Recent developments in solar energy and biofuels lead me to believe that the sunny San Joaquin Valley could become a leader in the emerging clean energy industry.

My colleague Sandy Nax has called the Valley a petri dish for alternative energy development because it has many of the necessary attributes: available land, scorching sun and/or clear days most of the year, wind in the mountains, and lots of resources. farms for biofuels or biogas.

This morning, Sandy leaned in front of her computer and said, “Clean energy could be a game changer.” He was referring to the economy.

Sandy and I discussed the attributes of the sorry state of economic affairs that have devastated the region’s real estate, collapsed government tax revenue, and put many of our neighbors out of work.

We used to work in the newspaper business, which hasn’t been doing well in recent years. As part of our business story writing and editing jobs, we spend years analyzing trends and making sense of them.

This clean energy trend has been fascinating to watch. I still have no idea where it’s headed and which component in particular will be the first to generate jobs, but the indicators have been extremely positive.

In just the short time I’ve been affiliated with the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization, great strides have been made in industrial solar power, offshore wind power, and biofuels. And that’s on top of energy efficiency measures being taken by government, businesses, and consumers.

While the energy of pond scum or algae intrigues me beyond measure, commercializing usable fuel extraction at a decent price could take years. Fellow reporter Jeff St. John reminded me after a post about algae shortcomings.

Concentrated solar power is another area of ​​massive possibilities. The trick with solar power is to increase efficiency and reduce costs so that it reaches or exceeds “parity” with fossil fuels. Advances in concentrated solar power being used now were hinted at when I covered a start-up in San Jose in the mid-1980s.

I remember thinking, “That would be great.”

My optimism is bolstered by statements like this from John Denniston, a partner at greentech investor Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, as reported by Andrew Nusca on smartplanet.com: “Some geographies are on (solar) grid parity: in Italy, in some parts of California.

Denniston made the comment at the 2011 Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. He said the industry is poised for a very big takeoff, and he was referring to solar power as a whole, not just the concentrated variety, which remains relatively rare.

A column by Christian Wolan on forbes.com caught my attention when the oilgae.com aggregator service sent it to me. Here’s the good old Forbes stalwart, albeit the electronic version, writing about the scum of the pond. That has to be a development in credibility, right?

Closing out his state-of-the-tech review, Wolan uses a quote from Riggs Eckelberry, president and CEO of OriginOil, a Los Angeles-based company that says it is “developing an innovative technology that will transform algae, the most promising source of renewable oil, a true competitor of oil”.

Wolan wrote that “referring to the algae biofuels programs of ExxonMobile, BP, Chevron, and Valero, Eckelberry said, ‘This last factor alone is driving funding for algae projects.'”

I can also quote myself here. Having grown up in the interior of Alaska, I am very familiar with the power of the oil companies. I watched as the first overland truck and first Catalan train headed north on ice roads to Prudhoe Bay to develop the oil fields. He then grew up to high school age among the huge stacks of pipes that went overland or underground 800 miles to Valdez.

Many of us believed that these companies could do anything. Maybe it’s that wild streak that infuses much of the industry, the “Git Er Done” mentality, turning a dream into a job-creating reality.

I missed out on the pipeline boom of the mid-1970s, but got a job in Valdez in 1978 building foundations, basements, and driveway slabs in a very well-designed subdivision: Mineral Creek, if I remember correctly. Huge mobile cranes dropped the prefabs onto the foundations when we were done. The boxy, three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses had been used to house the thousands of workers who built the terminal across the bay from the small town.

It would be nice to see a fraction of that kind of ingenuity, determination or tenacity, from whatever source, channeled into clean energy. The jobs would go on.

Timing, of course, is everything. I hope sooner rather than later. Right Sandy?