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A few years ago, it was still a subject of regular outrage. Jobs were headed to Mexico. Factories moving to China. Everybody hated globalization, without quite understanding it. But with a flood of news coverage — the slightly nauseating peak being an all-too-popular book about the world being flat — people finally figured it out: The manufacturing jobs were gone. Get a job banking, or flipping burgers, but don’t expect to be building cars or making clothes.

The idea is that we should switch to a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. And Silicon Valley, for one, long ago pinned its hopes on brains over brawn. Just take a look at the companies that get funding. But now that everyone’s getting used to the knowledge economy, manufacturing may make its comeback.

Here are the primary factors driving a manufacturing renaissance: The rapid growth of middle class consumers in countries like Brazil, China and India; a shrunken dollar and the loss of economic pre-eminence by the United States; less easy credit for overseas goods for consumers in the US; and, potentially, rising transportation costs that cut into cheap goods sent from overseas.

Those details are outlined by the CEO of the Manufacturers Alliance, Thomas Duesterberg, in this Industry Week article. There are a few more that could be added to the mix, though.

The first is our bid at shifting energy usage at home off foreign oil. Companies like Ausra, Nanosolar and Tesla are basing not only their research, but their plants in the United States. They have plenty of reasons to do so. States, eager to win back jobs lost long ago, are offering hefty incentives. Materials like solar mirrors and wind turbines are expensive to ship, and solar panels often break during long voyages. And for Tesla, there’s an additional prestige to having a car manufactured in the U.S., even if some parts are made overseas.

Another good example is Infinia, a solar company that is reducing its own startup costs by using existing manufacturing capacity in the country, much of which has been idle for years, to builds its solar dishes. And finally there are the many biofuel startups, many of which have no choice but to place their plants near the sources for their fuel. As the market for renewables grows, more will certainly be built here.

The need for specialized work will also become more prominent with the rise of next-generation materials, especially nanomaterials. Although fabless manufacturing in the semiconductor industry proved that high-tech work can be done overseas, the first generation of manufacturing will be at home. And with costs for overseas labor rising, the new nano industry may choose not to move elsewhere.

There are also opportunities for less commercial production. As the online marketplace Etsy has shown, there’s a nascent industry of crafters who are are eager to sell their goods. Ponoko, for one, wants to help those people create their goods, with online tools and a relatively inexpensive production process based on laser cutters.

And for the professionals, the small design firms and build shops of the world, cheap rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing technology are on the rise, a subject that I wrote about a year ago.

Whether physical production can ever dominate the American landscape again is doubtful. But the conventional view into the future, which suggests that we’ll make our way as a pure knowledge economy, is likely also off the mark. The future is never quite what you expect.

Writing on Nanosolar’s blog, CEO Martin Roscheisen has unveiled the next prong in his firm’s business plan — a focus on municipal solar power plants of 2 - 10 megawatts in size. The idea is to build 10 acre lots on the outskirts of small cities that could feed into the municipal power grid directly.

Each lot, consisting of several rows of solar panels mounted on rails above ground, could provide up to 2 megawatts, enough to serve 1,000 homes. The panels would be mounted on rails to prevent them from affecting the surrounding wildlife and vegetation.

Nanosolar’s scheme could be scaled up to supply the needs of larger cities — for instance, 5 lots, which would generate 10 megawatts of electricity, could serve 5,000 homes. Unlike coal-fired plants, which typically take 10 - 15 years to build, solar power plants can be done in as little as 12 months — and much more cheaply.

Though Rosencheisen acknowledged the appeal of rooftop arrays, which solar installers like SolarCity, Sun Run and Sungevity focus on, he also criticized them as a business “that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way,” and “a somewhat more expensive proposition.” Imagine having to hire a contractor to crawl around your roof to install an expensive array or — worse yet — having to set it up yourself, he noted irreverentially.

This small plant approach, though new to the U.S., has already been widely implemented throughout Europe and Asia in what Rosencheisen called a “silent revolution” that has yet to be picked up on by the mainstream press, and that is too often criticized by utility executives as being too costly or unrealistic. “It works, it is economic, and it is possible now,” he said.

Nanosolar has gotten plenty of attention for its claim that it can sell its cells for as low as 99 cents per watt, low enough to be competitive with non-renewable energy sources, as well as recently raising over $50 million more from EDF Energies Nouvelles. However, there are a number of other, less-sung companies that have either implied or outright stated that they have a similar game plan for small-scale power plants.

SolFocus, for example, makes large solar concentrator panels, which use mirrors to focus more light onto highly efficient solar photovoltaics. Its initial product isn’t designed for rooftop installation, but would work perfectly on open spaces near facilities that need modest amounts of power — such as universities or off-grid villages. It raised $63.6 million last year to build its panels in the U.S. and, through its new subsidiary SolFocus Europe, across the Atlantic.

In fact, the move to build small has swept most categories of solar power, as companies have come to realize that they can thus avoid most of the bureaucratic snags involved in building plants that produce over 50 megawatts. Furthermore, by grouping their panels into small lots, they’ve been able to grab small tracts of land on the edges of cities and towns, or on land that can be dual-purposed like farms. A secondary advantage is the ability to hook into the existing power grid without the modifications required to channel power from a large plant.

Another example is Cool Earth Solar, a startup based in Livermore, Calif. that hews to the “cheaper is better” model, using inexpensive reflective balloons to concentrate light on cells. It plans to suspend its balloons on cable-bound arrays 12-14 feet above active farmland, letting sunlight strike both the solar cells and crops beneath. The firm claims that it can produce electricity for 18 cents a watt, and hopes to ramp up its production of balloon concentrators to 50 megawatts by next year.

And there’s Infinia, a company that just raised its second round to $57 million, which specializes in the production of 3 kilowatt dishes that, lumped into groups, will generate 1-10 megawatts in small-scale projects. Finally, in the solar thermal category, there’s eSolar, which just snagged $130 million from Google, Oak Investment and Idealab to pursue a similar approach — building a number of small plants that produce up to 33 megawatts each.

The only category to have mostly stayed away from this trend is expensive silicon-based solar, which is generally relegated to rooftop installations. Yet even there a few exceptions are already starting to appear. OptiSolar, for example, a Hayward, Calif., based startup, makes somewhat less expensive thin-film solar cells. It last year announced plans to build a 40 megawatt solar power installation near Sarnia, in Ontario, Canada, and has since announced several more of a similar size.

For an idea of what a sun-powered future might look like without solar panels or huge solar thermal farms, take a look at Infinia — an odd little startup I covered two months ago when it sucked in a hefty $50 million round and announced plans to start churning out dish-based systems next year.

By some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did following another recent conversation with CEO J.D. Sitton, there’s enough free industrial capacity in the United States to manufacture over 100 gigawatts per year of the company’s solar arrays — enough power for well over 50 million people.

Got your attention? Good, but don’t expect to hear the same thing out of Infinia. The company started out planning 90MW of capacity and has since gotten enough inquiries to consider trying to make several times that amount in 2009, but has kept its outlook “very modest” despite intense interest from investors and developers.

The eye-popping 100GW figure I spun out comes not from any capability of the company, but from its scheme for manufacturing. Infinia’s solar arrays use a mirrored dish focused on a Stirling engine, in which air is heated to cause an internal cycle that produces energy. To simplify a longer explanation, the fact that it’s an engine makes it possible for automobile manufacturing plants to produce it, given a bit of re-tooling.

And according to Sitton, the nation’s auto plants, set up to churn out well over 20 million cars a year, will instead produce as few as 15 million. That leaves a lot of unused capacity (and unemployed workers; hello, Detroit) ready to build something else, capacity that Infinia is tapping into to build its first run, starting in November.

So where most solar companies have to work incrementally, building their own plants to produce the parts they need, Infinia has the advantage of simply being able to contract out the work, and the luck of contracting it out into a market thirsty for work. The company does have limitations; it takes care of final assembly from the parts received itself, and of course has to prove that the arrays can produce power at competitive rates without problems cropping up (like the Stirling engines breaking down). Any kinks that exist will become apparent in a year or so, when the first clusters of dishes are going up.

The initial picture for Infinia does look pretty good, though. The news that prompted the conversation with Sitton is some fresh attention for Infinia from a company famous for making the iPod and iPhone — no, not Apple, but Foxconn, the company that actually builds the things. A giant Asian manufacturer, Foxconn just placed a $7 million strategic investment in Infinia, with an eye toward getting in on the dish and engine manufacturing action.

The dishes themselves produce about three kilowatts each, and when first deployed will be bunched up into groups generating between one and 10 megawatts each. The small project sizes both allow the company to skip a lengthy permitting process — the same idea that eSolar, a solar thermal company, just announced for itself — and to hook into the existing transmission grid without any modifications.

As to who’s actually making the first arrays, it’s not Foxconn. Infinia is working out the details with some North American manufacturers, with the details to be announced in a few months.

Although it’s over two decades old, Infinia is a relative newcomer to the solar market, having only been working on its solar thermal generator for a few years.

That may not prevent it from quickly becoming one of the largest players, though, with a new $50 million investment to kick off production and a slate of manufacturing partners ready to help fulfill its first orders.

The most notable detail about Infinia’s technology is that it’s based on the Stirling engine, which uses thermodynamic cycling of air to produce energy. Basically, air within the engine is heated by the concentrated rays of the sun, and then converted directly to energy.

Stirling engines are noted for their high efficiency, but have so far confounded other startups that have attempted to use accident-prone “kinematic” versions with solar concentrators. “You don’t know when you fire those up whether they’ll run for 25 or 500 hours, but you do know they won’t work for 5000 hours, or 60,000, as ours will,” Infinia CEO J.D. Sitton told us in an interview.

Infinia uses a hermetically sealed, single-piston design that Sitton says drastically reduces maintenance costs, although it lowers efficiency somewhat. The outcome is a solar thermal generator with 24 percent efficiency, which is still much higher than most competing alternatives currently on the market.

However, rather than fight for utility-scale developments with other solar thermal startups like Ausra or Solel, Sitton says his company will compete with solar photovoltaics. The first Infinia product will be a dish which can be sited within towns or cities, singly or in small groups.

That strategy will give the company the ability to set its own margins because it 20-30 percent cheaper than solar PV, Sitton said, although he would not disclose exactly how much the 3 kilowatt dishes would cost.

The company plans to begin producing dishes in November, and build up to 200MW per year of manufacturing capacity by the end of 2009 by working with manufacturing partners from the automotive industry, who Infinia is helping retool their production lines with part of its funding.

GLG Partners led the $50 million round, with Wexford Capital and previous investors Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, EQUUS Total Returns, Idealab and Power Play Energy also participating. It was Infinia’s second funding; it also took $9.5 million last year and $3.5 million in early 2005, for a total to date of $63 million.

Earlier this week, we wrote about setbacks at some Silicon Valley companies with new solar technology.

They’re built on real science and work in the labs, but they’re grappling with the real-world manufacturing stage.

Infinia, of Kennewick, Wash., is another example of this. It has just raised more cash to help it develop products based on the “Stirling engine,” which creates electricity by processing various types of fuel, and by using heat differentials to drive a piston back and forth. Its work is based on invention of Robert Stirling in 1816, and on almost 20 more years of additional research since Infinia was spun out as a company from the University of Washington.

It has gotten $9.5 million in a new round of funding, and follows $3.5 million it raised two years ago. Backers are Khosla Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Equus Total Return and Idealab, along with existing investor Power Play Energy, it said in a statement yesterday.

The deal also includes the acquisition of Stirling Cycles, a company developing Stirling engine technology, from Idealab for an undisclosed sum, and which has also been working on the Stirling process for years.

Infinia is now applying the engine to solar energy. It says the process is more efficient that existing photovoltaic methods, however it is first expected to be available in 2008. It will concentrate solar energy for commercial and residential customers. Notably, the company says some of the funds will be used for product development; a working prototype will be ready by fall, it says. Stirling Cycles was also working on solar energy.

Besides the solar version, the company is also working on a bio-gas fueled Stirling generator for rural areas of developing countries.

Famed inventor Dean Kamen has also been working on Stirling engines for quite some time.