It’s a simple enough robot: an ATV equipped with a robotic arm and few cameras. But it’s already stealing green jobs from humans. Its suction cups grab onto the glass face of huge, power-plant-grade solar panels and lift them onto a metal frame. One robot, with three human helpers, can install a field of solar panels in an eighth of the time it would take 35 humans. Technology Review explains:

The main idea is to save money on labor, which accounts for a growing fraction of the cost of solar power as panels get cheaper … For a 14-megawatt solar plant, the company [PV Kraftwerker] estimates, it might cost about $2 million to install the panels manually. Using the robot could cut that cost by nearly half. The company says that the robot, which lists for $900,000, could pay for itself in less than a year of steady use.

For now, at least, the robots still need humans to install the metal frames for the panes and to screw them in after they’re placed. And Tech Review says that, for residential-scale projects, human labor’s still faster and cheaper.

If robots can make solar power cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels, that’s a net plus. But it does seem like we’re programming them to build the power source that will sustain the robot revolution, when that time comes. At least they won’t need to suck power from humans, Matrix-style. Solar beats biofuels any day.

The internet is full of makers, creating homebrewed technology out of stuff they have lying around, but every so often someone makes a thing that I can totally see as the centerpiece of tomorrow’s science-fiction way of life. For instance, this levitating LED bulb.

Photo by Chris Rieger.

Electrical engineering student Chris Rieger put it together in about six months with a lot of trial and error, and in the light, it looks pretty rough. But once it’s turned on, you can totally imagine your futuristic pad festooned with the mass-produced version.

Oh yes. I’ll take 100. And a swanky apartment to hang them in.

The Hiriko Fold (you think that’s Japanese, but it’s from the Basque for “urban”! Basque! Didn’t see THAT coming, did you?) was conceived a decade ago by researchers at MIT media lab, who wanted to design a small car that got even smaller for tight city parking. Now it’s finally going into commercial production, which means you could have your own sweet little fold-up car as early as 2013.

The all-electric Fold is normally eight feet long, already smaller than a SmartCar. But it folds up to a mere five feet long for parking, about the size of a shopping cart — small enough that three (and a half) of them can fit in a standard parking space. And all four wheels can swivel up to 60 degrees, which means you can just sort of sidle into the space instead of dealing with all that parallel-parking hoo-hah.

This is definitely not a road-trip car. It’s got a range of about 75 miles on one charge of its lithium-ion battery, and a top speed of 31 miles per hour. And if you’re already an accomplished urban biker, you might want to save your money — your bike already fits in small spaces, and the Fold will cost $16,400, which can buy you a lot of padded shorts. But for non-cyclists who want to zip around the city, you could do a lot worse than a zero-emissions car that can fit into the spaces shitty parkers leave behind.

The designers aren’t interested in the private market, though, so much as in the idea of selling fleets of Hiroki Folds for municipal car-sharing programs. If they get their wish, cities like Berlin, Barcelona, and San Francisco could be equipped with flocks of wee carlets for tourists and commuters to borrow. (Note that two of those target cities have some serious killer hills, making an EV-share program more realistic for non-Übermenschen than bikes.) Instead of spending all your milk money on a Fold, then, you could join a program that would let you use one on the weekdays to get to work. Or you could just borrow one to fold it and unfold it and fold it and unfold it a couple of times. We won’t judge.

Global investment in clean energy rose 24 percent in the second quarter of 2012, hitting $59.6 billion. The rise is largely due to China:

China was the main contributor to a 24 percent rise in new global investment in clean energy in the second quarter as large Chinese solar and wind projects raised millions of dollars of finance, said research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

New global clean energy investment totalled $59.6 billion in the second quarter of this year, up 24 percent from the previous quarter but still 18 percent below the near-record high of $72.5 billion in the second quarter of 2011, the company said in a report on Wednesday.

Investment increased in other countries as well.

Europe saw investment rise 11 percent in the second quarter to $20 billion, while the United States gained 18 percent to $10.2 billion, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Some of the largest projects financed in the second quarter included the 270 megawatt (MW) Lincs wind farm off the UK coast at $1.6 billion; the 419 MW Flat Ridge Wind Farm in the United States at $800 million; the 250MW Guodian Shanxi Qinyuan Taiyue wind farm in China at $317 million and the Shanlu & Shengyu Bayannur Wuyuan solar PV plant in China at $316 million.

(There are some cool photos of the Flat Ridge project at this website which you should go look at.)

It’s not surprising that investment grew; cleantech had one of its worst quarters in years at the beginning of 2012. Nor is it surprising that it grew so rapidly in China. The country remains the leader in global cleantech manufacturing.

Michael Liebreich. (Photo by Mike Lawn/Bloomberg.)

Q. The big story in solar right now is the flood of cheap, silicon-based panels from China and the subsequent wiping out of non-silicon solar companies in the U.S. and Germany (including, most famously, Solyndra). How will that play out?

A. A few years ago, China bet on blasting the existing stage of technology with money and process engineering, and American companies bet on the next generation, the funky stuff like CIGS. You could say that the Chinese definitely won this round. (Though I suspect First Solar, being a very well-run and effective company, may argue that it ain’t over yet.)

You’ve got an existing overcapacity which will probably take most of next year to absorb. We’ll probably see some solar manufacturing migrating away from China, accelerated by the U.S. trade finding. At the moment the Chinese have over-invested; you’re seeing bankruptcies.

I don’t think it’s over for manufacturing in the U.S., Germany, or Japan, because [solar] is not purely a commodity. I still don’t think we’ve seen the endpoint in terms of building-integrated, high-efficiency products. We’re a couple of rounds in to a 12-round fight. It’ll be a while before you see the final shape of the solar industry.

It’s interesting: The U.S. has never been a manufacturer of solar panels at scale. It did the specialist technology for pocket calculators and satellites. It was really Europe and Asia [that manufactured at scale]. One unfortunate element to the trade tension is that the U.S. exports more silicon than it imports solar panels, and yet it’s engaged in a trade war, which is extremely bad for those people employed at the installation end, it’s bad for U.S. scientists developing [intellectual property] to license to China, it’s just bad all around. You can understand the politics, but if the U.S. is not competitive in manufacturing, then it seems unfortunate to lay the blame for that at the door of this industry. Apple doesn’t make iPads here; they’re quite content to import those from China. What’s different about solar? The only difference is, it’s subsidized.

But look at the situation in Germany. Through feed-in tariffs, they’ve subsidized solar panels to the tune of something like 100 billion euros, and a big chunk of that went to China. But you know what? They’re getting their own back. Now China has subsidized manufacturing with all this cheap capital, and the Germans have got cheap solar! It swings around.

We almost need a global industrial policy. But we’re playing it for short-term, national, political (not even economic) advantage.

A country engages in dumping to destroy a [competitor's] industry and then raise prices and extract rents. But what industry, other than First Solar? Unless you want to argue that Solyndra was a robust business that was only destroyed because of the perfidious Chinese … but that’s absurd. That company was founded on the premise that silicon would remain at $450/kilo, despite the fact that before the whole boom, silicon was a $23/kilo. I don’t want to mock Solyndra too much — good people came up with the idea and good people backed it — but it was always a Hail Mary bet. It was new technology, new form factor, new distribution channel — it was a multi-miracle business. And frankly it never should have been debt-funded. That was just a distortion of loan guarantees for early-stage technology companies. There were lots of mistakes made, but it’s not right to force it into the paradigm of the anti-dumping response.

Q. Do you think silicon prices will come back up and non-silicon solar panels will eventually become competitive?

A. I don’t think the price of silicon is going to come up much. What will happen is, the excess stock will be liquidated, there will be people manufacturing at marginal costs for a while, and the glut will be absorbed. But meanwhile, other manufacturers will come in, people will shut down the old lines and build new ones. I’m just not seeing panel prices materially come up.

On the contrary, I think we’re going to see continued improvement in racking technologies, installation technologies, the whole balance-of-systems. [Rooftop solar installations] still look like PCs, not like Macs. It’s not elegantly done. When you really start to pluck out costs is when they’re fully building-integrated. I see continued improvement, plenty far to go in cost reductions.

The non-silicon stuff isn’t as efficient, but it’s competitive on a dollar-per-watt basis. I think we’ll see much better understanding of when you do what, which niches. It’s clear that on a rooftop, efficiency matters, because you’ve got limited space. You’re not as worried about [internal rate of return], you’re worried about [net present value]. I’ve only got one roof; if you told me I could earn 200 percent a year, but it’s only a few bucks, I don’t want someone crawling around on the roof doing it. I’m worried about the value I can get out of leasing my roof.

But when you’ve got no space constraints, you want the [internal rate of return] to work. I think we’ll see specialization rather than monoculture, one company or technology winning everything. There’ll be a space for concentrated photovoltaics, solar thermal, thin-film, non-silicon and silicon, and whatever else comes along. It’s all a question of which locations and which applications.

Look at the improvement in gas-turbine efficiency between 1990 and now, and then ask where clean energy technology will be in 20 years. There are people who act as though wind, for instance, has reached the end of its experience curve — it’s just ridiculous. Improvements in cost and performance scale with the doubling of experience — it’s a logarithmic function, not a linear function.

Q. What do you make of the new NREL study showing that it’s possible to get to 80 percent clean energy by 2050?

A. I haven’t read the study closely, in a sense because I already know what it says: It can be done; there are costs involved. Eighty percent is expensive, and it’s a lot more upfront investment. The key thing about these technologies — geothermal, solar, wind, hydro, marine — you spend up front and then there’s no fuel costs. You’re shifting to upfront payment, so you’re very sensitive to interest rates, and right now the financial markets are pretty poor. The financial stresses, particularly in Europe, have kept net interest rates high despite very low central bank rates.

You get into something of an ideological discussion, because those who do not want to go that direction will say, “there, you see, in order to deal with all the intermittency issues, you’ve got to spend tons of money and have overcapacity.” But then the people who do want to go that direction will say, “at least we know then what we’re spending. We don’t have hidden health costs, we don’t have volatility costs, we don’t have increasing gas costs, we don’t have defense costs.” So what would you rather have, the cost devil you know, or the cost devil you don’t know, which pops up all over the place in unpredictable parts of your economy?

It should be an economic discussion, because you can quantify those things, but it isn’t. It tends to descend into ideology.

A bill advancing through the California legislature would change all that and make it easy for anyone who pays a utility bill to become a solar customer. Senate Bill 843 has passed the state Senate and just got approval from a key committee in the Assembly. As GigaOM reports:

The bill … aims to enable people who don’t own homes, or own homes that don’t have suitable roofs for solar panels, to buy clean power and offset their utility bills. They could sign contracts with owners of solar power projects for a portion of the power produced, and the amount they pay for would show up as credits on their utility bills. The proposed program would be available not only to consumers but also businesses who are customers of the three big investor-owned utilities.

Susan Kraemer at PV Insider explains further:

Solar developers would sign up interested subscribers and then build neighborhood solar projects on nearby open space, industrial buildings or big box store rooftops to supply their electricity. … It could catapult the development of distributed solar even more effectively than feed-in tariffs did for Germany or Spain — but at no cost or risk.

Tom Price of solar investment firm CleanPath helped draft the legislation. “What’s important and transformative about this bill is that for the first time, it allows everybody in California, regardless of income or home ownership status, to choose to buy renewable energy,” he says. “Considering that 75 percent of residents and businesses in this state currently don’t have that option, imagine what kind of impact we’ll see.”

Price predicts that the bill will ultimately be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D).  If so, it will be yet another reminder that California, were it a country of its own, would be not only the ninth-largest economy in the world but a green policy pioneer to rival those show-offs in Scandinavia.

Engineers at Rice University have figured out how to make spray-on, rechargeable batteries that could transform any surface, anywhere, into a device for collecting and storing energy.

Basically, the team broke down the elements of individual battery components and turned them into paints. Once they’d done that, they could turn any paintable surface into a working battery — including coffee mugs.

The final paints were layered on to glass, stainless steel, glazed ceramic tiles and flexible polymer sheets — the resulting “batteries” worked just as well as the regular version. The team even picked out a choice ceramic mug, spray-painted the word “rice” in capital letters using a stencil, and demonstrated its efficiency as a battery.

They also layered the batteries with solar cells, which meant that the cells could not only collect energy but store it.

There’s still some work to do to make the paint more resistant to the elements, but in theory one day it’ll be possible to spray-paint these battery components and solar cells on porches, buildings, roofs, bike helmets, cutlery, whatever and have them collect and store energy. It’s officially the future.

Although gigantic ships are relatively efficient — compared to, say, transporting massive amounts of stuff by airplane — they do use an astounding amount of fuel. The shipping industry is working on this problem. In particular, a Norwegian shipping company and a marine energy company are partnering to work on a hybrid ship, the Viking Lady.

The Viking Lady (how awesome is that name?) already has a fuel cell installed that helps reduce its energy impact. Next year it should be getting a battery. Together, those features will mean it won’t have to burn gas while it’s hanging out in port — not only saving energy, but keeping down emissions.

Will it be as creepy-quiet as a Prius is when it’s running only on battery power? The idea of a totally silent, GIGANTIC ship sneaking up behind a little dingy in the bay is … frightening. But compared to other aquatic hybrids — mermaids, sirens, Ursula the Sea Witch, that octopus-face guy from Pirates of the Caribbean — even a spooky hybrid ship is pretty reassuring.

Whatever, Google Glasses; I’m holding out for the Google brain implant. And that just got a little more plausible, thanks to new technology for fuel cells that run off of blood sugar. In theory, if you popped one of these babies in your brain, it could get all its power from your own cerebrospinal fluid (the stuff that cushions your brain inside your skull).

[Researcher Benjamin] Rapoport calculated that in theory, the glucose fuel cell could get all the sugar it needs from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes the brain and protects it from banging into the skull. There are very few cells in the CSF, so it’s highly unlikely that an implant located there would provoke an immune response. There is also significant glucose in the CSF, which does not generally get used by the body. Since only a small fraction of the available power is utilized by the glucose fuel cell, the impact on the brain’s function would likely be small.

This is not the first glucose-based fuel cell, but it’s the first one that’s a candidate for long-term implantation. That means the only remaining challenge is figuring out how to get Wikipedia directly into my short-term memory (or, even better, how to upload my brain to the internet — hello, singularity!). Once we have the tech, the power source will be taken care of.

Okay, technically this is not intended for making me a trivia whiz/immortal, but for worthwhile pursuits like helping people with spinal-cord injuries. We already know, for instance, that patients with spinal damage can move a robot arm, using a brain-machine interface. This would allow that robot arm to be powered by the brain instead of plugged in. And actually, the research is far from complete — the next step is to make sure it’s safe in animals. But I’m just going to assume it’s now only a matter of time before I can have instant access to search, email, and maps. And also a robot tail.

Broadly, what’s happened is that both parties now perceive, accurately, that the public is pro-energy. That’s why both parties are grappling for the “all of the above” slogan.

“Pro-energy,” in the U.S. public’s case, means pro more energy, cheaper energy, cleaner energy, and more secure energy. What the public does not like is the trade-offs between those goals. It doesn’t like hearing that it has to give anything up. It doesn’t like hearing about “anti-energy” penalties and prohibitions. And it never likes favoritism, waste, fraud, or generic “spending.”

Given that all energy policies involve trade-offs between various desiderata, a political party’s ability to sell an energy policy to the public hinges on its ability to evoke the right frames. More/cheaper/cleaner/safer energy always polls well. Restraints, added cost, pollution, and foreign-ness (especially Middle Eastern-ness) do not.

This basic dynamic helps explain why Mitt Romney is not dropping Solyndra. Conservatives still see it as one of their bests attacks on Obama. It evokes Big Government spending, cronyism, waste, and failure (i.e., less energy). It tars the rest of Obama’s clean-energy programs, nay his entire agenda, by association.

The dynamic also explains why the right is going after Obama for allegedly (though not actually) leaving coal and other fossil fuels out of his energy strategy. They don’t want him to capture the pro-energy label. “All of the above,” says Romney, means that Obama is “for all sources of energy that come from above the ground, not for things that come below the ground.” He’s not really pro-energy — he’s just pro-some-energy!

The Dem response has two tracks, one I think is politically smart and one I worry is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating.

The smart response is to double-down on being the pro-energy candidate. That’s what Obama and his cabinet have been doing. They boast about increased oil and natural gas production while also insisting that clean energy innovation is a key part of an “all of the above” strategy — a part that the GOP is leaving out. Republicans aren’t pro-energy — they’re just pro-some-energy!

This is obviously not what any climate hawk would choose. “All of the above” is, as a matter of policy guidance, absurd. Nonetheless, it is aimed squarely at the bulk of public opinion; that’s the battle that must be fought and won.

The other track of the Dem response is less wise. It amounts to, “They did it too!” History is littered with Republicans enthusiastically grubbing for federal support for clean energy (and dirty energy) projects and companies in their home districts. Their sudden indignation at loan guarantees and the like smells of hypocrisy. I’ve indulged in this kind of thing myself on occasion.

The latest such twist, which Politico says may “undercut attacks on Solyndra,” is focused on a solar company called Konarka.

You see, Romney helped secure the company a $1.5 million loan when he was governor of Massachusetts, and — here’s the twist — it recently declared bankruptcy! Ha ha! Romney “picked winners” in a failed bid at crony capitalism! I’m rubber, you’re glue, bounces off me and sticks to you.

This is an entirely Beltway-focused line of attack, meant to serve journalists the hypocrisy stories they find irresistible. But at what cost? The intent of the attack, as I hear it, is to show that Republicans generally and Romney specifically were “for it before they were against it” — they’ve flip-flopped on alternative energy, from moderate to far right.

Is that what’s coming across, though? When Konarka is called “Romney’s Solyndra,” I suspect political elites do not hear “Romney’s civic-minded attempt to support clean energy.” They hear scandal and vulnerability. They hear that funding clean-energy companies is a dark secret to be embarrassed about; that government support for clean energy is always cronyism; that solar is not a viable business, even with subsidies.

This does not play to cleantech’s advantage. And it’s not true. It is absolutely in the public interest to support clean energy, programs like the stimulus bill and the DOE loan guarantee program [PDF] have been run incredibly well, and solar employs over 100,000 Americans and is rapidly approaching grid parity.

Konarka has been around since 2001. It was a spin-off from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, using organic chemistry and nanotechnology to make thin, flexible solar panels and spray-on solar dyes. In addition to $170 million worth of private funding, it received $20 million in help from the government, including from the Pentagon, the Bush White House, and, in a splashy 2003 press conference, then-Gov. Romney.

Konarka, like Solyndra, was based on a fateful bet against silicon solar panels. The hope was to innovate more efficient non-silicon alternatives and drive down the price enough to compete with silicon. Lots of companies were involved in that bet, as was quite a bit of bipartisan government support. Then along came China with its huge subsidies, manufacturing silicon panels in massive quantities, driving down the per-unit price, flooding the world with cheap product, and undercutting alternatives.

Eventually, silicon prices will rise and alternatives will become more competitive. When that day comes, we will look back on the demise of our domestic solar innovators with great regret. The fight to support them is no embarrassing secret, whether Romney or Obama did it. It was and is in our country’s best public-health, economic, and security interests. It’s a point of pride. It would be unfortunate if, in their enthusiasm to win a news cycle or two, Democrats and their spin doctors implied otherwise.