A few years back, manufacturers of crystalline silicon solar cells competed fiercely with chipmakers for polysilicon, leading to a big jump in the material's price and a scramble by polysilicon producers to build new factories.

Something similar is happening for other materials coveted by solar companies.

Prices for tellurium, a precious key ingredients in the most common thin-film solar panels, have gone from under $100 per kilogram in 2007 to over $200 per kilogram in 2008, said Lita Shon-Roy, a partner at market research firm Techcet Group, in an interview after she spoke at the Thin-Film Solar Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. Last year proved to be a boom year for solar before recession and a big cut in government subsidies in Spain crushed the global market.

"The mines weren't equipped to react quickly," Shon-Roy said. Tellurium now commands about $150 per kilogram.

The mines currently sell tellurium mostly as a byproduct of copper refining, and 11 percent of the global tellurium supply go to one company, First Solar, Shon-Roy said. That's about 40 metric tons per year, she added.

Copper mine operators make production decisions that focus on how much copper – not byproducts – they can sell. Large mines are currently located in the United States, Mexico and China.

To ensure amply supply of tellurium, First Solar has been looking for suppliers who would focus on mining tellurium. Capital Mining in Australia announced in May 2008 that First Solar was sending a geologist to check out a newly discovered tellurium deposit.

There is an ongoing debate on whether there is enough tellurium in the world to support the growing solar market, and how much costs would be added to the solar cell production if mines spend their resources to focus on tellurium production. Although First Solar is the largest cadmium-telluride user, there is a cadre of startups hoping to replicate its success.

The debate has spilled over to the mining of indium as well. Indium is a key element in copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) cells. It also is the key material for liquid crystal display (LCD) panels that are used for flat-screen TVs and monitors.

In fact, a big growth in the LCD business in recent years has pushed the indium price from about $200 per kilogram in 2004 to nearly $700 per kilogram in 2008, Shon-Roy said. Indium is currently fetching an average of $420 per kilogram.

Ironically, recession has boosted LCD TV demand.

"People have been staying home and they say, 'It's time for us to buy a flat-panel TV because it's cheaper than taking a trip to Vail,' " Shon-Roy said.

LCD TV shipment rose 38 percent to reach 37.5 million units in the third quarter, compared to shipment from a year ago according to DisplaySearch.

Seambiotic, one of the oldest companies in algae, has signed a deal with China Guodian Corp. to build algae farms near power plants in that country.

The first farm, opening in 2010 in Penglai, will cover 12 hectares and cost about $10 million. Seambiotic specializes in open "racetrack" ponds. In these ponds, flue gas from a power plant is circulated into water where multiple strains of algae grow. Add sunlight and time and careful cultivation techniques and in a few weeks you have mounds of slime. Guodian has 100 power plants to the deal could grow. Since 2003, Israel-based Seambiotic has been in the prototyping and pilot stage: this marks a transition toward larger commercial production.

Instead of producing algae for cars, Seambiotic grows it for the nutraceutical and pet food markets: oil for nutraceuticals and protein for pets. (Algae is only about 30 percent oil in its natural state – the remainder is protein and other cell materials.) Nutraceutical oil sells for far more than diesel. Kyle McCue of Ternion Bio Industries told us recently that his company has signed deals with pharmaceutical companies to deliver algae at close to $10,000 a ton. Going straight to food also lets producers skirt some technical issues, like how to turn the lipid oil into hydrocarbons and how to keep single strains pure.

Besides, food is as big a problem for China as oil. Rising temperatures and temperature fluctuations could cause swings of 30 to 50 percent in harvests.

Solazyme, the South San Francisco startup that ferments algae into a variety of oils, has started selling algae oil to the food market this year (see Arnold Schwarzenegger and his unearthly orange skin tone at the company headquarters earlier this year here). It has an algae milk and the brownies weren't bad.

Admit it. You've never spent much time thinking about the difference between flourine and nitrogen triflouride.

Solar manufacturers and chip makers have traditionally employed nitrogen triflouride to apply chemical layers in chemical vapor deposition chambers. It's an extremely harmful chemical. Although CVD chambers are vacuums, some gas invariably escapes. Swapping it with flourine reduces greenhouse gas emissions (see more on the video from Intersolar here).

Masdar PV, the solar manufacturer within the Abu Dhabi's Masdar Group, has adopted flourine control systems for its amorphous silicon solar panel lines. The two companies also stated that flourine reduces processing and cleaning time, which in turn reduces the cost of the panels.

There have been a number of interesting announcements in factory chemistry this year. Dow Corning, for instance, started selling a silicone encapsulant for solar panels that it says speeds up factory throughput (thereby cutting panel costs) and protects panels better than traditional encapsulants. Small startup Armageddon Energy, they with the modular solar rack, have also taken out some of the weight from their solar panels by swapping out glass for a flexible film.

Masdar began producing solar panels this summer. It was running two shifts six days a week at its factory, which is capable of producing 65 megawatts of solar panels per year, CEO Rainer Gegenwart told us in October. The plan is to expand the production to 85 megawatts by 2011. The Abu Dhabi factory, at 65 megawatts, could be built in 2010, though that depends on how well the market will have recovered. 

The company is shipping panels with 6 percent to 6.6 percent efficiency. The panels make use of a layer of amorphous silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. Next year, it plans to start making panels with two layers of amorphous silicon, and Gegenwart expects the efficiency to fall between 7 percent to 7.8 percent.

R. Dixon Thayer, who has run a variety of companies, will take over for Frank Greco as CEO of Southwest Windpower. The tranisition occurs Dec. 8.

Southwest is one of the leaders in the small, but maybe finally growing, market for small wind turbines. Southwest specializes in turbines that can generate approximately one to three kilowatts, but are small enough to put on residences or small industrial buildings. The company claims that the turbines can provide 40 percent to 90 percent of a home's power, depending on electricity use, the number of turbines, and the quality of the prevailing winds (see Small Wind Spreading Its Wings).

General Electric joined a group of investors and put $10 million into the company in April.

Small wind has often been the crazy uncle of greentech: a nice idea, but impractical compared to passive systems like solar panels. A study by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust found that at 21 sites, the projected power output was three times the actual power output. A green retrofitting contractor who installs small wind turbines recently described small turbines to us as "eye candy."

Nonetheless, the technology has slowly and steadily improved. The Massachusetts study noted that it wasn't the turbines that were at fault. It was how they were implemented. Southwest's sales have been growing rapidly, thanks in part to tax incentives. Other companies such as Makani Power and Magenn have recently entered the market.

Like green window specialist Sage Electrochromics, Southwest is a new name to a lot of people, but it is not startup. It began approximately 23 years ago.

Brian Murphy has left PrimeStar Solar. The company is developing cadmium-telluride solar panels and counts General Electric as a major investor.

Speaking at the Thin-Film Solar Summit in San Francisco Tuesday, Murphy said he completed his service last week. The three-year-old company in Arvada, Colo., hasn't announced a new chief executive, and Murphy is still listed as the company's CEO on the website.

Murphy told me that he left because the company is doing well, and it's not unusual for the CEO to move on at this point. He said he didn't leave on bad terms with GE.

"As you look at companies globally, when they achieve successful milestones, they often need different talents. PrimeStar has been successful, and it's time for somebody to lead the company to the next phase of growth," he said. 

GE became PrimeStar's majority shareholder last year. Since then, GE said it has grand plans for producing cadmium-telluride solar panels with the GE brand. Meanwhile, GE is shutting down its only solar panel factory in the United States, a facility to make crystalline silicon solar panels in Delaware.

Back in June this year, Murphy said PrimeStar was preparing to launch its first product by the end of this year. Murphy declined to say whether that was still the plan when I asked him about it Tuesday.

Murphy said he is looking for new opportunities in solar, particularly in the thin film segment. He previously founded Fulcrum Technologies, a project management company and counted Alcoa and ST Microelectronics among his customers. He also was a manager for the plasma display product line at Applied Films, which is now part of Applied Materials in Santa Clara, Calif.

Sometimes older is better.

Although Toshiba and others have promoted fast breeder reactors for the nuclear industry and still other companies have promoted things like small, modular nuclear reactors, the quickest, most efficient way to add nuclear capacity lay in concentrating on light water reactors, according to Ernie Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative during a visit to San Francisco this week.

"For the next decades, it is light water reactors," he said. "The key question for the U.S. is getting them built."

Why? "We know how to build them," he added. Hyman Rickover developed the first light water reactors in the 1950s and variants of light water reactors constitute the majority of reactors around the world. The "light" in light water reactors refers to the fact that plain water, versus oxygen combined with deuterium (the heavier isotope of hydrogen), serves as a coolant.

Fast breeder reactors were developed with the idea that uranium and nuclear fuel would be in short supply. "It turns out that that pathway was based on assumptions that aren't relevant," he added.

Fusion? Not in our lifetimes, he stated after eyeballing me. (I'm a youthful 48.) He then added that that meant not likely before 2050. The Energy Initiative is MIT's multimillion dollar push into developing technologies and companies around solar, energy storage and other fields. Hence, his opinion carries weight.

While there are no nuclear power plants under construction at the moment in the U.S. many believe that nuclear will play a larger role in the future. Energy secretary Steve Chu has come out in favor of expanding nuclear. Several European nations are also looking at nuclear. The U.S. has also changed the approval process (reactor designs can be certified by the manufacturer separately from the site approval).

"I don't see a sensible solution [toward reducing carbon emissions] without having nuclear as part of the mix," said Dan Kammen, the UC Berkeley professor who also runs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at the school. Nuclear power plants can gobble up billions in capital and take years to build, but they also can act as a very low-carbon source of energy for decades. The carbon comes from the energy expended to build them.

Nonetheless, many, including Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins, argue that nuclear, with its chronic cost overruns, delays and waste issues, isn't nearly as economical as advocates claim.

The U.S. is suffering an intellectual crisis and it is probably your fault.

One of the big problems facing the U.S. is a brain drain, stated Kristina Johnson, Undersecretary of Energy at the Department of Energy, via videoconferencing during a symposium at Google's San Francisco offices last night.

"Forty to 60 percent of the energy workforce will retire in four years," she said.

Executives at oil companies have noted the same ominous trends. In the U.S., enrollment in geosciences hit a peak of 35,000 students in 1982 but lately has meandered around the 5,000 level. The drop is somewhat easy to trace. Oil companies started engaging in mass layoffs in the early '80s, Three Mile Island put the brakes on nuclear power and the rise of the personal computer made IT a more promising field. As a result, energy experts tend to look a lot more like Dick Cheney than Sergey Brin. (I also think the decline also had something to do with the release of "Hungry Like the Wolf" from Duran Duran, but I stand alone.)

To some degree, things are looking up a bit. Right now, only 16 percent of high schoolers that will probably go onto college in the U.S. will pick scientific degrees and only 6 percent will go into engineering, she said. That's bad. However, the students that are choosing engineering and sciences are overwhelmingly interested in energy, said Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Ten years ago, the introduction to energy class at UC Berkeley might have drawn 45 students a semester.

Now it gets around 300 and many classes are over-subscribed. MIT's Ernie Moniz, who also spoke, seconded Kammen's comments about interest in energy. 20 percent of the faculty at MIT participates on the school's sprawling Energy Initiative.

The Obama Administration is also expected, by some, to loosen up student visa and green card requirements. Many academics and executives, from the right and the left, criticized the restrictions imposed by the Bush Administration after Sept. 11th that have prevented foreign electrical engineers educated in the U.S. from getting jobs in the U.S. Brian Halla, the retiring chief of National Semiconductor, is particularly upset about the trend, and he has pictures of himself shaking hands with every Republican since Ulysses S. Grant in his office.