I'm shaking off my post-Thanksgiving torpor just long enough to take a look at the solar stories that mattered this week.

Actually, I'm going to reach back to last Friday, if you don't mind. Last week was action-packed, and I missed a few biggies. Out of China, we saw both a major solar investment and a new IPO gaining steam.

China Investment Corp, one of the country's sovereign wealth funds, took a 20% stake totaling around $710 million in Hong Kong-listed GCL-Poly Energy. GCL is a major wafer player, supplying the likes of Suntech Power (NYSE:STP) and Trina Solar (NYSE:TSL) with silicon. Meanwhile, thin film player Trony Solar bumped up its planned initial public offering by more than 20%. The company plans to list depositary shares in the U.S. under the ticker symbol TRO.

On Monday, LDK Solar (NYSE:LDK) kicked things off with an earnings report that got at least a few people excited on Monday. I had a hard time getting too jazzed about the subsidy-fueled results, given that this remains a heavily indebted, speculative security.

Elsewhere, First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) peddled another of its internally developed solar projects. This sale of California's largest utility-scale facility to NRG Energy (NYSE:NRG) follows close on the heels of the Enbridge deal that lost First Solar a few fans last month.

Also on Monday, India unveiled a plan to grow its solar market 100-fold within 13 years. That would take capacity from a modest 200 megawatts to a mighty 20 gigawatts. World installed capacity was 15 gigawatts last year. If India's good for the plan, that's fantastic news for shops like Suniva, which just completed the country's first large-scale solar project in West Bengal. Suniva is a U.S. startup that's graced these pages on two past occasions -- once for its big Indian contract, and then more recently regarding the firm's domestic manufacturing plans, which dwarf those of Yingli Green Energy (NYSE:YGE).

The oddest news in this holiday-shortened week may have been the report that Qatar is planning a solar-powered water desalination plant that could cost on the order of $1 billion. As Energy Recovery (NASDAQ:ERII) will tell you, desalination is hugely energy intensive. The plan to use of solar energy to power this process, in a country that has natural gas coming out of every pore, seems like a real turkey.

Speaking of which, I need to go lie down.