Back in October, Fortune’s Todd Woody was one of the first reporters to point out the devastating threat the credit crunch posed to the renewable energy industry. A time-honored mechanism for government support of the industry was to give renewable start-ups big tax credits to apply against the huge cost of building, for example, a solar power plant. But these start-ups weren’t profitable, so they didn’t pay any taxes, so they couldn’t use their tax credits. Instead, they joined forces with Wa