Urban Re:Vision — a think tank, media company and real estate developer all rolled into one San Francisco for-profit — has announced the winners of its latest competition, Re:Construct. The award series recognizes creative solutions to sustainable design problems.

The three winners in this competition were asked for “inventive ways to create new types of structures or techniques — or renovate old ones.” Here’s what they came up with: a human-movement powered water pump, a structural building block made from repurposed maps that can’t be recycled, and a folded-metal sculpture that uses the movement of the sun to project a time-based poem on the ground below it.

Our favorite is the Human Pump. The brainchild of South Korean designers at Studio L (which doesn’t have a web site), the Human Pump uses walking, playing and other movement on a wooden deck to compress springs; that compression is used to pump groundwater in areas with water shortages or contaminated surface water, according to the project team.

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Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s multibillion-dollar clean technology initiative, has today taken a 20 percent stake in the London Array, the world’s largest planned offshore wind farm. Masdar purchased its stake from German energy titan E.ON, which maintains 30 percent ownership of the project. The other half of the project is financed by Danish utility DONG Energy. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, though the entire London Array project could reportedly cost £2.5 billion ($4.3 billion).

The London Array project has been proposed for a 90-square-mile site 12 miles off the coast of England, near the mouth of the Thames. When fully completed, the project could contain up to 271 turbines and produce a full gigawatt of power, representing 10 percent of the UK’s ambitious renewable energy goals.

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Clean Energy Fuels, the natural-gas vehicle distribution company of which former oil barron T. Boone Pickens is a director and largest shareholder, said last month it planned to buy FuelMaker from Honda and the FuelMaker Trust for $17 million. Well, late yesterday the companies announced that they have agreed to terminate the deal.

There were few details given in the announcement as to why Honda and Clean Energy Fuels changed their minds, and we’re still waiting to hear back from the companies. But in the regulatory filing it sounds like Honda was actually the initiator of ending the agreement. In the filing Clean Energy Fuels says both companies had the right to terminate the purchase agreement if it did not close on or before Oct. 3, and this didn’t happen due to the fact that the sellers (Honda and Fuelmaker) were unable to deliver audited financial statements for FuelMaker’s parent company, a subsidiary of Honda, by that date. Clean Energy Fuels says it continued to negotiate but that on Oct. 13, 2008:

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It’s been a pro-solar week in Oregon. German solar maker SolarWorld is set to open its 480,000-square-foot semiconductor plant in Hillsboro today, and Sanyo broke ground at its 861,000-square-foot factory on Wednesday at the Salem (Ore.) Renewable Energy and Technology Park. As we’ve written before, solar manufacturers are moving into Oregon at a brisk pace, thanks in part to the state’s successful Business Energy Tax Credit. But while the new solar facilities may boost clean energy around the world, what’s their impact on Oregon’s energy supply?

Semiconductor manufacturing is an energy intensive business; such facilities can require 20 to 70 MW of power load, according to Tom Guantt, a spokesman for Pacific Power. While that’s a laughably wide range, none of the solar manufacturers were willing to disclose the specific energy footprint of their facilities. Pacific Power’s service territory includes just one of the announced solar manufacturing plants in Oregon — the Peak Sun facility in Millersburg — while Portland General Electric (PGE) is responsible for servicing the other new developments, including the SolarWorld and Sanyo facilities, as well as the Solaicx, XsunX and Spectrawatt factories.

Whether its 20 or 70, a tens-of-megwatts load isn’t easy to for the grid to absorb, especially when it’s concentrated at one site. Much like turning on too many kitchen appliances at once can overtax your home’s circuit breaker, ramping up heavy industrial manufacturing without prior planning would destabilize the local power grid. To avoid this problem, Oregon utilities have had to prepare, by adding new substations, upgrading distribution and transmission lines — and, potentially, building or buying additional generation. (Yes, that means power plants.)

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Residential solar installer SolarCity is looking to differentiate itself from the herd of other installers serving homeowners in the West with its SolarGuard 2.0, an upgrade to its online monitoring service, and Canopy, a new panel mounting system. The Foster City, Calif.-based startup showed off the two new features at the Solar Power International Conference in San Diego on Wednesday.

SolarCity will roll out SolarGuard 2.0, an upgrade to its web-based monitoring service that allows customers to check energy production as well as local weather, carbon offsets and pollution reduction, later this fall. The beefed-up service includes demand monitoring, which overlays your panels’ energy generation on your home’s energy consumption. The revamped webware even starts working before your panels are on your roof by allowing users to track the progress of their installation online with updates starting with the initial site audit through permitting and installation to interconnection with the utility, providing some much needed transparency to the consumer.

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Tesla chairman and investor Elon Musk explained in a blog post this afternoon that, in an attempt to become cash-flow positive within 6 to 9 months, he has taken over as CEO of the electric vehicle startup and will soon be conducting layoffs. While the moves are hardly unusual, they have particular significance for the cleantech industry in Silicon Valley.

Basically, the message is this: The green party is over, or at least suspended. Companies creating carbon-reducing technologies that aren’t able to bring in revenues, or keep costs down, over the next 6 months look like they are going to have more trouble than in the past raising needed funds. Tesla seemed to spend somewhat freely over the past year as the company wanted to ensure it had the best designed electric vehicle, and was fixing its transmission issues. The CEO before Ze’ev Drori, Martin Eberhard, reportedly was partly ousted for letting finances and cost of the car get out of hand.

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Real Goods Solar Merges with Regrid Power: Residential solar energy integrator Real Goods Solar has merged with Regrid Power, a solar installer located in Northern California. The shake out of the solar market continues - Press release.

Presidential Debate “What If?” Prep: The good folks at Environmental Capital posit the energy questions they’d ask the candidates at tonight’s debate. Schieffer, we hope you’re taking notes - WSJ’s Environmental Capital.

Bats vs. Wind Turbines: Spanish energy conglomerate Iberdrola has teamed up with Bat Conservation International to study exactly how bats are impacted by wind turbines. Make sure to check out their bat-tastic URL - Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative.

Brazil’s Votorantim Novos Negócios Invests in Amyris: Brazil’s Votorantim Novos Negócios (New Business) has taken a stake in Amyris, a synthetic biology startup working on renewable diesel fuel produced from sugarcane. The undisclosed investment pushes Amyris’s funding over $100 million - Green Car Congress.

Hyundai Heavy Industries Winding Up for Wind: Hyundai Heavy Industries, one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, has licensed wind turbine technology from American Superconductors and has plans to tap into America’s growing wind energy industry - Cleantech Group.

It seems like we can find almost everything we need through Google Maps — even the best place to put a new wind farm or a solar power plant. Renewable energy prospectors can now assess potential sites with the click of a mouse using 3TIER’s high-resolution maps of the earth’s solar radiation, wind speeds and hydro power capacities. The company showed off its new seamless, high-resolution solar map of the western hemisphere this week at the International Solar Power conference.

3TIER is working on mapping the entire world with its “REmapping the World” initiative which it hopes will help developing countries assess their renewable energy resources and “leap frog” past fossil fuels. Many of the places that need renewable energy the most don’t have the resources to synthesize millions of satellite photos. 3TIER offers a free look on their web site for consumers and sells comprehensive, custom full site analysis reports, complete with GIS data layers to energy developers.

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Electric car maker Tesla has confirmed with us that Chairman and investor Elon Musk has taken over the role of CEO at the company. (The Register confirmed the news earlier this morning) Ze’ev Drori who was hired as CEO last December will continue on at the company as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors. Tesla has also confirmed that there will be what they call “modest” layoffs.

Update: Tesla has posted to its blog a note from Elon Musk explaining the reason for the layoffs and the CEO change. As promised, the company says the move is “a strategic response to the liquidity crunch.” In the blog post, Tesla says it will focus on production of the Roadster, as well as powertrain sales to other automakers, in an effort to become cash-flow positive in the next six to nine months. Musk says the powertrain business is already profitable and “growing rapidly,” in spite of a soft auto market. As for the Model S, he says production will be delayed anywhere from six months or until mid-2011:

Tesla has needed to raise a lot of cash to get its electric vehicles into production and just announced that it will need to spend $250 million to build its new plant in San Jose. Good thing the company picked a close-to-home location for the plant: Musk also writes that the company is planning to close its Detroit-vicinity office, citing a need for “good communication, tightly knit engineering and a common company culture.” Celeste LeCompte contributed to this article.

Combining solar and robots could never be bad (Wall-E!), but at the Solar Power International convention it wasn’t about solar-powered robots as much as it was robotics that can help with the manufacturing and production of solar gear. There were at least four booths touting robotics for stacking solar panels, assembling products and inspecting systems.

We took this short 15-second video of the solar robotic solution from Adept. In the video the Adept Quattro quickly picks up and places the solar products into exact locations, which the company says maximizes productivity and minimizes breakage.

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