Sustainable Industries Daily Update

Fisker Automotive is pulling up its Detroit operations and re-locating them to its headquarters in Irvine, Calif. The announcement comes just as the company expects to close on a $528.7 million dollar loan from Department of Energy.

Public corporations are now supposed to report risks due to climate change to their investors and the public. But reporting climate change risks is not easy according to a new study due out soon. Multiple metric frameworks, a lack of uniform definitions, and a lack of consistent applications have created a plethora of reports that are often unreliable, the study says.

We'll have a story on this soon, but in case you missed the news, PACE financing just took a huge leap forward thanks to legislation in San Francisco where loans for all sorts of energy-related improvements can be paid back via property taxes now.

Four counties in the Portland metropolitan area have tentatively agreed to long-term urban growth plans that set aside tens of thousands of acres as rural reserves and others as urban reserves. The deal isn't final yet, but if approved, could giver certainty to farmers and urban  planners alike through the middle of the century.

Lower rates of waste in Berkeley are contributing to the city's budget deficit in a big way. The city is down $4 million just because of reduced waste and increased recycling.

Tax credits for wind energy manufacturers are not creating jobs as hoped. In fact, demand for wind is low low right now that jobs in the industry were lost last year.

Remember FutureGen? That's the plan to build a demonstration clean-coal plant that was scuttled by the Bush administration that has been brought back to life after howls of protest from the industry. The plans for the 275-megawatt plant that is now projected to cost three times as much as a regular coal plant have a new funder. Catepillar will join the FutureGen Alliance which is contributing somewhere between $400 and $600 million to the $1.5 billion project.