The oversupply problem plaguing the solar panel industry may be coming to a close. A glut of panels caused prices to plunge this year, calling into question the future of the industry, as well as the individual fortunes of manufacturers. An increase in demand from Germany is helping to consume the excess inventory on the market, according to a new report by research firm iSuppli, which should provide some support to the manufacturers.

Close to half of all solar panels manufactured this year will not be sold in 2009, iSuppli says, and it forecasts that the glut will continue until 2012. In August, the company pegged oversupply at 92% for 2009, but it recently revised the overage rate to 66%.

On a recent trip down to Silicon Valley from San Francisco, I got a chance to sit down for an extended discussion with Brian Hinman. He is one of a growing number of A-list venture capitalists who have jumped the fence from IT into alternative energy and greentech ventures. Oak Investment Partners is one of the most venerable venture capital firms in the country, and Hinman is the firm's point man on greentech. He's the kind of guy that you have to listen to based on his track record -- co-founder of a two successful companies and a former CEO of a third. Hinman founded Picturetel, which was later acquired by telecom equipment company PolyCom (PLCM). Hinman then founded 2Wire, another telecom equipment company that ended up with revenues greater than $300 million.

So this is a guy with no Internet fluff in his pillow. Hinman is a hard-core engineer with 12 patents to his name. Hinman also loves to talk ideas about greentech innovations and sits on the boards of seven different Oak greentech portfolio companies. He has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the industry. Our talk ranged widely, so I've edited heavily. Here are some brief excerpts from our conversation:

Darwin's Finance explains why the normal correlation between gold and the dollar has broken down.

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And speaking of which, The Intelligent Speculator figures out a new way to protect against inflation.

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Which biotech stock yields over 12% and sells for less than $10?

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As the federal government hands out billions of dollars to subsidize, push, prod and canoodle companies into jump-starting a green revolution in the U.S., one segment of the economy has been more or less left out. That would be farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has gotten only a few tens of millions of dollars to underwrite grants and programs to promote rural alternative energy projects.

Still, acccording to the AP, the ranks of farmers who are producing their own power is increasing. But what's even more striking is how few now do so, considering the nature of their business and their access to precious energy commodities such as large acreage needed for solar panels and steady winds needed for wind-power generation. According to U.S. government figures collected in 2007, just over 1 percent of the 2 million U.S. farms are producing their own electricity, reported Cleantech.

When Serious Materials announced $60 million in additional venture capital funding last month, investor Jim Pettit felt more than a little bit vindicated. Pettit and his venture capital firm Navitas Capital led the early funding rounds in Serious, a Sunnyvale, Calif. maker of energy efficient building materials such as windows and drywall material. Along with his partner Travis Putnam, Pettit had positioned Navitas to be an early player in a greentech sector -- construction and building materials -- that had lots of promise but huge barriers to entry.

The latest injection represents the largest funding round for greentech energy efficiency in 2009, according to the Cleantech Group. And it is likely an early indicator of a big bump in venture activity in this space. Venture capitalists, burned out on expensive and capital-intensive energy generation players focused on biofuels and solar panels, are looking to the more mundane areas of energy conservation and efficiency as places to lay their markers.

There's hope the sun may shine on the solar panel industry again soon enough. The decline in solar panel prices has been dramatic over the past year, as China's government-subsidized solar panel manufacturing companies have ramped up production and flooded the market with cheap photovoltaic cells. In a Reuters article, alternative-energy research company New Energy Finance said it expects panel pricing to fall further still in 2009 and into 2010. This jibes with the panel-pricing slide I reported in September.

But there are some early indications that the price decline may be slowing, as the glutted solar panel market's supply and demand imbalance begins to right itself. I spoke with several solar panel installers in California who said panel maker SunPower (SPWR) has begun to notify its customers that it is running short of inventory. The company did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment. SunPower is considered to be among the most technologically advanced of the solar panel makers and it tends to command a premium price for its panels, which boast a higher efficiency rating than many of the cheaper photovoltaic products.

Rooftop solar power is the next item on the menu for Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG).

The popular burrito chain announced today it had plans to install solar panels atop 75 restaurants during the next 12 months. Collectively, the panels will produce 500 kilowatt hours of electricity. That will make Denver-based Chipotle the largest direct producer of solar power in the restaurant business, according to the company's press release and an article in Environmental Leader.

Cleatech is back in vogue, and financiers are jumping to get back into the green game. The latest quarterly cleantech funding numbers, released Tuesday by consultancies the Cleantech Group and Deloitte, show that preliminary results for the third quarter -- tallying clean technology venture investments in North America, Europe, China and India -- totaled $1.59 billion going to 134 companies. That's a 10 percent increase over the second quarter.

The improvement was fueled by a wave of big venture capital financings, and the successful IPO of battery company A123 Systems (AONE) helped the cleantech sector continue to rebound in the most recent quarter. The U.S. stimulus package also helped VCs make up their minds when placing big bets.

Income inequality pierced its previous record high in 2008 -- a fitting legacy for President George W. Bush. Fresh census figures reveal that the ratio of the incomes of the top 10 percent of Americans -- over $138,000 a year -- to those at the poverty level -- $12,000 -- was 11.4 times. (The previous record was 11.22 in 2003.) Bush's $1.3 trillion worth of tax cuts -- 32.6 percent of which went to the top 1 percent of earners -- have hit their mark.

The political miracle is that Bush was able to get nearly half the vote with policies that helped his base -- the top 1 percent. By 2007, the U.S. savings rate, at -0.7 percent, had reached its lowest level since 1928, right before the Great Depression. And with the price of oil rising to its July 2008 peak of $147 a barrel, Bush won the battle to help his buddies in Houston and Saudi Arabia. One measure of that help: Between January 2001 and August 2006, the W-Industrial Complex Index (WIC) -- a group of energy and defense stocks -- rose 184 percent, while the S&P 500 fell 4 percent.

With Thursday's successful IPO of A123 Systems (AONE) -- this lithium battery maker for electric cars saw its stock rise 50.4 percent on its first day of trading -- many clean-tech companies are now considering public offerings. Evidently, it does not take a profit to justify an IPO because A123 is a big money loser. It takes a forecast of a rapidly growing market likely to get big fast.

And if that's what it takes, there are probably dozens of private companies offering some form of clean technology that are going to become household names to investors in the months ahead. As I posted, A123's market for lithium batteries in cars is forecast to grow from $39 million this year to $22 billion in 2015. That sounds like a stretch -- but it helped A123 end the day with a market value of $1.9 billion, despite losing $40 million in the first half of this year.

Steve Jurvetson is the youthful partner at famed venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He is among the most respected VCs in Silicon Valley, with a string of successful investments under his belt, including Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft, MSFT) and Interwoven (IPO, then acquired by Autonomy), among others. He has made billions of dollars for investors and is reputed to be among the smartest VCs in the world. He got his electrical engineering degree from Stanford in a mere 2.5 years, graduating No. 1 in his class.

He designed communications chips for HP, worked in marketing for Apple (AAPL) and NeXT, and served at the elite consulting group Bain & Company. Like many VC peers, he jumped from IT into greentech. Jurvetson currently sits on the boards of several hot cleantech startups, including Tesla Motors and Synthetic Genomics, which is why I recently buttonholed him at a conference for a Q&A. Jurvetson suggested I join him for lunch. I didn't realize lunch meant sitting in on an impromptu pitch session from a fledgling company, providing a fascinating, first-hand view of how the mind of one of the world's greatest VCs works in real time.

The biofuels market is in a funk. Corn-based ethanol has become an environmental pariah to activists and an economic lodestone to people in favor of energy independence. Plant-based biofuel companies seeking to harvest oils from green matter have struggled to reach economies of scale and have faced political headwinds in Europe. And biofuels based on rendering animal and food waste have run into rough waters.

Alone among the biofuels remains algae, a prolific reproducer that is the current great hope among venture capitalists and other investors.

Among its many claims to fame, Silicon Valley is the birthplace of the Tesla, one of the world's fastest all-electric cars. But could the innovation hub's efforts to become a leader in clean technology be running out of juice? Some of the region's leaders think so, saying that other countries are swiftly developing the financing mechanisms and local markets that will give them an edge in the field, according to a recent Reuters report.

Blame, perhaps, America's love affair with the internal combustion engine. Or the country's undying commitment to keeping existing jobs intact. We're falling behind in the clean technology race. China, for instance, long known for its unfriendly attitude toward the environment, has actually emerged as a force in this sector, Reuters says.

If conventional wisdom mattered, super venture capitalist Vinod Khosla could not have picked a worse time to launch a massive venture capital fund focused on extremely risky green technology investments. Yet Khosla, a VC legend in Silicon Valley, not only pulled it off but ended up money away, according to the New York Times.

In fact, many of Khosla's investors are gun-shy state pension funds, still smarting from nasty losses suffered in venture capital and private equity placements that went horribly wrong in the economic meltdown of the past two years.

Larger transactions and increased investor confidence pushed clean technology ("cleantech") venture capital investments higher in the second quarter of 2009. Investments in companies dealing with energy efficiency and solar power led the overall market, which surged 73 percent quarter-over-quarter. A study by Ernst & Young, with data from Dow Jones VentureSource, suggests a sharp up-tick in cleantech venture capital.

Venture capital investment in cleantech companies hit $572 million last quarter. Forty-eight financing rounds were completed, representing a 100 percent increase in quarter-over-quarter transaction count. Compared to the second quarter of 2008, which was the second best cleantech quarter for venture capital investment, capital put to work fell 59 percent, with the number of transactions down 16 percent.