Make no mistake, climate policy is good business.

The ongoing buffeting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has received from a slew of leading corporate giants is a clear signal that opposing climate legislation, as the Chamber has repeatedly done, is now perceived as bad business.

The reasons are clear. Put simply, the country that sets the most aggressive and enlightened policy goals for clean energy will have a distinct business advantage over others. Why? Because those policies will allow the countries (and businesses) that adopt them to drive down costs, and thus scale the clean technologies that will power our future, i.e., make a lot of money while doing good. Those countries that fail to adopt such policies will be relegated to mere consumer status, i.e., spending money while doing nothing. (The U.S. currently squanders $1 billion a day importing oil.)

And aside from generating new clean growth, such policies also bring with them lower health care costs, lower national security risk and lower food security risk – all good business decisions.

Put even more simply: If our national and state policymakers don’t get their act together quickly, China will eat our lunch. Positive steps have been made in Washington, D.C. The passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set aside tens of billions of dollars for clean energy, clean transportation and clean building. And the American Clean Energy and Security Act adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives moved us closer to a framework that would benefit the growth of a clean economy.

Building a clean economy is no longer some feel-good mantra for a bunch of treehuggers. It is a practical and rational goal with massive economic and business implications. Already, China is storming ahead of the U.S. in adopting policies that will result in a $1 trillion annual clean tech market by 2013.

We can either compete for this market, or surrender it to other nations and businesses based in those nations.

As the Senate begins deliberations on climate and energy policy, some members of Congress are still under the misguided impression that putting a price on carbon is an ideological ping-pong ball. It is not. It’s an opportunity for the U.S. to either take a place as one of the leaders of the global clean energy industrial revolution that is at our doorstep, or be a spectator.

Without these policies in place, we will fall further and further behind domestic and international competitors. Getting strong federal policy is key to Washington state’s success, but business and public leaders need to come together on an action plan that will make the state even more competitive. Some key elements include: protecting and enhancing our state standards that require use of renewable power and greater efficiency, developing financing tools and policy that allow us to maximize clean energy investments, and removing disincentives for utility initiatives and investments. We also need to make growth of clean energy jobs and companies a priority. Our businesses, research institutions, and state and local governments need to work together with a sense of urgency and purpose.

The U.S. has prided itself for the past century for leading the world in business innovation. It now has a chance to lead again as we prepare for a race to stabilize our climate, but it is time for action.

Failure to act is bad business.

A former foreign correspondent, William Brent is a public relations exec at Weber Shandwick. He started the firm's cleantech practice. More can be found at http://www.mrcleantech.com.

When it comes to high tech, Israel can be thought of as a branch office of Silicon Valley.

Nearly every major tech company – Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. – has built facilities in the country and actively recruits engineers at universities like the Technion. Several Israeli startups have also been swept up by multinationals. The country even has its own venture capital community with strong links back to the 650 area code.

Naturally, the same sort of relationships have already started to migrate to green tech. Better Place is a U.S.-Israeli venture, for example, and VCs looking for water deals often start there.

To further foster the process, the Department of Energy and the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructures have decided to collaborate and will provide $3.3 million in grants to four companies. One is HelioFocus, a novel solar thermal company (read more here). HelioFocus, which grew out of research at Israel's Weizmann Institute, has created a six-story high parabolic dish that will concentrate the sun's energy onto an optical receiver at its center. The proprietary receiver in turn converts the light into a stream of hot air that can reach 1,000 degrees Celsius. The hot air then gets funneled through a gas turbine rejiggered for solar power. While many are skeptical whether the world needs another solar thermal technology (solar thermal actually can be competitive with fossil fuel power in the right circumstances), HelioFocus says its dish will take up less real estate.

Another is Tigo Energy, which specializes in software and electronics for solar (see video here). It will participate in a building integrated photovoltaic project.

And then there's Mississippi's SmartSynch, which will work with Motorola Israel on a smart grid management platform.

LEDs are coming, and iWatt says it can make them a little cheaper.

The company has devised a driver for LEDs that effectively lets a manufacturer eliminate another component called an opto-coupler. Reducing components reduces prices. Bridgelux, a larger and better known LED company, is already marching down the that path. Bridgelux came out with a packaging system earlier this year that ultimately lead to LED bulbs that cost $26 dollars in the not too distant future. It is not clear if iWatt can have the same level of impact. It's part costs 98 cents in quantities of 1,000. Another open question: will iWatt be able to survive the notoriously difficult market for semiconductors or will they get out-competed by established companies hawking the same thing? Far fewer chip start-ups make it out of the early stages than they used to.

Still, any price cut in LEDs helps.

Both companies, interestingly, have received investments from VantagePoint Venture Partners, which tends to pair investments. The firm also has investments in Tendril (home energy  management) and Adura Technologies (commercial building energy management.) Shotgun wedding anyone? Just a thought.

Although LEDs only represent a fraction of the market, they will likely come on strong in the next decade. Australia, Canada, the EU, the U.S. and others are phasing out incandescent bulbs. LEDs are also improving in quality and the price is declining.

The component, by the way, operates in quasi-resonant mode and employs adaptive gate drive control, in case you were wondering. 

Boston has joined Cree's LED City Program and put LED streetlights in Boston Common.

LEDs use less than half of the power of conventional streetlights, but more importantly they rarely need to be replaced. In a more extensive trial, Anchorage, Alaska replaced 16,000 light fixtures, about one-fourth of the streetlights in town, with LEDs. The swap should save the city about $360,000 a year in electricity, judging by current prices. The city will likely also save a similar amount of money in lower maintenance costs. LEDs last longer than traditional sodium lights so fewer maintenance crews are required. Toronto, Austin, Ann Arbor and Raleigh, North Carolina have already launched municipal LED lighting projects with Cree. Maintenance is one of the big reasons that LEDs will take off in commercial and municipal settings first. Starbucks is putting them in.

LEDs can also be easily networked. In Quebec, technicians have rigged smart streetlights up with sensors to allow police to detect when accidents occur. Oslo has paired networked streetlights with applications for pedestrian safety.

San Francisco has put up networked LED streetlights on one block in the Tenderloin, an area frequented by drug dealers. Weirdly, it was pushed as an idea to save energy. It's not a neighborhood where you would ever want to dim the streetlights, even in the daytime.

Globe Specialty Metals (NSDQ: GSM) said it has re-opened its factory in Niagara Falls to produce a type of silicon that hasn't found a wide adoption in the solar industry.

The New York City company said it has re-started two furnaces that could produce about 30,000 tons of metallurgical grade silicon per year. The company would refine a portion of those silicon so that it's pure enough for solar cell manufacturing.

The move is part of a $60 million plan to boost manufacturing and creating jobs. New York state's economic development authority, Empire State Development, and the New York Power Authority are helping Globe Specialty by providing 40 megawatts of hydropower over five years and up to $25 million in tax and other benefits.

The deal between Globe Specialty and the state would allow the economic development authority to offer discounts for up to 25 percent of the company's production of upgraded metallurgical silicon as a way to attract solar cell and panel manufacturers to set up factories in the state.

As part of its $60 million initiative, Globe Specialty also plans to build a factory, also in Niagara Falls, that would produce 4,000 tons of upgraded metallurgical silicon per year, the company said.

Upgraded metallurgical silicon is not as pure as the silicon that the solar cells makers have been using. But its producers say the material can work just as well as the purer version, and it can be had at a far cheaper price. Investments in upgraded metallurgical silicon began to show up a few years ago when there was a shortage of pure silicon, which was fetching hundreds of dollars per kilogram.

But refining metallurgical silicon so that it can be made into solar cells that can perform as well as those made from purer silicon hasn't proven to be an easy task.

Meanwhile, the price for the purer silicon has fallen by roughly 50 percent to reach about $70 per kilogram over the past year. That has raised questions about whether upgraded metallurgical silicon can compete in price and quality.

Q-Cells, one of the largest solar cell makers in the world, was once a big believer in the value of upgraded metallurgical silicon and signed deals to buy such material. But the German company, which has laid off workers and struggled to stay healthy in this recession, recently said it hadn't been using upgraded metallurgical silicon for its production. 

The alternative energy ATM is almost depleted.

The Department of Energy has already allocated $32.7 billion of the $36.7 billion in funds given to it under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, according to this fun applet on the DOE site. That leaves $4 billion, or a little more than ten percent. $4 billion. That wouldn't even cover holiday bonuses on Wall Street. But it was fun while it lasted.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu will to give out some more in Columbus, Ohio tomorrow.

At the end of last month, $28 billion had been allocated, according to Matt Rogers, the senior advisor to Chu. In the short run, the DOE will evaluate how well the stimulus worked to create jobs. Over the long term, the focus will shift to whether it helped created ongoing businesses. One key area to watch will be to see how the companies that received ARPA-E grants for advanced research performed.

The National Institute of Standards and Technologies is busy on one of the most ambitious standards programs in the history of technology: it wants to set 77 standards for the smart grids, including standards for 14 priority areas.

And it wants a number of the important standards, such as demand response monitoring and energy use information sharing, done in a few months.

This is not going to be easy. Some technology standards bodies can linger for years.

Last week, I sat on a panel with George Arnold, who heads up the project for NIST, at the GreenBeat Conference and asked him which are the ones that look like the biggest problems.

Surprisingly, he said home area networks. Homes should be easy to control, right? They only have a few hundred to a few thousand square feet and contain a finite number of appliances which get replaced at a fairly slow rate.

The challenge lay in achieving cooperation. Appliance makers are nervous about added costs. No single standard--ZigBee, WiFi, power line networking, some form of RF mesh--has won out yet and interoperability remains a work in progress. Different camps continue to promote different paradigms for home energy control. For hardware makers, this adds up to compounded risks.

How NIST gets through this will be one of the biggest issues next year in smart grid.