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In new data provided by the Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 31,000 global respondents, 68 percent of respondents trust the “renewables” business to do the right thing, as compared with 58 percent for natural gas, 53 percent for utilities and 49 percent for oil (see image below).

That’s a license to lead, folks. Despite significant perceptual headwinds, renewables emerge with a 10 point lead over its nearest energy competitor. As a marketer, I’m reminded of why I originally found this sector so energizing and inspiring during the cleantech boom of 2007-2008.

Note the high trust in places like China and India. Not surprising, considering the clear messages sent by those governments about cleantech deployment, and the ability of those nations to leapfrog traditional energy systems to meet electricity demand for growing middle classes. Both countries boast cleantech leaders like Hanwha Solar, Suzlon and Tata.

Note the low numbers for Japan (66 percent) and Germany (63 percent). These are consistent with both countries’ lower trust in business and energy.

The German numbers shocked me the first time I saw them. But for this country, renewables have graduated to the “big energy” establishment, which I expect engenders less trust than the sheen of new technologies in emerging markets.

For Japan, trust in the entire energy industry is lower than other countries post-Fukushima, but renewables are trusted most within the Japanese energy sector.

Broadening focus to the entire energy industry, this data corroborates another trend: so-called “purpose-driven” energy innovators enjoy a trust premium over other energy professionals. This not just a cleantech thing, it’s an advanced energy thing. This is for two reasons:

When asked to rank attributes that shape trust in a company, respondents ranked “purpose” – protecting the environment, partnering with NGOs – as most important, and being an “innovator of new products” close behind (see image below and note the orange and purple attributes that respondents rank as more important for the energy industry as compared with general business).

Clearly, energy companies can earn more credibility by better communicating real global citizenship and helpful innovation.

On the flipside, communicating about the success of business “operations” (dark blue) was valued only as table stakes for being an energy company, not as a major trust-builder. I would argue this is true if we’re talking about large companies, but I think the opposite is true for advanced energy start-ups where the onus is much higher to prove operational success.

The data also shows how technology is trusted more than energy. In my opinion, the marriage of technology and energy is a net gain for energy company trust building. See the image below, which depicts how much higher technology is trusted than energy (78 percent vs. 67 percent). I interpret this as further proof that innovation gives the energy industry license to lead.

This is reflected in the strong Silver Spring IPO on Wednesday. Silver Spring is an innovative energy IT company, not just an energy company. Energy IT is a highly credible sector populated by other promising companies like OPOWER and FirstFuel, and a primary focus for venture capitalist still focused on cleantech. The public trust data corroborates the investor enthusiasm.

Would you like more data on trust in the energy industry? Don’t hesitate to contact me at joey.marquart@edelman.com.

Joey Marquart is the global cleantech sector lead for Edelman, the PR firm. He is based in Silicon Valley and oversees communications programs for solar, bio, EV, materials and smart grid companies.

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You’re probably wondering, so what happened? ABB was previously the lead investor in GreenVolts’ latest round and had committed $20 million of the $35 million round. Andrew Tang, ABB’s Managing Director of its venture arm, ABB Technology Ventures, gave me some more context for why ABB decided not to continue to fund the company:

Our decision to not further invest in GV has nothing to do with its team or technology, in fact both of which are recognized as world class. This decision reflects the uncertainty in the PV market, and the lack of transparency on when it will stabilize. I hope this decision demonstrates that we are a disciplined investor, who won’t sell winners too early, nor throw good money after bad. We are optimistic about the industrial and cleantech space, and ABB Technology Ventures will continue to seek and make financially sound investments in innovative start-up companies which have technologies or business model of strategic interest to ABB. In fact, we currently have an active global pipeline and evaluate more than 1,000 deals a year.

So that’s the story from ABB.

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Other major U.S. solar customers include Costco, Kohl’s, Walgreens, IKEA, and Macy’s. It’s not surprising that the companies that have a lot of department and grocery stores — with large roof space — would have the most opportunity for installing solar panel systems. According to the report there’s 2.3 GW of solar panel systems installed, delivering over 24,000 systems, for companies and governments (non-residential). In comparison 1 GW is the size of a large coal or nuclear plant.

Remember these are already installed systems. Other companies have sizable plans in the works. For example, Apple is building a 20 MW system in North Carolina for its data center.

As I reported yesterday, the trends behind this interest by companies in solar panels is due to rock bottom solar panel prices, policies in some key states, like California, Arizona, and New Jersey, and also new business models for financing solar panel systems. Companies like SolarCity have created businesses around raising money from investors like banks (or even Google) to finance the upfront cost of a solar panel system. SolarCity’s customer can then pay for the solar system over a 20-year, or so, time frame (which is more convenient and affordable), and the bank can get back a return on that investment (like 12 percent).

However, according to the report released on Tuesday about the growth of solar panel systems in the U.S., this rapid adoption is expected to slow down in the second half of this year and next year.

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This year 3.2 GW of solar panels projects are estimated to be installed, which includes both utility-scale solar panel projects, and solar panels installed on rooftops for homes and businesses. Utility-scale solar projects — like the kind that SunPower and PG&E announced last week — made up more than half of the quarter’s installations, at 447 MW and with 20 projects completed. It was the largest quarter ever for utility solar panel installations, says the report.

The trends behind this solar panel wave in the U.S. are rock bottom solar panel prices, and policies in some key states, like California, Arizona, and New Jersey. However, the report authors estimate that the growth in U.S. solar panel installations will slow down in the second half of this year and next year.

There’s already a sizable amount of solar capacity in California. According to the New York Times blog Green, in August California’s utility solar power projects generated about 1 GW during a peak time, which is about as big as a large coal of nuclear plant. And there’s 5.16 GW of solar panel power spread across close to 250,000 solar panel systems total in the U.S.

Beyond the bright spot of solar panel installations, much of the U.S. solar industry that does manufacturing is really struggling. The industry is gathering this week in Orlando for the huge solar convention Solar Power International and will no doubt address the concerns, as well as the bright spots.

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But unlike these social media companies, Enphase is manufacturing actual devices (though also software) — buying goods from various suppliers — and that takes a lot of funding to scale up. It has designed a type of inverter that’s distributed for each panel — in contrast to the traditional single central inverter for a solar system — and Enphase says its microinverters are more efficient, safer, and can allow better monitoring. Here’s a look at Enphase Energy’s numbers via its just-filed S-1:

Proposed Maxium Aggregate Offering. $100 million.

Volume. Enphase says it has shipped 750,000 units through May 31, 2011, which represents over about 25,000 solar installations.

More reliable. Enphase says microinverters are 45 times more reliable than central inverters.

Background. Enphase was founded in March 2006 as PVI Solutions.

Financials. For the three months ended March 31, 2011, Enphase generated $18.07 million in revenues, up slightly from $11.59 million in revenues from the same quarter a year earlier. For the full year 2010, Enphase brought in $61.66 million in revenues, up from $20.20 million in 2009. However, Enphase has continued to lose money and has never been profitable. The company lost $9.29 million for the latest quarter, $21.78 million for the full year 2010, and as of March 31, 2011, had accumulated a deficit of $65.8 million.

Growth trajectory. While Enphase continues to lose money, it has been on a growth trend throughout 2010. The company shipped 11,000 units in 2008, 126,000 in 2009, and 414,000 in 2010. For the first three months of 2011, Enphase has shipped 123,000 units, or almost the same as it shipped for the entire year of 2009.

IPO proceeds. Enphase says the $100 million from the IPO will be good for funding the company’s activities over the next 12 months, but Enphase says it may need to raise more after the IPO for R&D, expansion, and acquisition. It’s a rather competitive market for Enphase, competing with large suppliers and sometimes the panel makers themselves.

Installer partners. Enphase says it works with 2,500 installers in North America as of May 31, 2011, and is adding new installers at the rate of about 100 per month.

Manufacturing and suppliers. Enphase works with Flextronics, which assembles and tests its microinverters; Phoenix Contact, which makes the AC cable for its third-generation M215 microinverter system; Fujitsu, for its ASIC; Epcos, for magnetic cores; Cree, for diodes; and TDK-EPC for magnetic components.

Funds raised to date. The company closed a $63 million private round in June last year, bringing the total private money raised to $104 million by the end of 2010.

Who will do well in the IPO? Third Point owns 19.10 percent of shares before the offering; RockPort Capital owns 18.10 percent; Madrone Partners owns 14.80 percent; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers owns 7.70 percent; Applied Ventures owns 6.30 percent; and Bay Partners owns 5.50 percent.

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California claimed less than 30 percent of the U.S. PV market in 2010, for two reasons. First, the California Solar Initiative — the state incentive policy that, more than any other, turned U.S. solar from a niche industry into “Big Sun,” as one PV executive wryly puts it — is nearing its end. Second, East Coast states, particularly New Jersey, are rolling out incentive policies, as more and more state governments seek to diversify their energy resources and capture the local economic benefits.

State policy makes all the difference in a state’s solar success. The federal incentive structure is the same across the U.S., and whereas states’ wind resources can vary dramatically, the difference between the solar resource in our sunniest and least sunny state is only about a third. Simply put, states that put public money behind solar create a viable market, and states that don’t, don’t.

State policy is why California took off first, why New Jersey took off second, and why many other states, primarily in the Northeast and the Southwest, are taking off now. Let’s take a quick look at which Northeast states are poised for a boom, and why:

1. New Jersey: Hitting Its Stride

New Jersey’s solar market really hit the accelerator in 2010, installing more than 25 MW per quarter in the first three quarters, then ballooning to more than 50 MW in the last quarter.  They’re keeping up the strong pace, for now, with as much as 15-20 MW of new capacity each month. This growth is the main reason California’s market share has declined.

However, the first big test for an East Coast market that is incented by solar renewable energy credits (state credits that can be bought and sold on a market) is coming. The idea behind a SREC incentive policy is that it is supposed to be able to weather the storms caused by fluctuation in the supply-demand relationship, and is eventually supposed to settle on a consistent SREC price that reflects the minimum subsidy necessary to get the desired amount of solar built. But with such rapid growth, the market will be over-supplied and saturated with SRECs in the coming compliance year.

Whether New Jersey market participants – and policy-makers – can stay cool as the large N.J. SREC market encounters a major patch of turbulence is an open question. The answer to which will certainly reverberate throughout the east coast SREC markets.

2. Quieter East Coast Markets Catching On

After New Jersey comes a parade of other eastern state governments that, through policies that are related to New Jersey’s, are calling for rapidly increasing solar demand over the next 10 years. Last year, these six states combined had policy-mandated demand for about 100 MW of solar; by 2021, their policies call for a combined 3.5 GW (5.5 GW if you count NJ). If these states are serious about their policy goals, there are going to be a lot of green jobs in the Northeast this decade.

3. New York and Connecticut: Joining the Party

Both the New York and Connecticut legislatures are considering major solar policies as of this writing. Connecticut’s program is meaningful but modest, mandating about 350 MW over the next 10 years. New York’s could be transformative; it’s a program that could rival New Jersey’s, calling for about two GW over 10 years and four GW over just a few more. If both those bills pass into law, the Northeast region will have policies in place that set a goal of more than 10 GW of installed capacity by the early 2020’s. Big Sun indeed.

The Future of Solar Incentives

For the most part, those goals are being implemented with SREC programs. At Borrego Solar, we believe SREC programs are the best state-based incentive form going on right now, because of their potential to uniquely combine efficiency, flexibility, and the political appeal of a market-based instrument.  That’s part of why we’re bullish on the region, and working to expand our business in the major SREC states like New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and others.

But all these programs are either infants or challenging adolescents, and how stakeholders navigate the problems and pitfalls they encounter in the next couple of years will determine how successful the east coast states are in reaching their solar goals.

Perhaps the largest issue is uncertainty in the future price of SRECs. Remember, the cost of generating solar electricity is mostly in the up-front capital expense; solar customers are sometimes making a million-dollar investment decision based on the revenue that they expect the system to generate over time. When there is uncertainty around that revenue  – as there is in all SREC markets, because the value of the commodity can change a lot for a range of reasons –investors will make conservative assumptions and use high discount rates.

In the best case, this issue leads to inefficiency; in the worst case, it leads to policy failure. This problem can be addressed through various tools of policy design and long-term contracting requirements, but so far no SREC policy has done a great job of addressing it.

Also important will be the ongoing balancing act that solar stakeholders — both policy makers and private-sector participants — have to pull off. That balance needs to occur between taking the kind of hands-off approach that is necessary for a policy-created market to function properly over time, and the practical and political reality that there will be pressure to intervene in these markets, when they are especially volatile or unexpectedly problematic.

No incentive program is perfect by design, and market participants will undoubtedly continuously ask for policy changes that fall in the gray area between technical fixes and market-making.

Likewise, many future policy-makers will certainly look at SREC payments that are going to projects that were built a decade ago and ask themselves “why are we still paying for that?”  The development and entrenchment of norms around this generation of SREC programs will be a key piece of their stable development.

Given the opportunities and challenges that companies like ours face in growing our businesses in the east coast SREC markets, it should be an exciting two to three years.

Dan Berwick is Borrego Solar’s Director of Policy and Business Development based out of the New England regional headquarters.  Dan’s primary focus is on shaping Borrego Solar’s unique business strategies and product offerings across various geographic markets and solar incentive jurisdictions.

Image courtesy Abi Skipp, US Army Environmental Command, The National Guard, Egan Snow.

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Heliatek will use the funding to build an initial production facility in Dresden for its organic solar cells. The startup, which uses vacuum technology to deposit the conductive material on film substrate, says its technology will lead to efficient, flexible and extremely lightweight PV modules — as much as 40 times less than today’s conventional technology. That’s why Heliatek is starting off targeting mobile applications, such as handbags that can power cell phones, though the company didn’t say when its production facility or its first commercial products would be ready. The company also believes it can find a market in “architectural solutions” (presumably building applications where weight is an important factor) and in regions with “weak infrastructures.”

Organic solar cells are widely viewed as a possible low-cost alternative to silicon-based cells, but their biggest shortcomings to date are low power conversion efficiencies (currently in the range of 6-7 percent compared with silicon-based cells in the 12-20 percent range) and poor durability, according to the Department of Energy. Heliatek says its cells have been third-party certified as reaching an efficiency of 6.1 percent, and the German solar PV developer says that will improve to 8-10 percent within three years. Heliatek, which is based in Dresden and Ulm, said the high degree of purity of the organic materials it’s using will yield longer-lasting solar cells.

In the meantime, Heliatek will be keeping a close eye on Lowell, Mass.-based Konarka Technologies, a leading organic solar cell developer.  Konarka, which raised $45 million in funding last December, has since announced sales agreements to embed its solar cells into portable electronics and consumer products and has partnered with an architectural aluminum builder to develop a building wall made of solar panels, glass and aluminum. Konarka began mass production of its Power Plastic films in October 2008 at a factory in New Bedford, Mass.   

Another player in the space is El Monto, Calif.-based Solarmer, which is developing strips of organic solar cells that could be attached to the back of cell phones to extend their battery lives. The company has achieved a 6.77 percent efficiency, expects to reach a manufacturing cost of less than $1 per watt and aims to bring its first product to market by early 2011. Solarmer hopes to subsequently expand from consumer electronics to building-integrated PV. Heliatek, Konarka and Solarmer might disagree on which of the three has the most promising technology, but they all appear to be on the same page when it comes to where the best opportunities lie for organic PV.   

Image courtesy of Heliatek.

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An AT&T subscriber near Lake Tahoe forwarded me a letter received via express mail a week after she signed up for naked DSL service from the ISP. The letter noted that AT&T has four tiers that allowed downloads of between 20 GB and 80 GB per month. When we reported on AT&T discussing its trial efforts with the Federal Communications Commission back in November, it said that the tiers would begin with a 20-GB-per-month tier and go all the way up to 150 GB per month. Update: AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom says that customers subscribing to AT&T’s fiber-to-the-node U-verse service can sign up for a higher 150 GB per month tier. While it may have lowered its tiers, t The carrier is sticking with a planned $1 per GB charge for users who exceed their limit.

The smaller cap for lower speeds is disheartening, but what’s more disturbing is that the customer was able to sign up for broadband service without ever knowing they existed. The ISP makes no mention of caps in its online marketing materials or terms of service (screenshots below), and a sales representative said the carrier had no caps when the customer called in to ask. A week after she ordered her service, the customer said she received a letter from AT&T via express mail detailing the metered broadband limits.

I’ve reached out to AT&T to understand why it was pushing a smaller caps and to also figure out if this particular subscriber’s experience was common. Update: Bloom says visitors who get their information from http://www.att.net can access terms of service information that notes the trial, but we were unable to find the info when visiting from http://www.att.com. As Time Warner’s experience has shown, metered broadband isn’t something that the public is happy about. By not informing customers of the trial when they’re signing up for service, and by detailing one plan before the FCC then implementing another, AT&T is pulling a bait and switch with consumers and possibly regulators.

And for those of you ready to point out that this customer can go elsewhere with her business, the answer is no, she can’t. The local cable company, Charter Communications, doesn’t have cable out to her apartment building just yet. However, it too is planning some form of consumption-based broadband billing as well.

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