MIT

If you needed any further evidence that the solar industry has reached a new level of maturity, you could find it in spades at this year’s Intersolar North America.

Officials from states eager to attract solar projects (notably, Arizona and New Mexico) were there touting new incentive packages. Chinese and German manufacturers showed up in larger numbers, many of them announcing new American headquarters. Start-ups came to showcase commercial versions of technologies developed in university labs.

Every trend in the global solar industry was crammed into three convention center floors in downtown San Francisco. But while solar trade shows in previous years have been the domain of start-ups and new technology, Intersolar 2009 featured a subtle shift.

There were start-ups and innovators, yes, but the biggest news involved giant industry leaders making deals, and there were many more foreign companies getting serious about their presence in the states.

With reporting by Molika Ashford

(Part 1 of 3 on Geothermal Energy)

As America’s love affair with coal cools off, geothermal energy is getting hot, hot, hot.

Why? Because the secret is out of the bag: geothermal is cheap and abundant.

For $800 million to $1 billion in R&D funding – spread out over 15 years -- geothermal could be deployed on a scale that would produce more than 100,000 MW of additional new (low-emissions) capacity in the US by 2050.

That’s less than the price of one 275 MW clean-coal plant and more than 360 times more energy.