So you’ve had a good solid week now of hearing about President Obama’s support for clean energy and what this means for the solar industry. At least, we’ve been chatting about it a lot on this blog and amongst ourselves at GetSolar.com. Yesterday, Adam drew our attention to the new presiden’ts speech announcing the revival of long-ignored CAFE standards, among other things. Schwarzenegger must be swooning. (The feds have been suppressing state-sponsored initiatives for greater fuel economy for years, a wall against which California has been gleefully flinging itself for some time.)

All this speculation has been nothing if not fun. And at last, there are some numbers to back up the general aura of feel-good surrounding clean tech at the moment. The New York Times reports that:

The single bright spot [in the overall investment picture for the close of 2008] was investment in clean-energy technologies. Investors put $4.1 billion into 277 clean-tech start-ups in 2008, 52 percent more than they invested the year before…Venture investors continue to favor solar energy and photovoltaic companies, which received $1.8 billion in 2008 — nearly half of the money that went to clean energy companies. 

And stock-market hounds are rapaciously tracking the slight uphill gains of solar stocks since the inauguration. There was a slightly more wistful note in the blogosphere though: Google’s Public Policy Blog wondered if Obama might reinstate Jimmy Carter’s brief love affair with solar hot water panels on the White House. The panels were only up for a couple of years before the Reagan decided he’d had quite enough of that particular statement, thank you very much, and the panels eventually ended up on a New England college campus. If Obama were to install solar panels at the White House now, we would hope he’d look at photovoltaics as well as at solar thermal. He’s already shown he has a gift for flair.