Siemens is the company that just can't resist.

The German industrial giant is considering purchasing solar cell maker Q-Cells, according to Reuters (via Forbes here.).

Earlier this month, Siemens bought solar thermal vendor Solel for $418 million. Earlier, it has bought an number of water companies and ramped up its investments in smart grid.

In a list of the top ten acquirers in greentech, we picked Siemens as number two, right behind General Electric.

This is a pattern you should get used to. Small, innovative startups often have tremendous technology, but they lack the capital, distribution networks and relationships to bring their ideas to fruition. Large conglomerates often fail...

Arizona is California, when it comes to solar.

Pacific Gas & Electric announced it has signed a deal with Aqua Caliente Solar, a division of NextLight Renewable Power, to obtain 290 megawatts worth of power from a power plant to be built in Yuma County Arizona. The plant will start delivering power in 2012 and become fully operational by 2014. Thus, it won't help PG&E hit its "20 percent by 2010" goal but will be there for the 33 percent by 2020 goal.

PG&E earlier this year contracted with NextLight for 230 megawatts in a power plant to be built in Antelope Valley, California.

With its ample supplies of desert land and a comparatively smaller population, Arizona boosters have...

Not only will it be big, it will involve the two main types of solar.

Acciona Solar Power, Clark Energy Group and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin development of a 1-gigawatt plus power plant at Fort Irwin in California this Thursday.

The plant will include both photovoltaic panels as well as mirrors and turbines for solar thermal power. Consider this the wave of the future. Some companies are already moving toward hybrid power plants which combine gas turbines with solar thermal systems to keep a more constant flow of power on cloudy days. A PV-thermal farm ideally will let landholders maximize their real estate by plunking down solar panels in corners of land where more...

We reported earlier this week on the resurgence of venture capital investment in greentech. We broke it out sector-by-sector in this post. The graph above breaks it down year-by-year and looks at the recovery quarter by quarter

The chart below is another example of some of the work done in the Greentech Innovations Report – where we carefully track every VC deal in greentech as well as report on a different renewable energy topic every issue.

Investors channeled $575 million into 29 solar VC deals in the third quarter.  The investments spanned the solar sector and ranged from the fanciful (solar in space from SolarEn) to the sublime.  Notable in this data is the number of small...

Uni-Chem, a maker of leather goods in South Korea, plans to set up a solar cell factory in Oregon, reported the Associated Press.

The company has apparently signed a memorandum of understanding with Hynix Semiconductor to buy Hynix's memory chip factory in Eugene for $50 million. Hynix, also based in Korea, closed the ten-year-old factory in September 2008 and laid off more than 1,000 employees when the memory business wasn't faring well.

Uni-Chem is interested in branching out to new business. It currently sells leather to Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors. The company also counts Burberry and Coach as customers.

Uni-Chem Chairman Lee Ho-chan told the AP that the company bought a 51...

"Separating the path of the photons from the path of the generated charge carriers."

"Decoupling the optical and electronic pathways."

That's what Solasta is trying to do.

The Newton, Mass.-based solar firm was founded in 2006 with A round funding from Kleiner Perkins. KP has a few of those stealth solar firms including Alta Devices and Solexel, none of whom appear on the portfolio portion of its website. In addition to VC funding from KP, Solasta has received more than $3 million in two DOE grants. 

With technology and founding personnel in the form of three physics professors from Boston College (Michael J. Naughton, CTO,  Zhifeng Ren and Krzysztof Kempa), Solasta is using amorphous...

SunPower's Doug Rose, the senior director of technology strategy, presented at the Silicon Valley PV Society in a talk titled, "Technology and Economics of High Efficiency c-Si PV." Of course, the thrust of the talk was the strength of SunPower's high-efficiency solar cells and panels, and the impact of efficiency on the cost and payback of a solar system.

The high efficiency of SunPower's solar cell stems in most part from its back-contact technology – a technology pioneered by founder Dick Swanson in the early 1980s at Stanford with low-cost manufacturing breakthroughs in 2001. The back contact design avoids gridlines on the front of the cell so there's no metal obscuring the cell...