This column highlights the top economic stories of the week.

Many Japanese, want what amounts to a revolution in a politically risk-averse nation: the ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for more than a half-century. More on this story here.

The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores is on a mission to determine the social and environmental impact of every item it puts on its shelves. And it has recruited scholars, suppliers, and environmental groups to help it create an electronic indexing system to do that. More on this story here.

Europe is gearing up for a major swine flu outbreak in the Fall. New calculations from the U.K.’s Department of Health suggest that, in the worst-case scenario, 63,000 people in the country could die after contracting the H1N1 flu virus in the first wave of the pandemic. More on this story here.

Economic downturns have historically been times in which there are more startup businesses than usual.  This particular recession is a great time to start a green business.  One easy place to start, for someone without a great deal of startup capital or knowledge base, would be to start a mobile food vendor business.  More on this story here.

Nabucco and other new gas pipelines may make Europe’s energy more secure, but market liberalisation matters too. More on this story here.

The opening session of Intersolar North America was packed and full of energy. The solar trade show almost tripled its exhibition space and more than doubled the number of exhibitors from last year, when the first North America Intersolar show was also hosted in San Francisco. More on this story here.

On the last day of the show (yesterday), Jeff Spies, Director of Training & Tradeshows of AEE Solar gave a half-day workshop called “Launch and Grow Your Solar Business”. Free to attendees of the Intersolar exhibits, the workshop covered everything from the qualifications needed to become a solar dealer to common configurations of residential and small commercial solar power installations to business strategies. And, if you would have signed up before early June, registration to the exhibit portion of the show would have been free (and after that point it was $100).

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As far as I can tell, there won’t be any major news coming out of the conference and show. Intersolar’s growth and popularity shows that this is still a young industry and more and more people want to learn about the technology and products available–as well as participate in discussions about how to grow the industry and influence public policy. Organizers say that there are 17,700 registered attendees from 79 countries and 333 exhibitors from 23 countries.

The primary “news” is a continuation of increases in PV efficiency and the lowering of costs of production for equivalent units of electricity. It’s good news but not new news.

Keynote Address by Mayor Gavin Newsom

In this blog network, you’ve probably read posts furthering the friendly rivalry between the cities of San Francisco and Portland (and now Seattle). San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and mayors of these other progressive cities blog about their communities’ challenge to each other to be more green and to claim leadership in electric car usage, solar installations and more.

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More than 17,000 solar industry insiders are gathering in San Francisco this week for the annual Intersolar North America conference.

Conference organizers say the event is bigger this year, attracting more than double the attendees as the inaugural event last year – when the industry saw the solar-technology market grow 80 percent, with 5.5 gigawatts of sales, according to Navigant Consulting analyst Paula Mints – as well as more than double the number of exhibitors and almost triple the floor space. The growth has been “faster than we ever imagined,” said Eicke Weber, chairman of the conference committee and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, in a press release.

The boost this year may seem surprising at first glance, because the solar industry is in a downturn. Slower demand – partly due to an incentive cap in Spain that significantly shrank what was the largest market in the world last year, as well as limited financing in the recession – have led to falling solar-panel prices around the world. Mints estimates the market this year will fall to 3.75 gigawatts. “That’s going to hurt,” she said, especially because the industry’s gotten used to high growth rates and has built some 11 gigawatts of run-rate capacity. “We’ve overbuilt.”

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There’s no question that China is a force to be reckoned with in the solar industry. The country is the largest silicon-based solar-cell producer in the world, with Chinese and Taiwanese production accounting for 39 percent of global production last year, compared with 28 percent from Europe, according to a report the Worldwatch Institute released last week.

But while China had long been considered a potential game-changer in solar, companies’ growth had previously been slowed by a silicon shortage that hit newcomers more dramatically than incumbents. Even so, Chinese manufacturers overtook German and Japanese companies in 2007. Now that plenty of silicon is available, could the country’s dominance grow even larger? Or will some Chinese manufacturers struggle to differentiate themselves and suffer more than the rest of the market during an oversupply of panels?

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As U.S. policymakers debate the best renewable policy for the country, many German experts are already convinced they know the answer: a feed-in tariff. Germany’s feed-in tariff, which offers generous set prices for renewable electricity fed into the grid, stimulated 1.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity last year, and similar programs also have boosted markets in countries such as Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey and South Korea. All the fastest-growing solar markets in the world today have feed-in tariffs.

Gainesville, Fla., and Ontario, Canada, also recently created German-style feed-in tariffs, but the policy hasn’t yet taken hold as a U.S. state or federal policy. I recently wrote a post for Earth2Tech about the difficulties of implementing a German-style feed-in tariff in California: the policy isn’t responsive to market signals that would encourage electricity generation when and where it’s most needed, it’s more challenging to make work in places with lower conventional electricity prices and widely varying utilities with different restrictions, and it doesn’t address retail electricity or encourage customers to use less energy.

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1. Germany has the world’s largest wind power sector— but had barely any notable wind power at all 16 years ago.

With over 20,600 MW of installed capacity, Germany is the world’s wind power leader. And they accomplished this feat pretty quickly, having had less than 100 MW in 1992. The second place wind leader, Spain, only has approximately 12,000 MW of capacity.

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Earlier today, I had the opportunity to visit Intersolar US, the United States’ premier exhibition for solar technology. I learned about a variety of products that are revolutionizing the solar industry, and one of the most interesting was Paradigma’s AquaSystem.

The Aqua solar heating system, first introduced in 2004, works like an additional boiler with a selectable temperature. It is the only solar heating product on the market that can be connected to an existing heating system without any modification. Additionally, the AquaSystem does not require frost protection agents in the winter, as it is protected with warm water if temperatures drop below a certain level.

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Corporate participants will come from every part of the solar energy supply chain—ranging from PV cell manufacturers and components suppliers to service companies and manufacturers of solar thermal applications for heating and cooling.

Not only will the event have a massive exhibition center for the participating companies, but it will also put on a variety of solar-themed workshops. Topics will include solar cooling, solar thermal energy, introductory photovoltaics, and more.

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