SustainableBusiness.com has released its 8th annual list of 20 public companies that are leading the way to a sustainable economy. The selections are made in cooperation with a group of judges consisting of leading green stock analysts.

Judges select companies across the range of green business sectors: solar, wind, geothermal, smart grid, water, food, agriculture, green building and transport. SustainableBusiness.com said a third of the companies populating this year’s list are “corporate pioneers” — companies with conventional products and services that are greening their product lines.

Here is the 2009 SB20 list:
(Company Name — Ticker — Sector — Country)

1. First Solar — Nasdaq: FSLR — Solar — USA
2. Vestas — VWS.CO; VWDRY.PK — Wind — Denmark
3. Gamesa — GAM.MC; GCTAF.PK — Wind — Spain
4. Ormat — NYSE: ORA — Geothermal — USA/Israel
5. WaterFurnace — WFI.TO; WFIFF.PK — Geothermal — USA
6. Telvent Git, SA. — Nasdaq: TLVT — Smart Grid — Spain
7. Novozymes — NZYM.CO; NVZMY.PK — Industrial/Ethanol — Denmark
8. Westport Innovations — Nasdaq: WPRT; WPT.TO — Transport — Canada
9. Pure Technologies — PUR.V — Water — Canada
10. Chipotle Mexican Grill — NYSE: CMG — Corporate Pioneer/Food — USA
11. Naturex SA — NRX.PA — Food — France
12. United Natural — Nasdaq: UNFI — Food — USA
13. Plant Health Care — PHC.L; PLHCF.PK — Agriculture — UK
14. Bendigo and Adelaide Bank — BEN.ASX — Corporate Pioneer/Finance — Australia
15. Novo Nordisk — NYSE: NVO — Corporate Pioneer/Pharmaceuticals — Denmark
16. Google — Nasdaq: GOOG –Corporate Pioneer/Technology — USA
17. IBM — NYSE: IBM — Corporate Pioneer/Technology — USA
18. Herman Miller — Nasdaq: MLHR — Corporate Pioneer/Green Building — USA
19. Philips — NYSE: PHG — Corporate Pioneer/Green Building — Netherlands
20. Timberland — NYSE: TBL — Corporate Pioneer/Apparel — USA

What do you picture when you think of “green jobs”? Chances are you envision a guy strapped to a wind tower, or maybe someone tinkering with a solar panel.

Those are green jobs. But there are dozens more — at organic family farms, home building supply operations, big blue chip companies, inside power plants, at universities and government agencies, and yes, even at petroleum companies (what you thought they’d miss out on the opportunity?).

Green sustainable jobs are weaving their way through the economy, with traditional companies re-examining outdated practices and assessing the life cycle impact of their products and new green energy companies gearing up to change transform how we power our homes and cars.

Leaving aside the economists’ debate over how robust these enterprises might be in a stronger economy, it’s clear that these jobs are continuing to appear and reconfigure themselves on the green landscape. It’s just a little difficult to step back and take in the big picture.

The Environmental Defense Fund is trying. It has profiled a list of companies engaged in and driving the green movement. Some of the companies are growing new concerns on the verge of becoming household names, like Gamesa, the Spanish wind turbine maker with a factory outside Philadelphia, and First Solar, a photovoltaic manufacturer in Perrysburg, Ohio, near Toledo. Others, like LED manufacturer, Cree Inc., in Durham, N.C., have been around for decades but find their futures suddenly brightened by the interest in energy efficiency.

(Some of the companies are more green than others; Owen Corning’s listing points out that it uses a lot of recycled glass, but many would argue that its fiberglass insulation cannot compete with new, greener choices. Still, the venerable U.S. firm has other offerings aimed at new tech solutions and home energy efficiency. And heck, it’s in Toledo.)

EDF has posted this list focused on the Midwest (the project will ultimately cover the nation),  to help the public see and understand what’s happening on the green front, and to signal lawmakers that supporting a green economy is not a hypothetical proposition. With all the incessant yammering about unemployment these days, it’s nice to see that green jobs are not a mirage, not someone’s wishful thinking. They are real.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Business types, evidently, feel they know all they need to know about Tempe, Ariz., firm First Solar, a nine-year old company being called “the Google of solar.” In a year and a half, investors drove its stock price up from $25 to $250. But aside from reports that this year’s sales are projected to hit $1 billion, what exactly do they know?

The company is highly secretive about its innovations, it seems, going so far as to refuse to speak with journalists. Now, an in-depth story in IEEE Spectrum Online attempts to get to the bottom of how, as the journal says, “within five years, this company’s thin-film solar cells could compete with coal.”

First Solar uses cadmium telluride (CdTe) rather than silicon, and the thin CdTe films it manufactures are a hundredth the thickness of silicon solar material and take a tenth as long to produce — advantages that could offset the fact that they aren’t as efficient as conventional silicon devices at turning sunlight into electricity. And the company is churning them out: The story’s author Richard Stevenson reports they’re on their way to having an annual production capacity of “just over 1 gigawatt by 2009.” (By comparison, the Mitsubishi solar production expansion we just reported on here hopes to hit three-fifths of that capacity by 2012.)

Stevenson’s article gets impressively technical on the second and third pages, doing detective work with industry analysts to guess at the exact nature of First Solar’s new processes, and wraps up with a list of competing companies and other technologies (using multiple substances to capture more sunlight, for example) that could outpace First Solar’s impressive rise.

But for casual readers, all this is just support for the bold claims on the first page that: “…analysts agree that [First Solar] will very likely meet typical grid-parity prices” within two to four years.

Translated that means the company will offer a product that will cost roughly $1-per-watt cell price, matching the cost of other forms of electricity “in developed countries”.

Unfortunately, these groundbreaking panels aren’t currently being sold to the public. First Solar is keeping plenty busy meeting the demand of solar farm operators and corporations who want them on factory rooftops.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media