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Gold for December delivery surged $30.60, or 4%, to $757.40 an ounce in electronic trading on Globex. The contract earlier hit an intraday high of $765.

Tucked into a few dusty acres across from a shopping mall, it uses steam heat from deep within the Earth’s crust to generate electricity. Known as geothermal, the energy is clean, reliable and so abundant that this facility produces more than enough electricity to power every home in Reno, population 221,000.

“There’s no smoke. Very little noise,” said Paul Thomsen, director of policy and business management for Ormat Technologies Inc., which owns the operation. “People don’t even know it’s here.”

Geothermal energy may be the most prolific renewable fuel source that most people have never heard of. Although the supply is virtually limitless, the massive upfront costs required to extract it have long rendered geothermal a novelty. But that’s changing fast as this old-line industry buzzes with activity after decades of stagnation.

Billionaire Warren E. Buffett has invested big. Internet giant Google Inc. is bankrolling advanced research. Entrepreneurs are paying record prices for drilling leases in places such as Nevada, where they’re prospecting for heat instead of metals.

“This is the new gold rush,” said Mark Taylor, a geothermal analyst with the consulting firm New Energy Finance in Washington. He credits high fossil fuel prices and concerns about global warming with jump-starting the U.S. industry, along with federal tax credits and state laws mandating the wider use of renewable energy.

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Costing about 4 to 7 cents a kilowatt-hour, Taylor said, geothermal is competitive with wind power and significantly cheaper than solar. Geothermal facilities occupy a fraction of the space required by wind and solar farms. The energy is also more reliable. Plants crank electricity around the clock, irrespective of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

This so-called baseload generation is coveted by power companies, which are under pressure to boost their use of green energy. California utilities must generate 20% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010. Nevada utilities must hit that target by 2015. Geothermal is a cornerstone of that effort, accounting for about two-thirds of the renewable portfolio of NV Energy, Nevada’s biggest utility.

“It’s a 24/7 predictable supply,” said Thomas Fair, the company’s head of renewable energy. “That means a lot to a utility.”

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A geothermal well can cost $5 million or more. The result: The U.S. currently derives less than 0.5% of its electricity from geothermal.

Some say the key to harnessing this energy source on a massive scale lies with a technology known as enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS for short. The idea is to engineer the necessary conditions by pumping water into the Earth’s crust and fracturing the hot rocks below. Heat from the Earth warms the water, whose resulting steam is channeled back to the surface, powering turbines to create electricity. The water is then pumped back underground.

Though still in its infancy, EGS has the potential to open up much of the planet to geothermal development. Tiny plants are already online in France and Germany. More than 30 EGS firms are engaged in exploration and development in Australia.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine company, is trying to push EGS in the U.S. It recently gave $10 million to Southern Methodist University’s Geothermal Lab to update the nation’s geothermal resources map, as well as to two California companies — Potter Drilling and AltaRock Energy Inc. — that are working on EGS technologies.

Google is urging the U.S. government to spend big on geothermal R&D as part of the company’s push to encourage utility-scale renewable energy that’s cheaper than coal. About half the United States’ electricity is generated by that dirty fossil fuel. China, already the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is adding coal-fired plants at a swift rate.

EGS “is indeed the sleeping giant of renewable energy,” Dan Reicher, director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org, said during a recent industry conference in Reno. “It’s the killer ap.”

Some industry veterans such as Shevenell are miffed that EGS has grabbed the spotlight when there’s plenty of energy to be extracted quickly using conventional techniques. Still, she credits Google for helping pump life into a dormant sector.

The utilities say they are under pressure to clean out accounts that are weighing down their books at a time when their stocks are being hammered and earnings growth has slowed.

Meanwhile, the increasing number of homes left without power — which could rise as economic pain deepens — is beginning to worry some consumer advocates and regulators.

In Pennsylvania, PPL Corp. increased shutoffs by 78% in the first three quarters of the year compared with the same period a year earlier. Shutoffs at electric utilities throughout the state increased by 20% in that period. George Lewis, a spokesman for PPL, based in Allentown, Pa., said the utility had been somewhat lax in the past but decided this year to “reverse the trend and prevent people from getting further in debt” by cutting them off sooner. About 3% of the company’s residential accounts have been disconnected for delinquency.

In Memphis, Tenn., the city-owned utility that supplies electricity, natural gas and water to residents cut off 38% more people in the first eight months of the year, or 69,743 electric accounts, versus the same period in 2007. The utility raised electricity rates 20% this year, reflecting increased wholesale power costs for energy. Chris Stanley, a spokesman from the company, Memphis Light, Gas & Water, said the number of accounts owing more than $900 that were 90 days or more past due was up 148% to 1,766 accounts as of Oct. 28.

The increased number of shutoffs has attracted the attention of some regulators. Dian Grueneich, a member of the California Public Utilities Commission who has responsibility for low-income programs, has begun asking utilities to furnish information on shutoff criteria. She wants commission staff to “take a look and make sure it is being applied fairly.”

One bright spot is that many utilities will have more money to distribute next year to poor customers through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Congress boosted the program’s funds for the current fiscal year by 78% to $5.1 billion. Many utilities are trying to get the word out that people should apply because eligibility rules have been expanded, allowing people with higher incomes to qualify.

State regulators say they have noticed that power shutoffs have moved up the economic chain. “We’re seeing an uptick in middle-class people who have never been in this situation before,” said Eric Hartsfield, director of the customer-service division of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

New Jersey’s biggest utility company, Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., said it saw a 10% increase compared with the year earlier in uncollectible natural-gas accounts, and slightly less on the electric side, in the third quarter. “We’ve been diligent in our shutoff activities,” said PSEG Chief Executive Ralph Izzo.

Rising delinquencies are occurring across the country. In New York, the amount of money utilities are owed on accounts at least 60 days past due jumped 22%, to $611.3 million in September compared with a year earlier, according to regulators.

The rise comes as utilities are finding it more difficult to fund their operations.

Northeast Utilities, which owns electric and gas utilities in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, is carrying about $15 million of unpaid bills currently, up from about $11 million this time last year and about $8 million in 2006. “We’re putting more resources into collecting on accounts now,” said Chief Financial Officer David McHale.

In the third quarter, PECO Corp., a Philadelphia utility, racked up an additional $37 million of bad-debt expenses from unpaid bills compared with the third quarter of 2007, bringing its total unpaid balance to $56 million.

The company has put in place a new service-termination strategy this year that for the first time assesses credit risk, and pulls together other information used as a basis for decisions. “We ask how old, how big and how risky” an account is when prioritizing disconnections, said Denis O’Brien, president of PECO, a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corp.

The number of shutoffs could rise further, as new technologies such as digital meters make it easier for utilities to cut off late-paying customers.

Digital meters allow power companies to do things remotely that previously required sending out work crews. For example, utilities can take meter readings wirelessly and switch a customer’s power off or on without having to send a crew to a house. They also can use a “service limiter” feature to cut power flows to a trickle until customers pay up. Utilities are installing millions of these meters across the U.S.

Southern California Edison, a unit of Edison International of Rosemead, Calif., currently disconnects late-paying customers owing as little as $30, but that could drop lower in the future. That usually would be a money-losing proposition, because it requires a crew to be sent out to disconnect service manually. But the company is in the process of installing 5.3 million digital meters, at a cost of $1.63 billion, which will allow remote, wireless shutoffs, making it economical to take action even for tiny amounts owed. In a recent filing with regulators it said it could adopt “rigid enforcement” of payment rules in the future for those owing less than $30. It hypothesized it could cut off an additional 129,000 people a year.

Lynda Ziegler, senior vice president of customer service at SoCal Edison, said the utility doesn’t have enough wireless meters to support a policy change yet. She added that notification requirements mean it still could take nearly three months to sever a delinquent account. But she said the utility may seek authority from the Public Utilities Commission in the future to act more quickly or to convert certain customers to prepaid service because “one of the struggles people have is catching up when they get behind.”

We suppose that Alix at least has plenty of experience with unsound banking institutions. He was the chief risk officer of Bear Stearns from 2006 until 2008. So, basically, he was the guy on the mast charged with yelling “iceberg” just before the titantic introduced its bow to a floating hunk of ice. Prior to that he ran credit risk management for Bear from 1996 to 2006, Jon Keehner at Bloomberg points out. That worked out just great.

The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.

During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.

Ford Motor Co. reported a 30 percent drop in car and light- truck sales from a year earlier and Toyota Motor Corp.’s declined 23 percent. Honda Motor Co.’s slid 25 percent, Nissan Motor Co.’s were down 33 percent and Chrysler LLC’s fell 35 percent.

“If you adjust for population growth, it’s the worst sales month in the post-World War II era” for the industry, said Mike DiGiovanni, GM’s chief sales analyst, on a conference call. “Clearly we’re in a dire situation.”

Industrywide U.S. auto sales fell for the 12th straight month, extending the longest slide in 17 years. Tight credit, falling consumer confidence and the weakening economy, the same forces that suppressed buying in September, hurt automakers again last month.

October total sales dropped to 838,156 from 1.23 million, according to Autodata Corp. The last time light-vehicle sales were lower was 822,200 in January 1991, according to Autodata.

The seasonally adjusted annual sales rate for the month was 10.6 million, the lowest since February 1983, the Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey-based provider of industry statistics said in a statement. The October 2007 rate was 16 million, Autodata said.

“People are feeling a hell of a lot less flush than they’ve felt in the better part of a generation,” said Joe Phillippi, an analyst at AutoTrends Consulting in Short Hills, New Jersey. “Everybody is taking it on the chin right now.”

The Treasury Department leapt to keep AIG from going bankrupt on Sept. 16, and in the past seven weeks, AIG has drawn down $90 billion in federal bailout loans. But some key AIG players argue that bankruptcy would have offered more structure and greater protections during a time of intense market volatility.

AIG declined to comment on the matter.

Echoing some other experts, Ann Rutledge, a credit derivatives expert and founding principal of R&R Consulting, said she is not sure how badly the financial system would have been rocked if the government had let AIG file for bankruptcy protection. But she fears that the government is papering over the problem with a quick fix that was not well planned.