FORTUNE’s third annual Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment starts today (Monday), and one new twist this year is that you can play along at home.

For the next three days, many of the plenary sessions at the event, which is being held at the Ritz Carlton in Dana Point, Ca., will be shown on the web. People who sign up to attend online will be able to ask questions, I’m told. This is an experiment, an effort to see how a virtual conference will work and, of course, to expand FORTUNE’s business. (Hint: You can tune in for free this year, but that may not be the case in the future.)

As the co-chair and creator of Brainstorm Green, I’m obviously biased but I think we’ve got a great lineup again this year. I’m going to take a break from blogging for a few days to focus on the conference. Here are some  highlights:

Today (Monday) at 3:05 p.m. (all times are listed as Pacific Time, so this is  6:05 in the East), Lee Scott, the former CEO of Wal-Mart who is now chair of the executive committee of the Wal-Mart board, will talk about Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts with John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc. John is a great interviewer who once wrote a book about Sam Walton, so this session should be a treat.

Following that session, at about 3:50 p.m.,  I’ll be asking some of America’s most important environmental leaders: What Do Environmentalists Want? Joining me will be Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy, David Yarnold of the Environmental Defense Fund and Mike Brune, the new head of the Sierra Club. We’ll talk about the outlook for climate legislation in Washington, as well as such hot topics as nuclear power and geoengineering.

Later Monday, I’ll talk to Sally Jewell, the CEO of REI, about “sustainability as a team sport.”

David Sokol

On Tuesday at 9:15 a.m., David Sokol, the chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings and a director of Chinese electric car company BYD, will talk with FORTUNE managing editor Andy Serwer. Sokol is a fascinating guy, a plain-spoken Midwesterner who may be in line to succeed Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, so we are calling the session Warren Buffett’s Power CEO.

We’ll follow that with a panel called Renewable Energy—Hype and Reality. I’ll be speakng with Jeff Broin, the CEO of POET, the big ethanol company; David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy; Bill Gross, the founder of eSolar; Katrina Landis, who runs the alternative energy division at BP; and Martha Wyrsch, president of Vestas Americas.

Later on Tuesday, we’ll webcast panels on nuclear energy and electric cars as well as one-on-one interviews with Lew Hay, the chairman and CEO of FPL Group and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who is never dull.

On Wednesday, I’m going to lead a discussion about sustainable consumption. The basic question: How can a company or an economy grow its business, generating things we want like jobs and wealth, while at the same time limiting or shrinking its environmental footprint, so we get less of what we don’t want, like pollution and greenhouse gases. Tackling that topic will be Cliff Burrows, the president of Starbucks U.S., Scott Griffith, the CEO of  Zipcar and Robin Johnson, the chief information officer at Dell.

Also on Wednesday, my co-chair Brian Dumaine will moderate a penal on sustainability indices, notably the one being led by Wal-Mart. Andy Serwer will interview Yvon Chouinard, the legendary co-founder of Patagonia. And Andy will wrap up with a conversation with Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor.

It’s going to be a great three days, I hope. I’ll take lots of notes and report back when I come up for air.

Barely a week goes by without new evidence of the greening of China. This is great news for the planet—but some people say it’s bad for the U.S.

Are they right to worry?

What got me thinking about this was a phone conversation the other day with Bill Gross, the brilliant and tireless entrepreneur who is the chief executive of eSolar and a founder of electric-car startup Aptera.

Bill was calling with great news for eSolar, a Pasadena, Ca-based firm that makes software and equipment for utility-scale solar thermal power plants. This weekend in Beijing, eSolar announced a deal with a Chinese electrical-power manufacturer to build at least 2 gigawatts (2,000 megawatts) of solar thermal power plants over the next 10 years, beginning with a 92-megawatt plant that will break ground this year.

ESolar power plant

“China is really moving fast to implement as many green technologies as they can, to become experts at them and to scale them up,” Bill told me. “It’s a statement that China is thinking about clean energy for the long term.”

I’m hearing this more and more. Tulsi Tanti, who runs a big Indian wind power company called Suzlon, told me last month in Copenhagen that China is his biggest market. My blogging colleague Jesse Jenkins (at The Energy Collective) has written about a report from the Breakthrough Institute, where he works, called Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant (available here as a PDF) that argues, among other things, that:

Asia’s rising “clean technology tigers” – China, Japan, and South Korea – have already passed the United States in the production of virtually all clean energy technologies, and over the next five years, the government’s of these nations will out-invest the United States three-to-one in these sectors.

It also says:

If the United States hopes to compete for new clean energy industries it must close the widening gap between government investments in the United States and Asia’s clean tech tigers and provide more robust support for U.S. clean tech research and innovation, manufacturing, and domestic market demand.

The New Yorker just published a long story about clean tech China called Green Giant. And this morning in The Times, Tom Friedman tackles the issue again, saying:

I’ve been stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year.

We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.

Note Friedman’s use of “competitor/partner.” That’s the question, isn’t it: Is China a competitor or partner or both?

Obviously, that depends on precisely what China is doing; no single China investment in clean tech can be called typical. But let’s look at the question through the prism of this weekend’s eSolar deal. Interestingly, eSolar already manufactures in China—it buys its motors and gear boxes from a contract manufacturer in Shenzhen. The company is also supplying its solar thermal technology to India through a key partner, the Acme Group. So, like most any big company, eSolar has a global supply chain and a global customer base. Other clean tech startups like First Solar, which makes solar PV panels, and Coda Automotive, an electric car company, also manufacture in China. (For details, see Todd Woody’s story about First Solar and my blogpost about Coda.)

According to Bill Gross, eSolar’s most valuable asset is the software which enables its equipment—fields of mirrors known as heliostats—to efficiently focus the sun’s rays on water, creating an intense heat that vaporizes the water and creates steam to drive a conventional electricity-generating turbine. The company has been operating a plant in Lancaster, Ca., which impressed delegations of Chinese officials who came to visit last fall.

“They had been looking all over the world at every solar thermal technology, to find one they can bring into China,” Bill said. “We’ve been producing electricity for six months, so we have very reliable day by day data.”

Interestingly, China’s Penglai Electric made the deal with eSolar is less time than it is taking the U.S. Department of Energy to decide whether to provide loan guarantees for a similar plant that eSolar wants to build in New Mexico with NRG Energy, a firm power generation firm. One of the advantages that the Chinese have over the U.S. is that they can move fast.

Another is that the Chinese government can will things to happen. (“Not in my backyard” is not a cry often heard when the backyards are in Beijing or Shanghai.) Yet another advantage is China’s massive government subsidies, which some clean energy boosters in the U.S. use to argue that our government is not doing enough. See the following from Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, as quoted in The Times:

“In China, 80 percent of the entire cost of a factory and worker training is paid for by the government,” Mr. Resch said. “Malaysia will give you a 10- or 20-year tax holiday.”

He praised Mr. Obama’s $2.3 billion tax credit program, but said its 30 percent credits were not nearly as generous as China’s.

Think about that for a moment, though. If eSolar and First Solar and Coda Automotive do business in China, and get a piece of those subsidies, how is that bad for the United States? Doesn’t it mean that the Chinese government is subsidizing U.S. companies and U.S. jobs?

In the case of eSolar, the China deal will enable the company to become profitable almost immediately, Bill told me. In fact, there’s a chance that if the company does more deals, it won’t need a loan guarantee from the U.S. government to go forward in New Mexico. That’s good for American taxpayers.

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I have to say that I wonder about the whole “global competitiveness” argument around clean technology. For one thing, without massive government subsidies, the U.S. is unlikely to become a center of “green manufacturing” for products that can be shipped easily from place to place. (Huge and heavy products like wind turbines are another matter.) What’s more, is it really such a bad thing if China or India are able to generate “green jobs” faster than we are. There’s no question that they need the jobs more–per capita income in China is about $3,000, and in India it’s about $1,000.

I asked Bill Gross by email: “Should Americans be worried about the rise of clean tech in China?  Do you view China as a partner to the U.S. or a competitor or both?” He replied:

I think China doing this is a great thing for us.  First of all, as a California-based company, this creates jobs in the United States.  Second, this is one earth, so a project anywhere that is renewable is a great project.  But finally, we need bold leadership across the planet to take renewable energy seriously, and if China does that, and we all emulate that, that’s not just a good thing, that’s a great thing.

Maybe we need the trumped-up equivalent of a “space race” with China to motivate Congress to get moving and put a price on carbon. But we shouldn’t. As Bill says, this is one earth.

No offense to those working hard to bring wind, solar or geothermal energy to scale, or to people who are jazzed about energy efficiency, but I’m going to end my blogging for 2009 by saying that I am really excited about electric cars. It’s my favorite green technology, and one that’s on the verge of a breakthrough.

Recently, I’ve had a chance to ride (briefly) in the Coda and in the Renault Fluence EV, part of Better Place‘s Denmark rollout. I’ve written at length about BYD, the Chinese electric-car company owned in part by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. And next year I am hoping to check out the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf, as well as the Aptera from entrepreneur Bill Gross and the Tesla if the price comes down.

The electric car could bring about the biggest transformation of the auto industry since its invention. If  all goes well, we will be seeing many more of them on the roads in 2010 and especially 2011.

With thanks to Plug In America, a nonprofit group that promotes plug-in vehicles, which put this list together, here are12 myths about electric cars that, just in time for the 12 days of Christmas. Plug In America began as a group of electric vehicle (EV) drivers, so its members are speaking from experience.

I’m now going to do my best to slow down and stay away from my laptop between Christmas and New Year’s Day–so enjoy your holidays, happy new year and I’ll be back in 2010.

Aptera

1. MYTH: EVs don’t have enough range. You’ll be stranded when you run out of electricity

FACT: Americans drive an average of 40 miles per day, according to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation. Most new BEVs have a range of at least double that and can be charged at any ordinary electrical outlet (120V) or publicly accessible station with a faster charger. The latter, already in use, will proliferate as the plug-in infrastructure is built out. At present, all it takes is planning for EV owners, who can travel up to 120 miles on a single charge, to use their cars on heavy travel days. Alternatively, a PHEV goes at least 300 miles on a combination of electricity and gasoline.

2. Myth: EVs are good for short city trips only

FACT: Consumers have owned and driven EVs for seven years or more and regularly use them for trips of up to 120 miles.

3. MYTH: EVs just replace the tailpipe with a smokestack

FACT: Even today, with 52% of U.S. electricity generated by coal-fired power plants, plug-in cars reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and most other pollutants compared with conventional gas or hybrid vehicles. Plug-ins can run on renewable electricity from sources such as the sun or wind. PHEVs will reduce greenhouse gases and other emissions, even if the source of electricity is mostly coal, a 2007 study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and NRDC showed. Read the summary of some 30 studies, analyses and presentations on this topic.

4. MYTH: The charging infrastructure must be built before people will adopt EVs

Renault Fluence ZE

FACT: Most charging will be done at home, so a public charging infrastructure isn’t a prerequisite. Still, a robust infrastructure will help, especially for apartment dwellers and those regularly driving long distances. But at least seven companies are competing to dominate the public-charging-station market and a trade group representing the nation’s electric utilities has pledged to “aggressively” create the infrastructure to support “full-scale commercialization and deployment” of plug-ins.

5. MYTH: The grid will crash if millions of plug-ins charge at once

FACT: Off-peak electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel the daily commutes of 73% percent of all cars, light trucks, SUVs and vans on the road today if they were PHEVs, a 2007 study by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found. Also, utilities are upgrading some local distribution systems to accommodate plug-ins, just as they do when residents add more air conditioners and TVs. Plug-ins, which can be seen as energy storage devices on wheels, can actually benefit the grid, making green energies like solar and wind power even more viable.

6. MYTH: Battery chemicals are bad for the environment and can’t be recycled

FACT: Ninety-nine percent of batteries in conventional cars are recycled, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The metals in newer batteries are more valuable and recycling programs are already being developed for them. Utilities plan to use batteries for energy storage once they are no longer viable in a vehicle.

7. MYTH: EVs take too long to charge

FACT: The most convenient place and time to charge is at home while you sleep. Even using the slowest 120-volt outlet, the car can be left to charge overnight, producing about 40 miles of range. Most new BEVs and PHEVs will charge from 240-volt outlets providing double or triple the charge in the same amount of time. Charging stations that reduce charging time even more are beginning to appear.

8.MYTH: Plug-ins are too expensive for market penetration

FACT: New technologies are typically costly. Remember when cell phones and DVDs were introduced? Also, the government stimulus package includes a $2,500 to $7,500 tax credit for EVs and PHEVs. Some states are considering additional incentives ($5,000 in California and Texas). And, the purchase and lifetime operating cost of an EV is on par with or less than its gas-powered equivalent because EVs require almost no maintenance or repair: no oil or filter changes, no tune ups, no smog checks.

9. MYTH: Batteries will cost $15,000 to replace after only a few years

FACT: The battery is the priciest part of a plug-in, but costs will drop as production increases and the auto industry is expected to be purchasing up to $25 billion in advanced batteries annually by 2015. Some car makers plan to lease their batteries, so replacement won’t be an issue. The Chevy Volt PHEV will have a 10-year battery warranty that would cover battery replacement.

10. MYTH: There isn’t enough lithium in the world to make all the new batteries

FACT: Even in a worst-case scenario of zero battery recycling, aggressive EV sales, no new mining methods or sites, existing lithium stores will be sufficient for projected EV production for the next 75 years. See an analysis at PlugInAmerica.org. Also, lithium comes from many countries (24% is found in the United States), so we won’t be dependent on any one global region.

11. MYTH: Lithium batteries are dangerous and can explode

FACT: Among the many kinds of lithium-ion batteries, lithium-cobalt batteries found in consumer electronics can pose a fire risk in certain circumstances. These risks can be mitigated by the use of advanced-battery management systems and careful design that prevents “thermal runaway.” Most plug-in vehicle makers are working with other battery types (such as lithium-iron-phosphate and lithium-manganese) which have inherent safety advantages and provide more years of service.

12. MYTH: Most of us will still be driving gas cars through 2050

FACT: Several irrefutable factors are driving the shift from gasoline to plug-in vehicles: ever-toughening federal fuel economy standards and state caps on greenhouse gas emissions; projected price hikes for petroleum products as demand increases and supply flattens or drops; broad agreement over the need for America to reduce its reliance on petroleum for economic and national security reasons; and climate change, which is occurring faster than previously thought, according to the journal Science and many other sources.

“We are producing the lowest cost solar electrons in the history of the world,” Bill Gross is telling me. “Nobody’s ever done it. Nobody’s close.”

Bill Gross is nothing if not an enthusiast, which makes him a great salesman for whatever it is he happens to be selling. A lifelong entrepreneur, a longtime evangelist for solar energy and the CEO of eSolar, a Google-funded startup that designs and develops concentrating solar power (CSP) projects at utility scale, Gross is one of the most interesting business people I’ve known.  I met Bill in 2002, when I wrote a critical story about him for FORTUNE – investors in Idealab, his Internet incubator, were suing him after the dot-com bubble burst – and although he and his wife, Marcia Goodstein, were more than mildly irritated with me then, we’ve reconciled and I now count myself as an admirer of Bill’s. He’s always got a million things going on, some of them slightly nutty, but all of them interesting.  He’s in the robot business with a company called Evolution Robotics and he’s the founder of Aptera, a very cool electric car company (in which Google has invested) that I wrote about last spring.

Today, Bill and eSolar are staging a grand opening for eSolar’s first plant, called the Sierra SunTower, located in the southern California desert near Lancaster. Below are a couple of photos, taken by Bill, from a helicopter ride over the plant on July 3. He sent them to me via Picasa, the photo sharing site now owned by Google, which he founded back in the 1990s. Like I said, he’s a serial enterpreneur. (Bill also invented the idea of paid search, but that’s another story.)

In any event, this eSolar plant is a big deal, according to Bill, because it is producing solar energy at a lower cost than other solar thermal plants and at a much lower cost than utility-cale solar photovoltaic arrays. Concentrating solar power (CSP), also known as solar thermal power, produces energy by using mirrors or lenses to focus the sun’s heat and boil liquids that become a heat source for a steam turbine. Climate-change expert Joseph Romm, writing in Salon, opined last year that solar thermal

will be the most important form of carbon-free power in the 21st century. That’s because it’s the only form of clean electricity that can meet all the demanding requirements of this century.

Solar thermal technology has been deployed commercially for decades, but Gross tells me that eSolar has been able to drive costs down by mass-producing and deploying thousands of small mirrors across fields that track the sun and reflect its heat back at a thermal receiver mounted on a tower. ”Our breakthrough is lots and lots of small mirrors, and lots and lots of software to control them,” he says. The Sierra SunTower alone uses 24,000 mirrors, made by a contract manufacturer in China. You can read about the technology and see pictures here on eSolar’s website.

Through a power purchase agreement with Southern California Edison, the Sierra SunTower plant will supply 5 MW of clean energy to the grid. That’s not a lot, but it’s just the start of big things to come, Gross says.

While Google is eSolar’s best-known investor, two other big backers of the company—an Indian energy and telecom firm called the ACME group and Princeton, N.J.-based NRG Energy—are ready to step up their commitment to solar thermal, now that they can measure the cost and efficiency of eSolar’s technology under real-world conditions.

Acme, which invested $30 million in eSolar, has agreed to invest another $20 million, Gross told me. ACME has said it plans to build, own and operate up to 1 GW of solar thermal plants over the next 10 years using eSolar’s designs and mirrors. Construction will begin this year.

NRG, meanwhile, plans to start building a 92 MW plant in New Mexico as soon as it wins regulatory approval, Gross says.  NRG has agreements with eSolar to develop solar power plants with a total generation capacity of up to 500 MW at sites within California and across the southwest.

I emailed David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, to ask him about eSolar. He was on his way to today’s ceremony and emailed back:

Bill Gross is the kind of can-do visionary–with the innate ability to find the “winning” disruptive technology of the future–who we, at NRG, want to work with as we seek to deploy a new generation of sustainable and climate-friendly power technology in this country.

It’s impossible for me to evaluate Gross’s claims for his technology. But the fact that big companies are willing to invest capital in eSolar—at a time when capital is scarce—leads me to believe that Bill is, once again, onto something big.

“We have a cost-effective, no-subsidy solar power solution and it’s for sale, anywhere around the world,” he says.

Bill Gross and David Crane are regulars at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm: Green conference about business and the environment, which I co-chair, and I’m pleased that they’ll both be back as speakers next year.

eSolar's Sierra Sun Tower plant

Think about the aerodynamics of jet plane, a sailboat and a minivan. When we build things to fly through the air or propel us through the water, we design efficient vehicles. Not so with cars.

Aptera, an auto company startup, aims to change that. In just three years, the Carlsbad, Ca.-based firm  has designed and built a remarkably sleek and snazzy three-wheeled, two-seat electric car.

“If a plane looked like an SUV, it wouldn’t take off, “ says entrepreneur Bill Gross, who is a founder and board member of Aptera. “Dophins don’t look like SUVS for a reason. Cars need to look like dolphins, not SUVs.”

Here are a couple of videos showing the car, one from ABC News and another from Popular Mechanics.

The Aptera is “the most aerodynamically efficient vehicle ever,” says Gross. By contrast, according to the company, an average car traveling at 55 mph uses half of its energy just to push air out of the way.

If you pay attention to business, you’ve heard of Bill Gross. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur and the CEO of Idealab, the incubator for new businesses in Pasadena, CA. Bill has birthed spectacular successes and  big flops, among them Knowledge Adventures (educational software, now part of Vivendi), Picasa (photo sharing software, acquired by Google), eToys (an online toy store that overextended itself and failed) and CitySearch (local directories.) Idealab’s GoTo.com introduced the idea of paid search to the Internet, and as such is the underpinning of the $20-billion search market now dominated by Google.

So it’s fitting that Gross is currently doing lots of business with Google. Google is an investor in eSolar, a utility-scale solar thermal power company that recently announced big projects in India and in the Southwest. (You can listen to an interview that I did with Bill Gross about the solar projects and about Aptera at Greenbiz Radio at www.greenbiz.com.) Google has invested in Aptera, too, and it turns out that the company’s beginnings go back to a  Google search.

As Bill tells the story, he was doing some casual research on the Stirling Engine a few years ago when he stumbled across a web page created by Steve Fambro, the founder and now chief technology officer of Aptera. Fambro, an electrical engineer, had posted a design for a vehicle that would be safe, comfortable and fuel-efficient; his initial idea was to make kits so people could build the car themselves. Gross was impressed by the idea of a super-efficient car. “Your dream is my dream,” he recalls saying.“Let’s get together and start a company.” They joined forces with Chris Anthony, who is CEO of a company called Epic Boats (they build wake boats) and an expert in composite materials.

Using computer-assisted design, Aptera’s engineers went on to design a car that weighs just 1,700 pounds with a body made from an impact-resistant material that is lighter than steel but three times as strong.  The car will run 100 miles on a single charge and it’s got some nifty features, including butterfly-styled doors that pop open and a solar-assisted climate control system. Its top speed is 90 mph and it goes from zero to 60 in less than 10 seconds.

“The car is very unusual looking,” Gross says.  “It looks like a futuristic Jetson  vehicle.  But we feel that that’s what it takes to actually make an impact on our energy use and transportation.”

Aptera, which is based in Vista, CA., began taking orders for the cars from California residents at the end of 2007. “Very quickly, we got 4,000 pre-orders,” Gross says. Buyers put down a $500 deposit. The entry-level price for the car is expected to be about $25,000.

Last summer, Google.org announced that it had invested a total of $2.75 million Aptera and a company called ActaCell that makes lithium ion batteries for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. Google didn’t say how much money went into each company but it’s not a lot of dough in any event. Aptera has also raised money from Idealab, Esenjay Petroleum, The Quercus Trust and from Donald R. Beal, the retired chairman and CEO of Rockwell, about $30 million in total. But the company obviously needs a lot more to go into production. Last year, Paul Wilbur, a career automotive executive who worked for 26 years at Ford, Chrysler and a sunroof maker called ASC, was brought in as president and CEO.

Only five of the cars have been built, so far.

Gross tells me he expects to raise the cash in a few months. “Most people would not want to invest in a new car company at a time like this,” he says, “but investors are quite warm to this.” We’ll see.

The U.S. government is a potential source of funding for electric car and battery companies, through the Department of Energy’s advanced technology loan fund. But Aptera has run into a brick wall in Washington. Apparently the government has classified the Aptera’s vehicles as motorcycles, and they aren’t eligible for loans.

I’m delighted that Bill Gross (below) will be at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment in April, to talk about both eSolar and Aptera. Here’s a chart comparing Aptera’s aerodynamic drag to other vehicles. It’s hard to see, I know, but the company says Aptera is more aerodynamic than a 10-speed bike and 2.86 times more aerodynamic than a Prius.