Is greentech the next telecom?

You won't find much sympathy at the gas pump today, but expensive gasoline above $4 a gallon actually might be beneficial in the long run.

It spurs development of so-called green technologies, which help reduce Americans' dependency on traditional energy sources.

And it may just be the engine that drives the economy out of the current recession, said Robert Eyler, chairman of the economics department at Sonoma State University.

As the demand for these new technologies increases, businesses sprout up to meet demand and add high-paying jobs to the economy.

One example is Enphase Energy, a Petaluma company that developed a product that could revolutionize solar panels, according to experts.

The company was launched by two Sonoma County men in 2006 with the idea of increasing the efficiency of solar panels.

Its technology allows individual solar panels to have different output levels, rather than conforming to the lowest output of an adjoining panel in the array. Previously, every panel in an array -- such as one installed on a house -- was dropped to the level of the lowest performing panel.

Two years after forming, the company has 40 employees mostly in high-paying jobs, said Enphase Energy co-founder Raghu Belur.

"Another two years from now, I could easily see us with well over 100 people," Belur said. "And those are going to be predominantly high-end jobs. We're going to be hiring a lot of engineers."

Belur has seen firsthand how startups can breathe life into an economy. In 1997, he was one of 20 employees at a little telecom startup called Fiberlane Communications. That company grew to become Cerent, which was acquired by Cisco in 1999 for $7.3 billion. It remains the county's largest acquisition.

"By the time it became Cisco, we had 300 people," Belur said. "They were all high-paying technology jobs."

Much as telecom companies spurred economic growth in Sonoma County in the late 1990s, the hope is that startups in greentech will strike it rich.

"A lot of investment has taken place in energy and environmental technology, and hopefully that comes into fruition now and drives a supply-side boom," Eyler said.

You can reach Staff Writer Nathan Halverson at 521-5494 or nathan.halverson@

pressdemocrat.com.