BOSTON, June 27 (UPI) — Boston’s SatCon Technology Corp. had a hand in the recent installation of one of the world’s largest solar arrays.

The solar farm at Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., was in part due to Boston-based SatCon Technology’s PowerGate inverters.

SatCon is a developer of power management and system architecture solutions for the alternative energy and distributed power markets.

The company’s PowerGate commercial grade inverters were an integral part of the recent installation at Google’s Mountain View campus. Google officials say the new 1.6 megawatt system is the largest commercial photovoltaic system in the United States.

Sharp Corp. provided 9,212 208-watt modules for the project, which was designed and installed by EI Solutions. SatCon’s PowerGate high-efficiency inverters are a critical component of the system, converting the sun’s energy produced by the photovoltaic panels into alternating current electricity that is used to power the facility.

Officials estimate Google’s new solar array could prevent as much as 3,637,627 pounds per year of harmful greenhouse gases annually. Over the next 30 years, the carbon dioxide reduction will be equivalent to eliminating more than 128 million car driving miles.

SatCon’s trademarked PowerGate inverters are designed for use with alternative energy power systems to generate distributed electrical power. Distributed, alternative energy power generation is a growing trend toward the production of clean, reliable power at the point of use. Alternative energy systems can alleviate congestion on highly loaded utility electrical distribution networks and offer an alternative to power line extensions in remote areas.

Do you feel as if your boss controls what you say and do even after hours? If so, you’re not alone. After noticing more and more examples of people getting fired or being shunned for their political affiliation, activism, or speech, Bruce Barry, a professor of management and sociology at the at Vanderbilt University, set out to research free speech in the workplace. What he discovered, he says, is that employers have much more power over our personal lives than ever before.

The culmination of his research is the recently published Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, June, 2007). In it, Barry demonstrates the problem through examples—including a woman in Alabama who lost her job for having a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car—and offers viable solutions. But if you’re looking for conspiracy theories, don’t look to Barry’s work. He admits that there’s no rampant movement by managers to censor everyone or fire every person who keeps a blog. But he is concerned when free speech is stifled.

“What I’m concerned about is that when someone does get fired for his blog, and it becomes widely known, it puts a chill on everybody else,” says Barry. “It sends a clear message: Watch what you say. Your employer is paying attention to your speech, even in some cases when it doesn’t have very much at all to do with your job.”

Barry recently discussed the erosion of free speech with BusinessWeek reporter Francesca_Dimeglio@businessweek.com. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:

What surprised you most about the research you did?

A lot of the research I did was legal research trying to answer the questions, “Is there free speech in the American workplace? For whom? To what extent?” The knee-jerk answer is, “Not really, because constitutional rights in this country don’t really apply on private property or in the private sector.” One of the surprises was to actually find out there are some rights to free expression in the workplace, even in the private sector.

[The issue] is complicated. It depends, in part, on where you live because some of this is governed by employment law, which varies widely from state to state. It depends, in part, on what kind of speech we’re talking about because there are some laws that cover certain kinds of activity, like political activity, but not others. Those laws also vary from state to state. The other alarming thing I found was that, even with all those complications and exceptions, employers have nearly total control over the expressive activities of employees in this country both on and off the job.

You write that the erosion of free speech has gotten worse in the last 30 years. Why do you think that’s happening as we’re modernizing and, one would hope, becoming more transparent and tolerant?

You can look at it from both sides—the perspective of the employer and employee. From the standpoint of employees, work has changed over the last 30 years. There’s less job security, more global trade, more people relying on multiple employment opportunities to form a professional career.

All of this makes for less job security and more concern about getting in trouble with one’s employer. I think people self-censor more because of the changing nature of employment. Something else that has gone on in the last 20 or 30 years is increased attention by employers to their image and stewardship of their brand and reputation. This makes them increasingly cautious about employee expression that might depart from the preferred corporate point of view or somehow reflect negatively on the brand, image, or firm (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/15/04, ).

Technology funds are enjoying their best year since 2003, but is the comeback for real?

Year to date, mutual funds that invest in tech stocks are up 15.7 percent, compared with 10.2 percent total return for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. (Numbers are through Thursday’s close.)

The last year this notoriously volatile group posted a double-digit total return was in 2003, when it gained 57.4 percent — exactly twice the return of the S&P 500.

In the past month alone, tech funds are up 7.7 percent, beating every other category of domestic stock fund tracked by Morningstar. For most of the past seven years, this group had been a cellar dweller.

Real estate funds — which had been topping the charts for most of the past seven years — are trailing every other stock-fund category except bear market funds for the past month, quarter and year to date.

This has me wondering: Is the momentum crowd — which chases whatever is moving — switching from real estate to technology, or is something fundamental driving the tech sector?

Fred Hickey, editor of the High Tech Strategist newsletter, says there is no fundamental reason for tech stocks to be rising.

“I do not know of a single event; I can’t think of one single company that has come out and said things are fantastic,” says Hickey, who has been generally bearish on tech stocks for years.

“Xilinx, Yahoo, Motorola, Novellus, Lexmark, LSI Logic and Office Depot have all lowered their earnings guidance for the second quarter,” he says. Best Buy and Circuit City are reporting “massive downturns in sales growth,” and Circuit City, CompUSA and Radio Shack are shutting stores.

Even the vaunted iPhone failed to sell out its opening weekend, despite unprecedented hype.

“I’ve seen people waiting in line for Tickle Me Elmo dolls, Xboxes, (Nintendo) Wiis, and they all sold out almost immediately,” Hickey says.

“All the colored-hair people, all the graphic design people, all the eBay scalpers were waiting in line for iPhones. (Apple co-founder Steve) Wozniak was there,” he says.

“How did a product billed as the Jesus phone not sell out?”

Meanwhile, he says, Apple’s iPod sales are lower on a year-over-year basis, yet its market cap is almost as big as Hewlett-Packard’s.

Corporate spending on information technology also remains weak.

When companies reported their first-quarter results, “They all talked about lower IT spending,” Hickey says. “What evidence do we have of an IT pickup?”

Hickey does not expect an improvement when tech companies start reporting their second-quarter results this week.

He says tech stocks are rising because money managers love technology and “When the market is going insane, the most beloved sectors always go up.”

Magnus Krantz, a stock analyst with RS Investments, put it another way. He explains that tech stocks are “high beta,” meaning they are more volatile than the market as a whole. They outperform when the market is going up and underperform when the market is going down.

“The market is up and people want beta,” he says.

Like Hickey, Krantz says there is no hard evidence of a broad resurgence in corporate tech spending, although there are a few glimmers of hope.

Accenture, which helps companies buy and install technology, recently said, “Management consulting, primarily related to IT, was very strong,” he says. (RS owns stock in Accenture.) And the personal computer business — from HP and Dell to Intel and AMD — is looking a bit better.

On the consumer side, he considers the iPhone a success and indicates that people are willing to pay high prices for the right gadgets.

Krantz says analysts were expecting that Apple would sell 300,000 iPhones the first weekend, but the actual number might have been 500,000 to 700,000.

“They didn’t sell out, but that was precisely because there was plenty of supply,” he says.

Krantz says Nokia, which his firm owns, is doing “extremely well” thanks to strong demand for high-end phones such as the N95.

He says Motorola is hurting because it didn’t invest in a strong successor to the Razr phone.

Krantz sees pockets of strength in technology, such as high-end TVs, which are helping companies like glassmaker Corning, another RS holding. But overall, he says, momentum is a bigger factor than fundamentals.

Karen Dolan, a fund analyst for Morningstar, says “We do think there are fundamental underpinnings” for tech’s recent performance.

“A lot of these companies — Cisco, Apple, Oracle, even Microsoft — have been doing quite well,” Dolan says. “Generally, their valuations have remained reasonable and in a lot of cases come down.”

That’s attracting a growing number of fund managers who typically buy value stocks.

Bill Miller, one of the first value managers to venture into tech, has added to his tech stake in the ING Legg Mason Value fund.

Bill Nygren, manager of Oakmark Select, counts Intel and Dell among his small number of stocks.

“We have seen eBay show up in a lot of value portfolios,” Dolan says.

Tech funds, meanwhile, are getting a boost from Google and Apple. They are the first- and third-largest holdings, respectively, among tech funds. Google is up 20 percent year to date and Apple is up 62 percent.

“I don’t think this is just speculative,” Dolan says. “I kind of think these companies have gotten ignored” and now they’re being rediscovered.
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Net Worth runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail Kathleen Pender at kpender@sfchronicle.com.