March 6, 1981

Take a small country with no oil, plenty of sunshine and lots of scientists, and you have a perfect laboratory for intensive research into solar energy. Israel fits the bill, and in recent years, with the help of grants from the United States Government and private donors abroad, scientists say that significant progress has been made on harnessing some of the 250 watts of power that are estimated to fall on every square yard of the country on an average sunny day. One out of every three Israeli homes already gets hot water from rooftop solar heaters - simple, flat glass plates laced with water pipes to absorb sunlight - and they provide about 1.5 percent of the country's energy needs. Although this is a small amount, it is still one of the highest in the world, according to the Ministry of Energy. Experts say that the number of households using such solar heaters is expected to rise by 50 percent in the next fews years and, by the year 2000, about 10 percent of the country's energy is scheduled to be solar.

Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis suggested today that New York City might have difficulty trading in funds earmarked for construction of the Westway and using the money for mass transit. This is so, the Secretary said, because such funds are allotted on a first-come, first-served basis, and other places have applied for trade-ins while New York City and state officials have debated whether to build the superhighway on the West Side or to divert the money to shoring up the troubled transit system. Mr. Lewis's remarks were made at a hearing on transportation problems held by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Transportation and Tourism. Agreement on M.T.A. Plan Meanwhile, after a three-hour meeting in Albany, Governor Carey, Mayor Koch, Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink and Richard Ravitch, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, were in virtual agreement on the details of a plan to pump $5 billion of improvements into the M.T.A. system over the next five years. (Page B3.)

''I HAD the voice when I sang the blues in my youthful days. I didn't gyrate to them. The blues are supposed to be serious, and I sang them as the master taught me.'' ''The master'' was W.C. Handy, ''the Father of the Blues,'' who composed and published the first blues songs in sheet-music form. His ''St. Louis Blues'' is so timeless that only the other day, 67 years later, it appeared on a new album, ''Rocket 88,'' recorded by an English band including Charley Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones. Mr. Handy's pupil was his very own daughter, 78-year-old Katharine Handy Lewis. Feeling a little under the weather the other day, she was in bed, talking over the phone from the home she shares with her son in the Bronx. But she's not complaining about her health. No, she's singing snatches of ''Porgy and Bess'' and humming passages from ''Rhapsody in Blue'' to demonstrate George Gershwin's debt to her father. And she's eagerly anticipating her performance this evening at Carnegie Hall, where she will sing ''Yellow Dog Blues'' and - what else? - ''St. Louis Blues.''

After more than a decade of delays, New York City was ready to begin a billion-dollar effort to complete its basic sewage treatment system. But city officials now say President Reagan's proposed budget cuts once again threaten the entire program. The city had planned to ask the Federal Government for $560 million in the next fiscal year to complete the North River sewage treatment plant near Harlem and the Red Hook treatment plant at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although city officials said they believed they had the backing of the Carter Administration, such a large allocation for one city would have been difficult to get even under that Administration's proposed total appropriation of $3.6 billion for sewage plant construction.

Within the past month, a flurry of stock-trading scandals has tested the detective skills of a little-publicized team of analysts at the New York Stock Exchange. On Feb. 3, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley & Company and three others were accused of profiting from the use of confidential information on prospective mergers. Just two weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a consent degree against Frederick Wyman 2d, a broker at L.F. Rothschild Unterberg Towbin, and his father, Frank Wyman, for violating insider trading rules. And last week the financier Edward M. Gilbert was convicted of 34 counts of stock manipulation.