is that all recessions are bad, and credit-led recessions are the worst of the lot. Think of the economy as a house (goods and labor markets) resting on a foundation (credit markets), and you can understand how much more time consuming and expensive relative repairs might be. (Fixing foundations always means you will have to do some house work later as well, while the converse is not true.)

Despite the seriousness of the situation, looking at the problems of GM and AIG is not the best method of looking at the prospects for First Solar or Sun Edison. In truth, these businesses are poised to weather the storm quite differently. First, the new stimulus package not only throws a ton of money at the renewable energy industries, it has provisions for jump starting projects through tax treatment, grants, and loans-even if credit markets continue to stay slow.

Second, lenders must lend to someone. According to our recently released report Anatomy of a Shakeout II, solar projects in California will benefit from increased subsidy and falling module prices, creating unlevered project returns in excess of 20 percent. Lenders (and equity investors) will find this very interesting indeed for multi-year, essentially fixed, returns.

Finally, some innovative programs have emerged to accelerate local participation, including the recent announcement that the Berkeley First municipal-backed program has issued its first funding. People will be difficult to dissuade from installing clean energy that makes them high returns on investment. Let's give credit where it is due. The sky is falling, indeed -- it is raining money.

Travis Bradford is the founder of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.

The desalinated water supply is expected to grow by 9.5 percent a year and hit 54 billion cubic meters a year by 2020, or triple the amount out there now, according to a new report from Lux Research. You can buy the report, which covers 13 criteria over two axes (which sounds something like 3-D chess). Or, if you're cheap, just read the following excerpts from these articles I wrote:

• Desalination is hot, but still expensive. Desalination expert Energy Recovery pulled off one of the few successful green IPOs in 2008. Over 90 desalination projects have been announced in the last three years.

• The earth pretty much has the same amount of water -- 1.4 billion cubic kilometers -- as it did a few billion years ago. Only about 0.75 percent of that, however, consists of readily accessible groundwater or freshwater, according to the World Water Council. The rest is frozen (2.25 percent) or salty (97 percent.). Thus, if we want more, the sea or brackish wastewater.

• But, ugh, the price. Some estimates put desalination at $650 to $1,000 or more per acre foot when water agencies often sell water for $200 an acre foot. Put another way, a 25 million gallon a day reverse osmosis plant for seawater can cost $100 million. Stink!

• So what do you do? Energy Recovery reduces the cost by reducing the energy required to desalinate. In reverse osmosis, water is pressured to high levels and effectively shoved through a membrane. The company harnesses the pressure from the water coming out of the backside of the membrane and uses it again. It has projects underway all over the world.

• NanoH2O, meanwhile, says it has a better membrane that allows water companies to get by with less pressure. It came out of UCLA. Yale's Oasys Water, by contrast, uses forward osmosis. Salty water is attracted to a highly salty ammonia solution on the other side of the membrane. It is drawn through the membrane through chemical attraction (no additional energy needed). The ammonia salts are then boiled off. In essence, they are purifying water with ammonia -- fancy that.

• Secretive Quos, meanwhile, has graphite membranes. Check out the patents. Khosla Ventures has investments in NanoH2) and Quos. Oasys just closed a $10 million round.

• Then there is the elegant carbon nanotube membrane from Porifera. And let's not forget 212 Resources and Altela, which purify water sludge at petroleum plants.

• But if you're going to invest in desalination, invest in ones (like all of the above) that sell equipment to private firms. If a company needs to rely on deals with municipal water deals, it will be stuck in a Sisyphean cycle of beta tests.

The ocean power market is still emerging but has made more progress towards commercial deployment in the past few years than in the previous hundred years.  Governments and localities with strong marine resources are waking up to the potential power sources just off their shores. The coming years will see tens if not hundreds of megawatts of utility-scale power generation from the oceans, first in Europe, then in the U.S.  The challenge to ocean energy is not science, but overcoming the regulatory morass and making the technology cost-effective and reliable. Permitting is probably more an obstacle to marine energy markets than financing. In the U.S., scores of regulatory bodies have jurisdiction over marine power deployment while in the UK, two agencies control permitting. Streamlining the permitting process and establishing a consistent and reasonable regulatory policy will enable the commercialization of these technologies. The companies developing these technologies have evolved substantially from their beginnings in the British ocean power research programs of the 1970s and early 1980s. In September 2008, the first full-scale commercial wave power array was brought online off the coast of Portugal, with many more soon to follow. With 11 separate technologies under development by 35 companies and 50 government- and university-backed research programs in 26 countries and more than 600 megawatts of commercial projects announced for deployment in the next eight years, the consensus among the wave experts and investment communities is that ocean power is poised to make a significant contribution to the global energy portfolio. Ocean Power in the Mix The value proposition for ocean power is twofold. First, ocean power technologies are based on well-understood principles derived from hydrodynamic physics, marine design and construction, and mechanical and electrical engineering. Unlike solar photovoltaics, which rely on innovations in materials research and processing technology to reap efficiency gains, the research, design and development processes for ocean power technology have been practiced for hundreds of years. As such, the capital and energy cost paths for ocean power technologies are relatively predictable. Second, ocean energy is an abundant, dense and predictable resource. Waves propagate over thousands of miles of ocean and their size and energy content can be known from three to five days in advance. Tides and marine currents are 832 times denser than the air flowing over wind turbines and are predictable up to the minute at least 100 years in advance. The March 2009 Greentech Innovations Report, the monthly market research report from Greentech Media, explores a question essential to renewable energy: What can we expect from ocean power and wave technology?  The report takes a deep dive into the nascent ocean power market and draws upon extensive investigations by our research team and the pioneering work from our senior renewable energy analyst, Daniel Englander. Average Annual Wave Energy Flux (kW/m)