The benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 11,000 for the first time since stock markets began their nosedive 18 months ago. And the rebound in investor and trader confidence seems to be taking renewable energy and clean technology stocks with it.

Solar company stocks, in particular, have been performing well at the close of the year’s first fiscal quarter. That’s despite ominous news of rapidly shrinking subsidies that have been the real engine of growth for the industry. Several large European nations have been announcing steep cuts to their feed-in tariff programs, through which governments guaranteed higher subsidized electricity prices for solar power generation, in a bid to plug huge budget deficits.

Among U.S. firms, First Solar saw its shares rise by 2.3 percent last week, and the stock bounced up again by more than 3 percent in trading Monday. Holdings in the largest solar company in the United States closed yesterday at almost $128 per share, from about $124 at the beginning of the day. The stock rose to nearly $130 in the first half of the day before settling back.

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Google is a search engine, an advertising company and now a cellphone maker. But a green energy company? That too, said Bill Weihl, Google’s so-called green energy czar, in an interview with Jeffrey Marlow of The Times on the Green Inc. blog. He said:

Some people might look at that and say, ‘I don’t see any relationship between that and Google’s business.’ And then maybe five years later they’ll say, ‘Whoa, it’s a good thing you guys thought about that.’

Google is interested in making renewable energy less expensive than coal in part because Google, with its massive servers, uses so much energy itself, and because the founders and many of the employees simply care about environmental issues, Mr. Weihl said.

Google has invested $45 million in alternative energy since 2007, including in solar companies eSolar and BrightSource Energy, though the primary goal is not to make money, Mr. Weihl said:

We’d be delighted if some of this stuff actually made money, obviously; it is not our goal to not make money. All else being equal, we’d like to make as much money as we can, but the principal goal is to have a big impact for good.

In the interview, Mr. Weihl also discusses Google’s problem with coal, the technologies it thinks will solve that problem — concentrated solar thermal, enhanced geothermal and high-altitude wind — and what he thinks Google can do to address climate change that other companies can’t. He says:

I believe that the problems we’re facing are solvable, but they’re not going to solve themselves. And solving them is either going to require spending a lot more money on energy than we’re spending today, which I think is probably a non-starter, or it’s going to require major technological innovation. That’s where I think Google can help.

When people talk about renewable energy, they usually mean that the main source from which the energy is derived—wind, the sun, ocean waves and tides, the never-ending heat below the Earth’s surface—is available in endless supply and either remains relatively constant or continually regenerates as part of the planet’s natural cycles.

For renewable energy to be sustainable, however, the mechanisms we use to convert the raw energy to usable power have to be just as renewable as the source from which it is drawn. Currently, most of those mechanisms—from solar cells to hydrogen fuel cells—contain enough non-renewable material to make them the weak link in the renewable energy chain.

That idea was highlighted at the Financial Times Energy Conference in London a couple of weeks ago and reported in New Scientist magazine. Solar cells convert sunlight to electricity, but the most efficient solar cells rely on indium, a rare and expensive mineral that is in short supply worldwide. Hydrogen fuel cells, among the most promising alternative vehicle-fuel technologies, require platinum, which is even rarer than indium.

Scientists are hard at work on alternative ways to make renewable energy truly renewable, by finding new ways to convert the energy to electricity or other types of power without the need for components that may not be available when needed. Unfortunately, many of those breakthroughs may be years away—and at a time when the world is looking to renewable energy to slow global warming and replace fossil fuels before supplies are exhausted. Clearly, we have a lot more work to do.

Larry’s Environmental Issues Blog

By Larry West, About.com Guide to Environmental Issues