I’m back from the ultimate professional recharge: the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference, held south of San Francisco last week on the leafy Stanford University campus. This week I’ll be giving highlights from a packed agenda exploring environmental technology, politics, culture and science.

Highpoint #1: A trip across the Bay to Altamont Pass, where cool air sucked over coastal hills by the rising heat of California’s vast Central Valley spins some 5,200 wind turbines spanning a roughly 6×8-mile area. It was at Altamont that the U.S. wind power industry took flight in the early 1980s, as developers rushed to install largely untested technology to cash in on handsome federal and state tax credits. By 1985 California 80% of the world’s wind power capacity, and much of it was at Altamont. (The turbines in the photo are circa 1984).

That early lead was handed to Europe as the U.S. fell back into reliance on imported oil and other fossil fuels. “Because of a whole raft of poor policy decisions both here and in Washington, we blew it,” says Tom Gray, a veteran of the 1980s wind boom and currently communications director for the American Wind Energy Association.

But the U.S. wind industry itself seems to be blowing another opportunity here at Altamont: the chance to clear its reputation as a bird killer. Altamont is almost certainly the world’s most deadly wind farm for birds. Collisions with wind turbine rotors and poles kill an estimated 70 golden eagles a year in an area big enough to support just one nesting pair, plus significant numbers of burrowing owls, red tailed hawks, and American kestrels. Buildings kill hundreds of times more birds than wind turbines, but the ongoing slaughter of endangered birds at Altamont remains a damaging black mark on an otherwise green industry. 

This winter a lawsuit by environmental organizations and scientists required Altamont’s wind turbine operators to cut the bird kill in half by 2009 by taking down a few hundred of the most dangerous wind turbines. Unfortunately, at least from what the SEJ journalists saw on the ground, the deal isn’t being implemented. (For a detailed if pointed telling of the settlement story, see “Tilting at Windmills” by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, CA.)

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Wow. What a time for solar energy. On top of recent gains in plastic and thin-film photovoltaics the University of Delaware now reports the world’s most efficient solar cell at 42.8% — if the finding is confirmed it will boost high-end PV output an incredible 2.1% over the previous record set by Boeing-subsidiary SpectroLab last December (see my presentation of their approach at MIT Technology Review: “Ultra-efficient Photovoltaics”).

The University of Delaware advance is notable for (a) the incredible consortium assembled to bring together the multiple PV cells employed in the record-breaking cell, (b) the role of government funding — in this case its dollars from DARPA that were yanked out of the hands of another set of researchers developing plastic solar cells, and (c) the comeback it represents for Allen Barnett, the University of Delaware scientist leading the effort.

Barnett founded what was once the most successful solar U.S. solar producer, AstroPower, which made its mark producing photovoltaics from recycled silicon wafers. The firm took a blow when the tech bubble burst and semiconductor manufacturing slowed, causing a shortage of recycled wafers, and was then destroyed by an accounting scandal. GE picked up AstroPower’s assets in bankruptcy proceedings in 2004 — adding one more piece in the energy giant’s sweep into renewable energy (see “The Greening of GE” for more on that story).

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