The research, conducted by Silicon Valley-based research firm Collaborative Economics, underscores California’s lead in the green economy and may indicate where other states can expect green job growth.

California’s jobs in green businesses accounted for less than 1% of jobs statewide in 2008, but employment in green businesses may be holding up better than in other sectors. According to the report, from January 2007 to January 2008, jobs in green businesses grew 5%, while total jobs in California fell 1%.

The green job growth puts California at the forefront of a wide range of technologies, and shows that regions are developing green job clusters off existing strengths. The San Francisco Bay Area leads in green energy generation, San Diego is strong in co-generation technologies, and the Los Angeles and Orange County regions excel in transportation.

Unlike California’s software and biotech industries, which are centered in a few clusters, green jobs are disbursed all around California. California’s green job sector is more than three times the size of its biotech and almost two-thirds the size of its software sector, according to the report.

I believe that green jobs in California are being fueled, in large part, by government policies encouraging energy efficiency and solar adoption. And though California’s unemployment rate is still high, the trend lines are up for green jobs. The green economy is even helping California with manufacturing jobs. They accounted for 21% of green jobs as of January 2008, while manufacturing accounted for 11% of the state’s jobs.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about green technology

Although the plan has yet to find any commercial backing or wide interest, the project could make ethanol less of a political barb, considering all the debate which has raged in the past year over its effects on corn prices. The process right now is called the “Sewage Recycling System” (SRS), and certainly figures to be an innovation to watch in the future.

[image via National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health]

He also promised $100 million towards the creation of an environmental advisory group called the Climate Policy Initiative, which  “will be part advisory service, part policy developer and part watchdog” over the funds, according to Bloomberg business news.

Clearly these are large pools of investment, and they could not have come at a better time. Because of last year’s calamitous economic output, “new investments this year including research funded by governments and companies will total about $110 billion, 29 percent below 2008 and 26 percent off the 2007 total.” With a name like Soros behind the cause, however, I think it will only be a matter of time before those numbers pick way up again.

Currently, the high cost to build and maintain offshore turbines combined with their design constraints – they are still installed directly into sea beds and require additional stabilization to deal with the stresses of the ocean currents – they can’t compete on price with conventional land-based models. But with the Hywind’s innovative floating design, wind farms could be installed virtually anywhere, in waters with depths up to 2100 feet.

The dynamic turbine design, which employs stabilization technologies already in use on offshore oil and gas rigs, needs further improvements – lighter materials and blades that spin closer to the water’s surface – before it is economically viable and ready to be manufactured on a mass scale, but it’s early successes have already silenced many critics. Considering the infrastructure to transport the power is relatively inexpensive by comparison, the Hywind could be an attractive solution further down the road and one to keep an eye.

[image via phault]

The Democratic Party of Japan is led by Yukio Hatoyama, who also will likely be named the new Prime Minister of Japan. The Economist notes, Hatoyama “promises a government less beholden to the powerful civil service, wants to temper the free market and is keen to dole out cash to the disadvantaged in the economically stagnant and aging country.”

Having endured the “lost decade” under the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the people of Japan have embraced the new direction in large numbers. The goals of the new administration will likely be similar to new administration’s in power around the globe, including making loans more accessible and affordable, investing in sustainable energy infrastructure, and stimulating economic growth through spending programs.

[image via photopassjapan]

Reading the New York Times got me excited because of the prospect of wind and solar farms becoming more centralized, similar to a traditional utility. In other words, the “companies that are building or dreaming up large projects argue that there are economies of scale to be gained,” and therefore, want a greater piece of that action. The way I see it, this will only benefit communities in the long run, because once the infrastructure is in place, improvement in the technology will be easier to implement.

The Times points to a solar array in Arizona constructed by Arizona Public Service as an example of this trend. The scale of the project is truly massive, and takes up a large chunk of the Arizona desert.

“There are six rows of mirrors, each nearly a quarter-mile long, totaling nearly 100,000 square feet. The project produces one megawatt of power — enough to run a hospital or a large shopping center — but the company that installed it, now called Acciona Solar Power (formerly Solargenix), expects to open a 350-acre plant in Boulder City, Nev., soon, producing 64 megawatts with similar technology. And Arizona Public Service is one of about a half-dozen utilities that is considering a joint project to build a 250-megawatt plant based on the same technology.”

[ image via skyseeker ]

These numbers for green growth are encouraging to both investors in the private sector looking to capitalize on the expansion and further implementation of green technology, and officials in the Obama administration; the concept of a green work force has been a main facet of the new direction in environmental policy.

The study also goes further to define what exactly the term “green economy” means. The New York Times quoted Pew’s definition of a green economy as an economy that “generates jobs, businesses and investments while expanding clean energy production, increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, waste and pollution, and conserving water and other natural resources.” Pew also goes further to break down the different subsets of green jobs into five categories within that overall economy:  “(1) Clean Energy, (2) Energy Efficiency, (3) Environmentally Friendly Production, (4) Conservation and Pollution Mitigation, and (5) Training and Support.

This study proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that a movement that has long been a talking point has become an identifiable player in the American job picture as a whole. Aside from discussing the job growth rates state-by-state, the report also discusses the graduated level of investment in green infrastructure by the private sector. In fact, “venture capital investment in clean technology crossed the $1 billion threshold in 2005 and continued to grow substantially, reaching a total of about $12.6 billion by the end of 2008.  In 2008 alone, investors directed $5.9 billion into American businesses in the clean energy economy, a figure that represents a 48 percent increase over 2007 investment totals and accounts for 15 percent of all global venture capital investments.”

With figures like these, many believe that the sky is the limit for private investment in the areas of green infrastructure. For those seeking the next big investment opportunity, this study confirms that the time to get behind this ever-growing movement is now.

Four years after GreenPrint’s inception, the owners report a continuous struggle, as only about 25,000 people use the software daily. Some of the innovation issues the start-up has faced are technical (the original software choked on PDF files and had to be reconfigured to Microsoft XPS document standard), as well as societal (the novelty of an eco-minded technology has worn off as consumers become more environment-concious on their own).

But between a recent corporate partnership wtih Xerox and a 2.0 version rolling out shortly that includes a corporate package that predicts ink-and-paper cost savings of 17%, things are looking up for GreenPrint. As Scott D. Anthony, president of consulting firm Innosight and author of The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, states in the article, “You see again and again the companies that succeed are not the ones that have the brilliant strategy, but the ones that course-correct along the way” A lesson that all young companies can take to heart, as this flexibility on the fly is one of the biggest advantages they have over more established players in the marketplace.