Solar integrated Technologies announced yesterday that the Company has achieved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2000 certification for its quality management system.  The certification is for the design, manufacture and marketing of proprietary BIPV systems for commercial roofing and portable solar applications worldwide.

According to CEO Jon W. Slangerup ,"This ISO certification gives Solar Integrated another competitive differentiator and provides our customers with added confidence in their decision to partner with us."

I don't know how important this bureaucratic qualification is but no doubt some of you may have noticed a major movement in the stock today.

At the time of posting, the last trade was at 210p - up over 12% on the day and an all-time high. This matters because SIT has missed out on the spectacular boom in solar stocks that so many other solar companies have enjoyed.

So maybe SIT is just arriving late at the party?

• America's snapshot electricity demand is 411 gigawatts
• Annual electricity consumption was 3,602,000,000,000 kilowatt hours
• Roughly 2 acres of a windfarm will give you a 90% available megawatt

D1 Oils Plc, a developer of bio diesel fuels from jatropha curcas seed, has just signed a deal with Indian-based essential oil producer PManek Biofarms for the supply of crude jatropha oil (CJO) for biodiesel feedstock. The stock closed yesterday at 250 p.

This news comes not long after the company issued a press release knowing of no reason why the stock has fallen so far in the last 3 months. At the beginning of September, the price was around 450p and then dropped quite quickly to 225p. With oil prices where they were in September, one might have expected the reverse movement, because as oil prices rise, biofuels start to look a better bet.

Let's see what happens . . . the company has only been listed for just over a year.

EPOD International, is planning a public listing. The company claims to be the leaders in electric power storage systems for the Distributed Generation, Co-Generation, Wind and Solar Power markets.

Of particular interest to me is their recent teaming-up with a Canadian Wind Power company to test commercial levels of energy storage during off-peak times to sell back into the grid during peak hours, using the EPOD EMT Energy Storage system.

Windpower's greatest weakness is that it is not predictable and the power it produces at night is almost worthless. Yet the subsidy structure all over the world dictates that it is worth exactly the same price. It's fascinating that the company values the wind energy storage market at $20 billion - double the existing wind power market !

If EPOD really does crack energy storage on that scale, we could see an end to the spikes in spot electricity prices, sometimes multiples of the ordinary price.

SunPower made a spectacular market début yesterday on the Nasdaq, making a 41 percent jump from its opening share price of $18 to $25.45 a share at the market close.

SunPower Corporation designs, manufactures and sells high efficiency solar cells and solar panels that generate electricity from sunlight for residential, commercial and remote power applications. What makes them different is their proprietary all back contact silicon solar cell technology, which they claim produces up to 50% more power per square foot compared to conventional solar cells.

For this you can read 20% efficiency.

Small by solar standards, the company has capacity for 25 MW per year and the plant is based in the Philippines but could expand to 100 MW.

Looks like a nice little earner for Cypress Semiconductor.

NYSE-listed Ormat Technologies has just completed a 20 MW geothermal plant in Nevada. It took only 8 months to build - that must be one of the fastest large power plant constructions.

Since going public just over a year ago, Ormat has performed well, now trading in the low 20s, having reached a low of 14 in April this year. The company also takes an interest in recovered energy generation, remote power units and biomass fueled power units, although its major focus is in Geothermal. Ormat's recent Q3 results were strong; revenues rose 9.5 percent and net Income grew by 82%. And the company has a large market capitalisation of over $700 m - of major importance to Institutional Investors.

Its subsidiary, Ormat Funding Corp, has a much snazzier looking website. OFC was founded in 2001 to develop, construct, own, and acquire through certain direct and indirect subsidiaries geothermal power projects in the United States.

This company appears to have a major slice in the Geothermal market - and is publicly traded.

As per my earlier blog about British Biofuels being lifted by the announcement by the government to mandate 5% biofuels by 2010, Argent Energy, the Scottish renewable energy group, which is credited with having created the world’s largest biodiesel plant, is preparing to float early next year. 

The company is already capable of producing 50 million litres - almost equivalent to 5% for Scotland !

So you can see why they welcome the new captive client base that will have to appear in England, Wales and Northern Ireland . . .

Irish Carbon Credit trader EcoSecurities today said that it intends to float on AIM, with speculation that it could a fetch a price tag of some €200m. If it goes ahead, it will be joining "Trading Emissions" which listed earlier this year.

Both companies will be looking for the price of carbon to rise substantially from the EUR 21 - 24 range where it has been stuck for a few months. Trading Emissions - I suspect - would like to see a return the early volatility since the launch of carbon trading in Europe in December 2004.

I have more than a few doubts about carbon trading - a highly artificial market. A key question is whether it will be sustained beyond the period of 2012 and extended outside of Europe. A more pressing issue will be that Britain may suspend carbon trading if - as some have predicted - a harsh winter leads to blackouts.

Anyone wondering why London-listed Biofuels Corp rose nearly 11% today to 155.33p has missed the government announcement they had long been praying for. . .

Earlier today, Alastair Darling, the UK's Transport Secretary (why does government need a transport minister?) announced that 5% of fuel sold on UK forecourts should come from a renewable source by 2010, adding that the target could be 'much higher'.

Biofuels chief executive Sean Sutcliffe said: 'We believe the target could be much higher and will work with the Government on determining future target levels and on efficient Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation implementation, to help ensure that it stimulates further investments in biofuels in the UK.'

Biofuels Corp has had a rollercoaster ride since it's IPO last year. But thanks to this legislation, it could soon be selling biodiesel into a captive market.

According to this article from Reuters, China's SunTech Power is planning to raise $350 m in an IPO in New York.

The company is already big by solar standards, in the top 10 of manufacturers, with a capacity of 120 MW per year. It would appear to be very well placed to profit from China's greater appetite for alternative energy - just boosting the renewables target for 2020 from 10% to 15%. China's new renewable energy law comes into force at the beginning of next year.

Nasdaq listed FuelCell Energy , has just announced a partnership with a sewerage in North-Eastern Germany.

Keep reading, this is actually a lot more interesting than you might think !

FCE stands out as a fuel cell company that early on decided not to rely on hydrogen to fuel its fuel cells, but off the shelf fossil fuels such as natural gas. The hydrogen economy, so they believed, was decades off. So their fuel cells would reform gas, stripping off the hydrogen for power. A kind of fuel cell plus.

Now they're taking it a step further and using the power of human waste.

What they are doing here is to use the gas (particularly methane) which comes from the sewage to power the fuel cell, to power the plant and to sell any excess power back into the grid.

Pretty clever !

Evergreen Solar , a developer and manufacturer of PV modules, has come a long way since 2003 when losses peaked at just under USD 15 million. Today it capitalises at $675m and in its just announced Q3 results achieved positive product gross margin of 10.4 percent. This compares with negative 29.0 percent for the third quarter of 2004 and positive 6.2 percent in the second quarter of 2005. The turn-around came in Q4 2004, when the company achieved its first positive gross margins. Then came their joint venture with Q-Cells (also a listed solar stock) in Germany to build a 30 -megawatt solar wafer, cell and module manufacturing plant in Germany.

Evergreen has been fantastically well positioned in the solar boom because their proprietary string ribbon manufacturing technology, means that they can significantly reduce the need for silicon - a very high cost input - and achieve similar effects. This gives them an edge over many other solar firms, because the cost of silicon has risen from $9 a kilo in 2000 to $60 today.

Today, they have also announced their biggest sales contract to date - a minimum of $70 million of photovoltaic (PV) modules to PowerLight over the next four years. 

Xantrex Technology Inc has just announced a sales deal with recently London aim-listed Clipper Wind Power for $12 million of wind power converters.

Xantrex sees itself as a world leader in advanced power electronics. With the major renewables such as solar and wind providing power not in your precisely chosen quantity or even exactly when you want it, power electronics are vital to smooth out the power supply.

As renewables make ever greater inroads, it will still have to be on the back of better electronics managing the power. That's why Xantrex is important.

Outside of India - where power supplies are extraodinarily unreliable - there aren't many companies doing this. Xantrex though, is one of them.

AEI followers will have picked up how many alternative energy stocks are based in Germany. So the level of political support there is of huge importance.

Prior to Germany's recent election, there had been fears within the country's renewable sector of huge cutbacks to its Renewables Programme.

Yet in a deal reached last Friday, it has been agreed that nothing will change until at least 2008.

Still, coalition governments between the 2 main parties in Germany do not have a habit of lasting a long time.

This is something to keep an eye on.