So it looks like one of the first loan guarantees from the recovery bill will be going to Solyndra, a photovoltaics manufacturer for the commercial rooftop market.

The U.S. Department of Energy has offered Solyndra a $535 million loan guarantee to help fund the construction of a new manufacturing plant that will ultimately create more than 1,000 new jobs.

Energy Secretary, Steven Chu indicated a few weeks ago that the first loan guarantees would be for solar and energy efficiency.

First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) also had some good news today, announcing that by the end of the year, the company will have the capacity to produce more than 1 GW per year. To put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of an average-sized nuclear power plant.

Of course, it wasn't all positive PR coming out of the solar sector today. OptiSolar announced that the company now has to suspend its manufacturing and assembly business because it could not get the necessary funding to keep operations going. The company is currently looking for a buyer for its manufacturing business. 142 jobs will be lost. Incidentally, First Solar recently announced that it would be buying OptiSolar's project development portfolio for about $400 million in stock.

And Solarfun (NASDAQ:SOLF) investors certainly weren't doing cartwheels today, after Paul Clegg, a solar analyst at Jefferies cut his numbers on the company ahead of Q4 results. The stock fell about 15 percent by noon.

Jeff