On Tuesday, the announcement that U.S.-based First Solar and the Chinese government will partner to build a 2GW photovoltaic (PV) power plant Ordos New Energy Demonstration Zone in China, sent shockwaves of excitement through the solar and clean energy communities.

The memorandum of understanding, which both companies signed on Tuesday, sets the stage for the construction of the world’s largest PV power plant to be completed by 2019.

According to the New York Times the plant is part of a planned 11,950-megawatt renewable-energy park slated for this region of Mongolia, that “would generate enough electricity to power about three million Chinese homes.”

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The head of BP Solar International says his firm will install 100 megawatts of utility-level solar power projects on U.S. soil in 2009.

Reyad Fezzani told Dow Jones in an interview published Monday that his company, a subsidiary of energy giant BP PLC, is seeing high demand, and strong financing interest from investors. BP expects to manufacture 320 MW of solar panels in 2009, roughly double the amount it made in 2008. That will be split about 60/40 between large commericial and utility installations and residential sales, Fezzani said. That equates to about 192 MW of large scale installations, with 100 MW of that in the U.S., he said.

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The manufacturing costs of solar power — or at least for thin-film photovoltaic panels — have broken below a golden benchmark, as reported by Popular Mechanics: $1 per watt.

First Solar, based in Tempe, Ariz., has brought the costs down to $0.98 per watt. The company says that further cost reductions will be achieved as technological and manufacturing process potentials are reached.

But things are not all rosy since reaching this milestone of sorts. Popular Mechanics reported:

Despite the buck-per-watt announcement, First Solar’s share price plummeted more than 20 percent on Wednesday, thanks to warnings from CEO Mike Ahearn about the effect of the credit crisis on potential solar customers—as much as 10 to 15 percent of current orders might default. He recently told analysts in a conference call that “as good as things look for the mid-term and beyond, the short-term outlook for the solar industry in our view has never looked more difficult.”

But what if there are no more solar companies left? Publicly-traded green technology companies, like those that research and manufacture those costly panels, are being hit hard in the stock market and some are facing bankruptcy; it may take more than homeowner incentive to lift them up again. Because while homeowners may buy the systems now at the new prices, the question is: Will they buy enough to keep the companies afloat?

I took a look at a few of the public solar companies to see which, if any, have survived the recent stock market crash. The news doesn’t look too good.

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• Australian solar thermal company Ausra
• Solar thin-film company First Solar
• Greenfuel Technologies, a pioneer in algae biofuels
• AquaEnergy Group, the creator of technology for harnessing wave power

Of course, the technologies under development by the companies profiled in Earth: The Sequel aren’t cheap; in almost every case, major investors, such as Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, have backed these start-ups with significant funding. At one level, some might argue that the market is already working: capital is flowing to promising ideas.

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