Signet Solar has received an €11 million ($14 million) loan guarantee from the Export-Import Bank of the United States to pay for solar panel factory equipment from Applied Materials.

The loan guarantee allows Signet to borrow money from the Bank of America to add equipment to its factory near Dresden, Germany. The five-year loan guarantee includes a $5.2 million financing for installing the equipment, the Ex-Im Bank said.

Signet, founded in 2006, already has received the equipment to make amorphous silicon thin-film panels, the bank said. Signet Solar is based in Menlo Park, Calif., but has a German subsidiary. The company started with a production line that could make 20 megawatts of panels per year. Signet plans to expand the capacity to as much as 130 megawatts by the end of 2009, Signet said last November.

The company started shipping thin-film panels to customers last October, starting with Hannover-based Alfasolar Vertriebsgesellschaft, the company said. Signet’s other customers include Phoenix Solar, Soleg, Goldbeck Solar, SolarMarkt, all of them in Germany. The Ex-Im Bank said Signet also has customers in Spain and Italy.

Signet plans to build its first U.S. factory in New Mexico.

The Ex-Im opened the Office of Renewable Energy and Environmental Exports in 2007 to focus on helping American companies export greentech goods and services. Last week, it announced $61 million in loan guarantees to Seoul-based Gochang Solar Park Co. to buy and install solar panels from SolarWorld Industries American in Hillsboro, Ore.

Is New Mexico the new hotspot for striving solar startups? Austin-based Solar Array Ventures seems to think so. The company has waved off Texas and New York's advances to take New Mexico officials up on their offer to build its plant there.

The company is planning to build a 225,000-square-foot solar plant with the capacity of 75 megawatts, but with the potential for more, said CEO Joe Hudgins.

Solar Array Ventures is the offspring of the Austin University Technology Incubator and has Oxantium as the lead equity investor. After being courted by seven states (Texas and New York among them), the company last week made it clear that it will build a $210 million solar panel manufacturing plant in Bernalillo County, N.M.

Solar Array had its reasons for choosing New Mexico for its future plant. Hudgins pointed to the speed and efficiency of the economic development group as well as to existing policies, incentives and positive business mindsets as reasons for the move. Other arguments were wage rates and quality of life, according to Hudgins.

"We are totally happy with our decision and look forward to breaking ground. We have selected Hoffman as our Construction firm. Our Architectural and Engineering firm is Page Southerland Page. We are 80 percent through the design and engineering phase for a campus site with a potential output of about 300 megawatts," said Hudgins.

Although Solar Array wants to build a factory, a lot can happen. The solar power market is already competitive with companies scrambling for capital. Stimulus money will, of course, help, but it won't cover all of the costs. Any startup aiming for a good industry reputation needs to put its name out on the market. Some solar analysts and experts contacted for this article said that they had never heard of Solar Array Ventures. Being in a startup phase means that you can't give any warranties on future success. But it sure helps to have the buzz going for you.

When asked about the incentive investment from New Mexico, Hudgins declined to give any numbers, but did admit that: "It was financially comparable to one other offer."

Production will start in the middle of 2009 or possibly in the third quarter, said Hudgins. The first panel will be out eleven months after the factory opens. The basis of the technology, said Hudgins, is Amorphous silicon (a-Si) and the somewhat vague: "access to technology that is not commercially available to raise the efficiency and lower the cost faster than other comparable a-Si based processes."

According to Solar Array, its multi-junction thin-film panels have a 40 percent to 60 percent lower temperature coefficient and give better power output in low-sun and overcast conditions compared to crystalline solar modules.

Potential customers are utility companies, medium-sized integrators and "a large anchor customer, primarily utility." The Austin American-Statesman reported that the solar startup was not satisfied with the offer from Texas when it came to investing in the project.

"New Mexico made us a reasonable offer and allowed us to go to our investors. In Texas, it was more like, 'Get your funding and then come see us,' " said Solar Array Chief Financial Officer Everett "Buddy" Rodgers in an interview with the Austin American-Statesmen.

When Solar Array went fishing for plant space earlier this year, the estimated need was 250,000 square feet for the plant, employing about 250 people in the initial phase. Senator Charles Schumer of New York pushed the idea of Solar Array placing its plant in Riverview Business Park in Fulton, N.Y., but was beaten by New Mexico officials who, according to the Austin American-Statesmen, had been working hard to catch the interest of Solar Array Ventures.

"Our commitment to this industry and dedicated effort to this company over the past 18 months made today's announcement possible," said Deanna Archuleta, chair of the Bernalillo County Commission, to the Austin American-Statesmen.

Here's what's going on in the nation's capital, the source of green technology funding:

Vice President Joe Biden said that the Department of Energy will start to give out $3.375 billion in smart grid deployment grants. The grants range from $500,000 to $20 million. It will also give out grants for smart grid monitoring. Smart grid is everyone's favorite topic this year, which we began to predict in 2008. Why? There's a lot of power that gets wasted. Improving the grid's efficiency by 5 percent could save 41 gigawatts of power, according to GE's Steve Fludder. And it's all hardware, software and networking -- you don't have to invest in an expensive solar factory to get into business, so investors love it.

For those of you interested in selling smart grid technologies in the Golden State, the California Public Utilities Commission is holding an all-day symposium on April 21. More details here. It's going to be packed.

President Obama wants to study the feasibility of high-speed rail networks that could connect cities in the Northeast, California and/or Seattle.

"My high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America. We must start developing clean, energy-efficient transportation that will define our regions for centuries to come," he said. And how. I've ridden these rail systems in Europe and Japan. There is far more room than in a plane, you are dropped off in a central location (versus miles out of town at the airport) and you can eat ham sandwiches without running the risk of creating a cataclysmic accident as in a car.

The EPA, meanwhile, is slated to say it will regulate greenhouse gases, a reversal of what happened in the last Presidential administration. More on that later.

The EPA is also sending out letters to utilities to inspect and improve their ash storage ponds. Lead, chromium and other bad things are in these ponds. Many established companies and startups like Cal-Star Cement want to use some of this waste product to make bricks or cement.

Reticle Inc. (Reticle) is a Los Altos, California startup that has developed a new carbon electrode material and process of making the material, which is ideal for use in ultracapacitors (see New Energy and Fuel article here).

Ultracapacitors are used to store energy in applications that require storage of large amounts of energy and rapid energy discharge, such as electric vehicles.

Ultracapacitors store energy through movement of electrons, i.e., separation of charged species as positive ions called cations migrate to a negatively charged electrode (anode), and negative ions called anions move to a cathode, or positively charged electrode.  The more ions that are attracted to their respective electrodes, the more energy the ultracapcitor stores.

There are two known ways to increase the number of ions attracted - boosting voltage and increasing the surface area of the electrodes.  This is where Reticle comes in.  The company’s patented process produces granular activated carbon having much greater surface area than known carbon materials (see the inventor’s cogent explanation here).

Whereas typical processes consolidate carbon by pressing it into thin films, Reticle’s process applies pressure to the carbon material from all sides and obviates the need to add binders or adhesives.  This allows for better automation than other capacitor material, so the material can be machined into any size with lots of conductive surface area.

This picture shows one unique aspect of the resulting material, which the company calls “Reticle Carbon”:

That is, not only is the surface area greater, but all of the carbon particles remain connected to ensure that all the charge is distributed across the entire surface area of the material.

This table compares the specs and capabilities of two Reticle capacitors with those of a couple of other commercially available products:

Reticle Carbon also is a good material for desalination applications because the higher mass and surface area allows the acquisition of more ions before a regeneration step would be required.

Reticle’s manufacturing process and resulting carbon material are protected by a family of four U.S. patents:  U.S. Patent Nos. 6,350,520 (claims granular active carbon material made by a high temperature and pressure process), 6,511,645 (claims a process for producing carbon material by consolidating amorphous carbon using elevated temperature compression), 6,544,648 (claims a processed carbon material consolidated under elevated temperature and pressure) and 6,787,235 (claims a processed carbon material consolidated in a hot isostatic press under elevated temperature and pressure).

According to Jack Mastbrook, who does marketing development for Reticle, the company is currently seeking funding to ramp up operations.  But Mastbrook told me that Reticle already has a deal in place to sell its activated carbon to a major consumer products manufacturer, which plans to test the material as a replacement for batteries in its products.

Eric Lane is a patent attorney and intellectual property lawyer at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego, where he is in the Intellectual Property and Climate Change & Clean Technology practices. Eric is the founder and author of Green Patent Blog, which provides discussion and analysis of intellectual property law issues in clean technology.

Geoengineering is rife with potential for unintended consequences. We can’t say that altering the atmosphere or ocean to try to curb or reverse global warming is a good or bad idea. We don’t understand the extraordinarily complex and interconnected climate systems involved well enough.

This doesn’t mean I’m against studying geoengineering. Studying the effects of tinkering with the climate is a great way to begin to map the minefield of potential consequences. Let’s at least get an idea of the trouble we can get into.

One such study, an analysis of the effects of deliberately spewing aerosols into the stratosphere, delivers a bit of irony. Increasing the concentration of aerosols in the stratosphere would reduce the amount of direct sunlight penetrating the atmosphere, and this would cool the planet. But it would also reduce the effectiveness of concentrated and passive solar energy systems.

So one method for dealing with the impact of fossil fuel use would come at the expense of another. Of course, if we’re desperate enough to attempt to remedy how we’ve altered the atmosphere by further altering the atmosphere, the potential hit to some solar energy systems would probably be low on the list of priorities.

The study provides a good example of how just about everything to do with climate involves trade-offs.

While I’m on geoengineering, let’s think about that label for a minute. Can we really say that our level of knowledge about deliberately altering the climate deserves to be called engineering? Do we have the degree of control and precision implied by that word?

Maybe we should find another term, at least until we have a substantially larger body of knowledge on the subject. How about geo-interference? That more accurately describes the process, and it’s less likely to lull people into a false sense of security about our ability to control the climate.

Given that John Holdren, president Obama’s top scientist, broached the subject of geoengineering last week — and he understands the dire circumstances we’re in as well as anyone on the planet — we could be running out of time to deal with the issue.

Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.