The problem is, almost all of these players hit the same ceiling: they can’t figure out a way to inexpensively scale with the technology they have. But biofuel startup LS9 may have just changed that.

The company’s scientists have published a paper, academically titled “Microbial Biosynthesis of Alkanes,” claiming that they can now implant genes into E. coli that allow the bacteria to directly churn out alkanes — otherwise known as the hydrocarbons in car and jet fuel — in one step. This is a major breakthrough for the field, one that has been chased for years.

The discovery could eliminate the need for other, pricier methods to derive alkanes. It could also jumpstart the green sector’s focus on biofuels as a viable business. Before now, many of the companies in the industry, including Codexis, Synthetic Genomics and others, were focusing on creating more lucrative, renewable chemicals to replace petroleum in plastics, pharmaceutical development and other processes.

LS9 itself has been pursuing the low-volume chemical market for a while, teaming with Proctor and Gamble last spring to jointly develop chemicals to be used in consumer goods.

Because the new LS9 process consists of only one step, it also requires less feedstock to begin with, lowering costs and increasing efficiencies across the board. Prior conversion technique entailed dangerous inorganic catalysts, hydrogen, high pressures and temperatures, and a lot of intermediate steps.

In addition to being renewable, biofuels also burn cleaner than traditional fossil-fuel sources. Because they can be used in standard, internal-combustion engines, biofuels seem to have a bigger market ahead of them than electric vehicles — the other strategy to achieve cleaner, greener transportation. It’s going to take a while for plug-in cars to catch on, and very little roadside infrastructure exists today to support them. If biofuel companies can successfully scale, they have the potential to slash emissions more significantly.

These advantages have attracted the attention of venture capitalists interested in incremental clean energy innovations, rather than radical changes. For example, Khosla Ventures, one of LS9’s backers that also invests in biofuel makers Coskata and Amyris Biotechnologies, is major proponent of this category of startups.

Based in South San Francisco, LS9’s investors include CTTV Investments, Flagship Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners in addition to Khosla.

Tags: biofuels

Companies: Ls9

All told, the Greenwood, Colo. company raised $394 million, pricing its shares at $14. The stock has performed weakly since this morning, dipping as low as $12.

While it’s not exactly a traditional green technology company, Molycorp does provide the raw materials for advanced batteries (for plug-in vehicles, primarily), wind turbines, and energy-efficient light bulbs. More and more demand for its products is coming from the sector, which means its success relies largely on the shaky and uncertain growth of other green technologies.

This may be a major reason its IPO followed in the footsteps of similar sales by biofuel maker Codexis and solar cell maker Jinko Solar, both of which sold for less and raised less on the public markets than expected. Cylindrical solar module maker Solyndra couldn’t even get its IPO out the door.

Investors just don’t seem to be hot on cleantech stocks. There’s a lot of risk involved in green plays, and returns sometimes don’t come for years.

Molycorp, in particular, is in a sticky spot. The company plans to use the money raised in the offering to jumpstart its mine in Mountain Pass, Calif. that has been defunct since 2002, when radioactive waste from the site contaminated a local lake. The project is more vital than ever, considering China’s growing dominance in the rare earth elements market (it owns 95 percent of global production), and Molycorp’s dependence on its own operations in China.

Geopolitical disputes over rare earth metals have stolen the spotlight recently, especially following the discovery of a massive pocket of lithium in Afghanistan that could be used to make millions of new batteries. Bolivia, which reportedly contains half of the world’s known lithium supply, has prohibited foreign mining and exports. If China decided to do the same — already a concern for U.S. government officials — Molycorp and companies like it might be sunk.

Seeing this possibility on the horizon, Molycorp seems to be rushing to beat the clock. Not only is it working to get its California mine up and running by the end of the year (in order to hit full capacity by 2012), it’s applying for a $280 million loan guarantee through the U.S. Department of Energy to expedite development. The company hopes its IPO will buoy its application. It expects to spend $511 million in the next two years alone.

Tags: rare earth elements

Companies: Molycorp Minerals

Now the choice shifts to other measures, including electric and overall range, as well as the plug-in perks that states like California offer to early adopters to encourage them to opt for electric cars.

This is where it gets interesting. While California loves the Nissan Leaf, current regulations deny Chevy Volt buyers two significant perks: a $5,000 rebate, and permission to drive solo in HOV Lanes.

Federal credits yes, CA rebate no

Both the 2011 Leaf and the 2011 Volt are eligible for the maximum $7,500 federal tax credit that goes to buyers of plug-in cars with battery packs of 16 kilowatt-hours or more.

Some states add their own incentives as well. Georgia and Oregon, for example, offer state tax credits ($5,000 and $1,500 respectively).

California offers a tax rebate instead, a measure considered more powerful than tax credits because the rebate check that comes in the mail effectively cuts the car’s purchase price within weeks, rather than making buyers wait until they file their taxes.

Are you an AT-PZEV, little car?

The highest California rebate of $5,000 goes only to zero-emission vehicles, those cars with no tailpipes. The all-electric Nissan Leaf qualifies, but the Volt–whose range-extending gasoline engine switches on to provide electricity when the battery is depleted–does not.

California’s EV buyers had expected the Volt to qualify instead for a reduced rebate of roughly $3,000, says EV advocate Chelsea Sexton.

But that hope was quashed when the Volt didn’t qualify as an Advanced Technology Partial Zero-Emissions Vehicle (AT-PZEV), a specific category of clean vehicle in the California’s complicated taxonomy of emissions classes.

In the eyes of California regulators, the plug-in 2011 Chevrolet Volt is no cleaner than the 2011 Chevrolet Cruze compact–despite its ability to run solely on grid power for up to 40 miles, including at freeway speeds.

The 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid, on the other hand, does qualify as an AT-PZEV and will get a partial rebate, even though it must run its gasoline engine at freeway speeds.

No HOV perks either?

The other major plug-in perk is single-driver access to California’s high-occupancy vehicle lanes, greatly prized in congested San Francisco and Los Angeles traffic. But current legislation won’t extend that to the Volt either.

A bill before the California Senate, SB-535, is intended to let plug-in cars with a sole occupant into the HOV lanes. It’s similar to a law that expires at the end of 2010 giving 85,000 lucky drivers of three specific hybrid models that privilege.

Come January, just a few thousand all-electric, natural-gas, and hydrogen vehicles will qualify for that access unless SB 535 passes.

That bill has taken “lots of twists and turns,” says Jay Friedland of Plug-In America, an advocacy group that works to support and encourage plug-in vehicles. See, for instance, the strike-throughs in the amended version of SB 535.

Twists and turns

The California Air Resources Board has proposed amendments to the latest revision that enhance AT-PZEV eligibility for HOV lane access.  The original bill had required a threshold of 65 miles per gallon for eligibility, which Plug-In America supports.

The problem is that the EPA still hasn’t decided how to rate the fuel economy of plug-in vehicles that have gasoline engines too, since their effective gas mileage depends entirely on how they’re used.

Gas on freeways good, electricity bad ???

Even worse, Sexton notes, is a bizarre paradox created by the AT-PZEV requirement: A car that must use its engine on the freeway will get HOV-Lane access, while the Volt–which can run on battery power at highway speeds–will not.

So a Chevrolet Volt that does less than 40 miles a day may never burn a drop of gas, for instance, but will still be banned from the HOV lanes.

Whereas the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid that’s being flogged down the freeway at 85 mph will consistently burn gasoline at its highest rate, and yet it will be able to do so from the HOV lane.

No word yet on whether various other electric-car perks–like free parking in the closest lots at Los Angeles International Airport, worth at least $30 a day–will be extended to the Volt.

Cold starts a problem

Part of the challenge lies in a clause of California’s Enhanced AT-PZEV definition, says Friedland. It requires zero evaporative emissions, which is hard to design into a vehicle whose gasoline engine may not be run regularly.

Friedland says he understands that the Prius Plug-In Hybrid uses a coolant thermos bottle to keep its catalytic converter warm. (Catalysts must warm up before they clean exhaust emissions effectively.)

Future Volts might have to use battery power to keep their catalytic converters heated to several hundred degrees, which would likely reduce their electric range–even if the engine attached to the converter never switched on.

It’s “an area CARB has to consider in the future,” says Friedland, “especially when the benefits” of providing the same incentives for plug-in Volts “are so large.”

CARB may yet tweak its definition of what qualifies as an AT-PZEV to reflect the variations in vehicle technology represented by vehicles like the Volt. Unless that happens, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt won’t get the love from California that the 2011 Nissan Leaf does.

Written by John Voelcker, this article originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: General Motors

The Apple Battery Charger includes six AA batteries in the device’s $29 price tag. This hovers around the price of many of the other chargers on the market, but Apple says it has built in a little extra: the ability to save money, however little, on electricity.

A lot of other chargers continue to suck power even after the batteries they carry are fully juiced. Apple’s spin is that the product consumes 10 times less electricity than these rivals — about 30 milliwatts once its charge cycle is finished (as opposed to an average 315 milliwatts), the company says. If the batteries included in the purchase are charged regularly, they can last for upwards of a decade.

The battery charger may pale in comparison to Apple’s newly-launched Magic TrackPad — which incidentally depends on AA batteries — but it fits a real need in the market, demonstrating how Apple is widely surveying opportunities for it to make a difference for its customers in large and small ways.

Apple has garnered fairly positive reviews on its environmental efforts, even from GreenPeace, especially after the launch of the iPad made cloud computing and the prospect of eliminating energy hog servers more of a reality. The white, compact charger is a small contribution to the same green roadmap.

Tags: Apple Battery Charger

Companies: Apple

Renewable sources of energy are of particular interest in Hawaii, where gasoline prices are inflated by the need to import oil supplies. Funding wind and solar projects could wean the islands off this dependency, dramatically slashing their carbon footprints.

The Kahuku project, a subsidiary of independent developer First Wind Holdings, broke ground halfway through July. It will help the state meet its goal of generating 70 percent of its energy for electricity and ground transportation from renewable sources by 2030 — one of the tenets of the Hawaiian Clean Energy Initiative.

The Hawaiian Electric Company is the only utility operating on Oahu, and has set lofty alternative energy goals for itself. At the same time, it has been unable to integrate as many solar and wind energy resources as it would like because they remain intermittent and unreliable. The Kahuku project has set out to remedy this problem.

The company is also what the Energy Department is looking for in its loan recipients. Not only will Kahuku create more local jobs close to the wind farm, it is also boosting revenues for other American companies. Each of the 2.5-megawatt wind turbine generators installed at the site was built by Clipper Windpower, based in Carpenteria, Calif.

The development is also unique because it includes a 10-megawatt storage system — ensuring energy consistency — built by Xtreme Power, headquartered in Kyle, Tex. The battery system will allow the utility to serve customers with uninterrupted wind energy regardless of fluctuations in wind speed. Kahuku marks the first time Clipper and Xtreme have paired their technologies.

First Wind Holdings already operates a 30-megawatt wind facility in Kaheawa on Maui, which fulfills 9 percent of the island’s power demand every year.

The corporation struck a power purchase agreement with the Hawaiian Electrical Company in early May, dictating that the company will sell the wind power as it becomes available to the utility at pre-determined prices over the next 20 years. The deal insulates the utility from paying increasingly higher oil costs and hiking rates for its customers accordingly.

Tags: wind

Companies: Clipper Windpower, First Wind Holdings, Kahuku Wind Power, Xtreme Power

Interestingly, residential chargers are where many of Coulomb’s competitors have started out — just look at General Electric’s recent launch of its WattStation charger, capable of juicing up a battery in four to six hours. It looks like Coulomb wants to be able to claim market share on all tiers of this emerging market.

Coulomb’s residential chargers, dubbed (somewhat inelegantly) the CT500 Level II ChargePoint Networked Charging Stations (one pictured above), are smaller than their roadside peers and have an output capacity of 7.2 kilowatts. They’re appropriate for what Coulomb is calling “light commercial use” as well, which probably means stations for fleet vehicles.

Homeowners can buy the new ChargePoint stations via any of the company’s existing regional distribution channels, like Clean Fuel Connection in California, Charge Northwest in the Pacific Northwest and NovaCharge in the south.

The chargers are unique from similar systems on the market because they are networked together. This open platform allows for applications that can facilitate billing, energy management, authentication and demand response services. The idea is to make fueling up batteries as easy as possible by giving customers the information they need.

The CT500 charging stations are compatible with Leviton’s Evr-Green EVSE installation system, which eases the installation of charging stations in any environment.

Coulomb’s growth strategy so far has been to roll out charging stations to one city or region at a time. It just unveiled its networked stations in New York two weeks ago. And at the start of July, it won $3.4 million from the California Energy Commission to install electric vehicle infrastructure throughout the state.

Coulomb’s venture-backed competitor, Better Place, has shifted its focus to battery-switching stations where plug-in car drivers can swap out depleted batteries for full ones. But neither this concept, nor its charging stations have gained much traction.

Companies: Better Place, Coulomb Technologies, General Electric

Carbon sequestration is still a huge question mark. While efforts are currently being made to bury emissions from power plants and factories indefinitely, it’s a solution that can’t work everywhere, and may not last as is. Trapping carbon emissions in the form of usable products may increasingly supplement other carbon capture methods.

The recipients of the stimulus money were chosen in October 2009, as part of a $1.4 billion initiative to productively re-purpose the carbon emissions released by the growing number of fossil fuel power plants equipped with capturing technology.

Here’s a look at the six projects that were selected and what they are working on:

Alcoa ($12 million) — Working to convert carbon dioxide contained in flue gas into a soluble bicarbonate and carbonate that can then be turned into construction fill material, non-toxic fertilizer and soil treatments.

Novomer ($18.4 million) — Developing a process that converts waste CO2 into a diversity of plastic products that can be used in the packaging business, like bottles, films, laminates, coatings, cans, and more.

Touchstone Research Laboratory ($6.2 million) — Pilot-testing an algae-based process that absorbs 60 percent of the carbon dioxide in flue gas released from a coal-fired power plant and then turns it into biofuel and other high-value chemicals.

Phycal ($24.2 million) — Developing a conversion system to turn captured carbon dioxide into liquid biocrude fuel that can then be processed into gasoline additives, biodiesel and jet fuel.

Skyonic Corporation ($25 million) — Developing an alternative to scrubbing technology that turns carbon dioxide into carbonate or bicarbonate solids while also eliminating sulfur oxides, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and other toxic chemicals from plant emissions.

Calera Corporation ($19.9 million) — Based in Los Gatos, Calif., this company is transforming carbon dioxide into carbonates that can be recycled as construction materials, like cement.

You can find more information on each of these projects here.

Tags: carbon capture

Companies: Alcoa, Calera, Novomer, Phycal, Skyonic Corporation, Touchstone Research Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy

The bill’s supporters were aiming for a 17 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. But these figures never gained momentum in the U.S. and failed to impress at last year’s United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where they were viewed as weak and unambitious.

As a result, the Democrats are putting together a watered-down version of the bill that has a greater chance of winning support. Instead of tackling greenhouse gas emissions, the new legislation would increase potential damages for oil companies following spills and would provide more incentives for the development and purchase of natural gas vehicles and energy efficiency products and services.

Compensating for their failure to pass more stringent regulations (sponsored by Democratic Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman with help from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who later withdrew his support), the Dems say this new bill will be finalized and passed in the next two weeks.

Republicans had always been strongly opposed to passing an aggressive climate package. The real problem arose when too many Democrats also defected. The major argument against the original bill was that it would raise energy costs in an already limping economy. There was also concern that it would penalize industrial states that depend on fossil fuel sources of energy. Several of the Democrats hailing from these regions decided to cross party lines.

Today’s dissolution of the holistic climate bill, which made its debut in the Senate on May 12, isn’t exactly a surprise, even though a similar package passed in the House of Representatives last June. If it had passed in the Senate, the Obama administration would have officially won on its three top priorities: health care, financial reform and the climate. Republicans weren’t about to let that happen during the lead up to midterm elections in November.

Incidentally, the Chinese government announced today that it will be establishing a carbon cap-and-trade system during the next five years to slash its emissions.

Tags: climate bill

An interdisciplinary effort spanning the California Institute of Technology and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Hub will work on artificially simulating photosynthetic processes, which can be harnessed to produce innovative sources of energy, the Department says. The ultimate goal is to commercialize resulting technology.

Several other companies have made a name for themselves trying to achieve similar feats. Venture-backed operations like Joule Unlimited are trying to derive fuels from chemical processes that combine sunlight, water and carbon dioxide — usually CO2 emissions from power plants and other sources of greenhouse gases.

Being able to produce fuel this cleanly would be game changing. So many biofuel startups and even oil and gas giants are chasing the same goal: to produce clean, affordable fuel at scale that could replace gasoline in existing automotive and jet engines. Companies like Coskata, Codexis and LS9 are all engineering microorganisms and catalysts to convert feedstocks ranging from corn to municipal waste into usable fuel. But so far, none of thee businesses have been able to gain serious traction.

There is room in the market for a bold new idea in this arena. Making fuel out of sunlight, CO2 and water would avoid some of the major hurdles — including money, time and scale — that have prevented many of the other ongoing fuel projects and companies from achieving broader adoption.

The newly-funded center, to be called the Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub, is one of three such projects to get funding from the federal government this year. One of the other hubs focuses on simulating nuclear reactor technology.

Companies: Codexis, Coskata, Joule Unlimited, Ls9

The semiconductor company was hoping to become a major force in the rapidly growing solar market, making several key acquisitions and building major manufacturing facilities, to give it a leading edge.

It also chose a fairly unique technology: amorphous silicon, thin-film solar panels, which were supposed to lower costs by reducing the need for then-pricey silicon. SunFab was supposed to be an innovative turn-key solution for solar panel makers, allowing them to quickly set up and start churning out thin-film solar products.

But since 2006, when the company really got the ball rolling on its SunFab equipment line, the price of silicon has dropped significantly, making thin-film a less compelling proposition. Today, amorphous panel products cost about 30 percent more than its peers’.

In the meantime, the company has seen its crystalline silicon panel and light-emitting diode businesses grow. As VentureBeat reported last month, following a tour of the SunPower facility in Richmond, Calif., crystalline silicon seems to have thin-film on the ropes. Not only is it much more efficient, and more widely adopted, but it’s starting to be cheaper too.

This is bad news for companies like First Solar and of course NanoSolar, which have both invested heavily in thin-film technology. Applied’s decision to migrate away from amorphous panels is yet another blow, a move that could raise the alarm among investors looking for smart, more capital-efficient investments in solar.

Apparently, when rumors first started swirling that Applied would be shrinking its focus on SunFab, it saw a bounce in its stock price — it confirmed the shift in March.

In April, two of its customers canceled their relationships with the company. Signet Solar withdrew plans to build an amorphous solar panel plant in New Mexico before declaring insolvency in June, and SunFilm filed for bankruptcy (two more signs that thin-film is on its way out).

Applied Materials isn’t just getting rid of SunFab, it’s planning to overhaul its approach to solar, which could cost as much as $425 million — even though axing its thin-film equipment strategy should save an estimated $100 million.

The semiconductor giant says that it will still be providing some equipment for thin-film production but that it’s focus will mostly be on tools to make silicon wafers and cells.

Applied Materials (AMAT) saw a 1.13 percent drop in its stock price today, closing at $12.20 a share.

Tags: Solar, thin-film

Companies: Applied Materials, NanoSolar, SunPower

This new capacity, composed of four separate projects, will be added to existing installations at the Center (150 megawatts-worth of turbines built by General Electric), which is expected to reach 3,000 megawatts — the largest amount produced at any one wind facility in the U.S. Terra-Gen will be buying 190 new turbines from Vestas-American Wind Technology.

Terra-Gen already has a power purchase agreement in line for the Alta Wind Energy Center, with Southern California Edison pledging to feed the power generated into its grid. The utility made the deal in 2006 to buy up to 1,550 megawatts of capacity provided. Just 720 megawatts of this power will increase California’s wind generation by more than 25 percent.

The new capital is a hodge-podge, including $580 million in pass-through certificates, a $499 million bridge loan, and $127 million in ancillary credit facilities.

The four new projects are being continuously financed by Citibank as part of a leveraged lease. Basically, the bank has committed to purchasing the products when they begin their commercial operations and leasing them back to Terra-Gen. This sort of deal is the first of its kind in the wind energy industry, according to the company.

Altogether, the five wind farms making up the Alta Center will create 1,500 domestic manufacturing, construction, operation and maintenance jobs and will infuse the local economy with an estimated $600 million. The four new farms are expected to break ground immediately and come online within the first two quarters of 2011.

Based in New York, Terra-Gen has taken funds from ArcLight Capital Partners and Global Infrastructure Partners. It says it already has 21 renewable energy projects — including solar and geothermal developments — currently operating across six states, with 5,000 megawatts-worth of projects still in its pipeline.

Tags: wind

Companies: Southern California Edison, Terra-Gen Power

The blog’s goal is to provide a central location for people to hear from leaders working on different projects across the department. Chu and his cohorts have been very actively funneling millions of dollars into a wide range of technologies — from solar and wind to smart grid, geothermal, biofuels and more. But a lot of these projects are highly technical and their immediate benefit may not be obvious. The blog will play a role in clarifying where money is going and why, and how it could eventually alter the lives of average people.

“While the act of starting a blog is hardly novel, it is a first for us and part of our commitment to achieving the level of transparency, engagement and accessibility that you should expect from your government,” Chu writes in his first post.

Building on this goal, the Energy Department has also launched new presences on Facebook and Twitter (@energy). Already, it has been active on YouTube and Flickr, and Chu himself has been providing updates via his personal Facebook page. But today’s developments should extend its reach even further.

The Department has used Facebook and Twitter to field questions from the general public for David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs, and to provide updates from the Clean Energy Ministerial, a major meeting of energy leaders around the world to discuss renewables and other clean technologies.

Since launching early Tuesday morning, the Energy Blog has also reported on the Clean Energy Education and Empowerment “C-3E” Women’s Initiative designed to encourage more young women to study the science and engineering that could lead to future clean energy breakthroughs. The post was authored by Energy Undersecretary Kristina Johnson, who wrote from her own experience as a woman inspired to work in energy innovation.

The Department of Energy churns out press releases on its activities all the time. Today, for example, it announced $30 million more in funding to forge partnerships to make homes more energy efficient. The Blog may discuss the impacts of these news items, but will focus more on incremental developments, and on calling attention to programs, news, and projects that might interest people.

Tags: energy

Companies: U.S. Department of Energy

Called the 4Store application marketplace, the Flash-based platform is the first app catalog of its kind not to be tied to mobile phones and to center around devices, appliances and systems in the home. The company says it hopes developers will bring the expertise and ideas they’ve cultivated working on social networking, informational and entertainment apps for phones to the home arena.

The company has provided Control4 software development kits to developers so they can create applications that make homes smarter, and that give consumers more control over their media centers, lighting, heating and air conditioning, security and surveillance, and appliance energy consumption.

For example, Control4 customers could potentially use these apps to schedule when to water their lawns, when their refrigerators should make ice, at what temperature to switch on air conditioning or heating systems, and more. The underpinning idea is to help customers conserve energy without compromising their comfort.

To encourage developers to take a close look at the platform, Control4 is running a contest for the Flash development community, offering $5,000 for the most popular application and $5,000 in Control4 products for the most 4Store applications submitted between July 1 and August 31.

Based in Salt Lake City, Control4 has to date raised more than $78 million from Frazier Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, vSpring Capital and Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, among others.

Tags: energy efficiency, Smart Grid

Companies: Control4

Oracle delved deep into the smart grid software space last year, when it launched an end-to-end solution for utilities integrating smart grid systems into their offerings. This bundle includes Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing. Essentially, it offers software to help utilities parse all the data flowing in from smart meters into actionable information, and to help them more efficiently serve their customers.

Grid Net will be selling these products to complement its own software offerings: the PolicyNet SmartGrid Network Management System and Smart Network Operating System. Basically, it has landed a plum alliance with this Oracle deal, buddying up with one of the companies that has been serving utilities for years.

That said, Grid Net is not the only firm Oracle has formed this kind of relationship with. It is also working with other smart grid software providers eMeter and AMX International, as well as smart meter builder Sensus.

Software is an increasingly vital component of the electrical grid. Updating hardware, like meters, substations and the like only happens once every couple of decades. Now that many of these have been revamped with modern technology, software can be used to update them in the interim.

The deal between Grid Net and Oracle is advantageous for both parties for several reasons. It will allow Grid Net to quickly expand and diversify its relationships in the utility industry and to move outward from its core WiMAX strategy before it gets pigeonholed. It will also give Oracle another valuable startup partner in providing utilities with all the tools they need to further their smart grid strategies.

Grid Net has been on a roll lately, recruiting its new chief strategy officer, Andres Carvallo, fresh off a successful run at Austin Energy, one of the first utilities in the U.S. to deploy smart meters. In March, Cisco Systems took a large stake in the company, taking an obvious interest in its WiMAX technology.

Based in San Francisco, Grid Net has raised several rounds of funding from Intel Capital, GE Capital, Catamount Ventures, and Braemar Energy Ventures.

Tags: Smart Grid

Companies: Grid Net, Oracle

At this point we endow the idea with little more than wishful speculation, but since it’s an attractive fantasy, we’ll indulge ourselves a bit.

Inside Line reports than an unnamed source at Nissan has tipped them on an upcoming EV sports car with LEAF technology to follow the Infiniti-badged luxury variant of the standard LEAF. They even go so far as to christen the car, somewhat awkwardly, as potentially the “370Z-E.” Let’s hope that name doesn’t stick.

Another possibility is a version of the Essence Concept (pictured above) from the 2009 Geneva Motor Show, though saddling that car’s fantastic design and muscular yet svelte proportions with LEAF-type power would be a travesty, to say the least. As shown in concept form, the Essence is a 592-horsepower gasoline-electric hybrid. The LEAF, on the other hand, is powered by a battery pack and electric motors good for about 107 horsepower. That’s a difference of about 550 percent, meaning even using significantly up-rated LEAF technology isn’t likely to deliver the goods we’d expect from the Essence.

If Nissan does build an electric sports car, we’d expect it to show up with its own badge, as it will be something unlike any version of their current lineup, and they’ll want it to stand out instead of getting lost in the crowd. But that’s a big if.

Written by Nelson Ireson, this post originally appeared on MotorAuthority, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Companies: Nissan

Today, the company announced that it will have both a plug-in hybrid and an all-electric model on the market in the U.S. and Japan by 2012 — the first time the company has committed to green vehicles since it scrapped its electric Honda EV Plus more than 10 years ago.

The new strategy will progress in phases. By the end of this year, and throughout 2011, the company will be running a demonstration program for battery-powered vehicles, allowing them to be tested by an array of partners, including Stanford University, Google and the city of Torrance, Calif.

Honda remained mum on exactly what its all-electric vehicle will look like, or whether it will be a conversion of one of the company’s current models. AllCarsElectric, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners, predicts that it will probably be a real-word version of Honda’s EV-N concept car (pictured above), which made its debut at the Tokyo Motor Show last October.

The company also showed off plans for its Civic Hybrid for the first time today. The car will run off a lithium-ion battery built by Honda’s joint venture with GS Yuasa, called Blue Energy, which already has a manufacturing facility up and running. Batteries for the Civic Hybrid will start rolling off the assembly line before the end of 2012, the company said.

On top of this, Honda said it will expand its current portfolio of hybrid vehicles, which includes the Insight and CR-Z, to include the Fit Hybrid — ready to be launched in Japan this fall. All of these models fall into the category of “mild” or “gasoline-electric” hybrids, which don’t have a pure-electric mode. Rather, they use a small, high-voltage battery pack to extend the range of a fully-functioning internal combustion engine.

Honda has been hedging its bets on the new electric vehicle industry for a while now. As Earth2Tech points out, as recent as May, the company’s leadership was vocal about lacking confidence in the market considering the level of technology available, short driving ranges, and high prices.

Clearly, its attitude has shifted, and faster than predicted. No doubt, the rapid pace of EV and plug-in development at chief competitors is a motivating factor. General Motors and Nissan seem to be way out ahead of the pack, launching their cars by the end of the year with price tags that most middle-class consumers can afford. And just last week, Toyota announced that it will be building a new line of all-electric RAV-4 SUVs in tandem with Tesla Motors by 2012 too. Honda is still at risk of falling too far behind to compete in what will still be a small market for years to come — unless it can come out with truly unique technology.

Previously, the company has favored hydrogen fuel-cells over electricity as the superior direction for next-generation transportation. But development in that area is slow, hardly anyone is working on infrastructure for fuel-cell vehicles, and the technology remains prohibitively expensive.

Honda CEO Takanobu Ito said the new plug-in strategy is also being accelerated due to policy changes in the U.S., especially California’s new zero-emission mandate, which requires the world’s largest automakers to build a total of 7,500 electric or fuel-cell vehicles and 60,000 plug-in hybrids between 2012 and 2014. Honda has been buying zero emission vehicle credits from Tesla Motors in order to comply with regulations and continue selling cars in the state.

(Notably, Tesla has been relying on sales of zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) credits to supplement its revenue, especially considering slow sales of its Roadster and its lack of new product launches in the next two years. But with major automakers starting to produce their own green cars, reducing the demand for credits, Tesla may see these sales dwindle.)

To supplement its green car strategy, Honda said it will be building a new motorcycle factory in Indonesia next year and debuting its new EV-neo electric scooter in Japan in December, followed by another electric bicycle in China next year.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: General Motors, Honda, Nissan, Tesla Motors, Toyota

The company made the purchase via its relatively new Google Energy unit — an entity that won the rights to buy and sell energy just like a utility from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in February.

This isn’t the first time Google has worked with NextEra. The search giant has already invested $38.8 million in two wind farms — pumping out 169.5 megawatts total — developed by NextEra in North Dakota. But starting on July 30, Google will be buying 114-megawatts of power from NextEra’s farm in Iowa at a flat, undisclosed rate.

Reuters initially reported that Google was buying the power to run several of its data centers, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. That’s not to say that renewable energy, derived either from wind or solar, won’t eventually be used to power up data centers, or even some of its campuses, just not right now.

When Google Energy was first formed in December, speculation swirled that the company planned to launch its own utility to compete with the likes of Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. But the company fended off these guesses, saying only that it wanted the ability to buy and sell a greater amount of renewable energy on the wholesale market — a key pillar in its plan to achieve carbon neutrality.

The deal with NextEra is consistent with this mission, and there have been no signs of Google Energy expanding its purview beyond this type of transaction. In addition to expanding its green portfolio, the deal will also allow Google to purchase energy over 20 years at the same rate — insulating itself from inevitable price hikes.

Google has several other energy-related projects ongoing. Google PowerMeter, its consumer-facing system for tracking energy use and costs, just lost its leader, Ed Lu, but may be switching course when a replacement takes the helm. Google Ventures and philanthropic arm Google.org have also funneled millions into companies developing new solar, wind, geothermal and smart grid technologies.

Several of the company’s higher-profile green investments include grid communications firm Silver Spring Networks, solar thermal developers BrightSource Energy and eSolar, and innovative electric vehicle company V-Vehicle.

Tags: wind

Companies: Google, NextEra Energy Resources

Spotting this swelling interest, Pike Research released a report predicting that there will be 31.8 million smart meters worldwide by 2016, up from the 5.2 million meters already in place in 2009. It also said that 31 percent of all new water meters delivered will be digital, allowing for two-way communication between meters, utilities and even consumers.

Like businesses and utilities already jumping into the smart water movement, Pike sees water shortages as a prime motivator for accelerated innovation. According to its research, about 50 percent of the world’s population will be impacted by water shortages by 2030, and in the U.S. alone, 36 states will experience drought by 2013.

With water supplies drying up, utilities are moving fast to encourage conservation and eliminate systemic problems. The more water that gets to their customers, the more money they make. All of a sudden, leaks and customary losses are becoming less and less acceptable.

IBM and other companies are developing elaborate sensor systems to help remedy these problems. Last November, the computing giant launched smart water tools with three utilities. These sensor networks detect waste and contamination along distributions systems. If they can justify their cost with savings, they will no doubt catch on elsewhere.

That said, there are major challenges standing between smart water meters and wide adoption. Municipal water boards and utilities are notoriously slow moving, unlikely to adopt new technologies unless they are monetarily advantageous or necessary to compete. Smart water monitoring will require a significant investment, so the transition may not be compelling for several more years.

Tags: water

Companies: IBM, Pike Research

According to the companies, two prototypes already exist, and the car could be ready for mass production as soon as 2012 — tying Tesla’s all-electric sedan, the Model S, to market. The new RAV4 will be distributed and sold by Toyota, but Tesla will be providing the secret sauce: its electric powertrain, including the battery pack.

In addition to the tandem-produced car, the formal deal between the two companies includes the joint development of automotive components, manufacturing processes and engineering systems. Most of this will be played out at the 379-acre former-NUMMI automotive plant in Fremont, Calif., which Tesla bought for $42 million at the same time it announced its partnership with Toyota.

For a while, there was doubt that a Toyota-Tesla car was even on the horizon. Shortly after the agreement was announced in May, it became clear that there was no official deal between the two companies to jointly produce a vehicle. Toyota said it would pump $50 million into Tesla upon its IPO (acquiring a 3 percent stake), but that was it. Now, after Tesla’s lucrative public sale, the partnership is forging ahead.

The original RAV4 (pictured above) is an older Toyota model that launched in 2003 and saw lackluster sales. It is one of two electric prototypes Tesla says it will be co-developing with Toyota — the other will be based on Toyota’s Lexus RX, according to an inside source. The plan is to first develop a fleet of the cars within the next year for testing before taking them to market. That said, there’s no guarantee they will actually make it into showrooms, at least yet.

The same source says that Toyota may be working independently on an all-electric version of its Corolla, which isn’t as well suited to Tesla’s powertrain systems, particularly the weight of the battery packs involved.

[Update: Referring back to the official press release, a Tesla spokesperson said that the two companies' current plans are limited to the RAV4.]

The cars Toyota and Tesla are partnering on are expected to have a driving range of at least 150 miles on a single charge, and cost around $40,000 — competitive with Tesla’s forthcoming Model S, but not so competitive with the cheaper Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf, both of which are coming out later this year and slated to cost around $30,000 before rebates.

If both cars do become a reality, Tesla won’t have to worry about taking advantage of the Fremont factory’s capacity. Before the official deal to build cars together, analysts wondered whether the electric car maker would be able to afford the facility — capable of churning out 500,000 cars a year — especially with its plans to make only 20,000 Model S sedans there a year. Now this future is starting to look more certain.

The development seems to have had an impact on both companies’ stock prices. Tesla (TSLA) jumped 6.15 percent today to close at $21.91 a share, rising above its initial public offering price of $19, and coming almost level with its impressive $23.89 first-day close. The recent news clearly improved investor confidence.

Toyota’s (TM) share price eked up 0.66 percent to $71.22 today.

Also today, Tesla announced that it has expanded its Roadster’s footprint, delivering units to Japan, Hong Kong, Poland, Turkey and Canada. About 1,200 of the cars have been sold in 28 countries to date.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: General Motors, Nissan, Tesla Motors, Toyota

As we pointed out at the time, they were basing that projection on a proposed formula for fuel usage patterns that made a lot of assumptions about the driving cycles that would be used.

Frankly, we think the whole exercise sowed confusion. But it sure got the Volt a lot of attention for awhile. Which was, clearly, the goal.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency has decided not to use the formula GM based its 230-mpg number on.

The agency is still trying to work out how to provide consumers with useful, understandable information on window stickers to go into new cars with blended powertrains, which may operate sometimes on stored electricity and other times using a gasoline engine.

That issue becomes increasingly urgent as the 2011 Volt nears dealerships — the first ones will arrive in November or December — with other range-extended electric cars (e.g. the 2011 Fisker Karma) and plug-in hybrids (e.g. the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid) close behind.

It’s a challenging topic, GM admits, meaning that talks among car makers and regulators are likely to continue to the last possible minute.

As we’ve also noted before, Miles Per Gallon is a bad way to measure fuel use. It’s not consumption — how much fuel you use to go a set distance — which is a linear scale. Instead, MPG is a non-linear scale that confuses people.

While the National Research Council agrees, that topic tends to generates lots of rants from readers who either don’t read the full article or think we’re proposing that cars use more fuel. Or something. So we’re just going to ignore it for now.

As for the 2011 Volt’s “gas mileage”? Stay tuned.

Written by John Voelcker, this post originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: General Motors

The announcement sets to rest potential worries that Volt owners might be stuck having to replace an expensive, high-voltage battery pack costing thousands of dollars just a few years down the road.

The warranty matches the length of time that all components affecting the car’s emissions must be free of owner maintenance, as per NHTSA regulations. It rises to 10 years or 150,000 miles in the several states that have adopted California’s stricter emissions limits.

While GM has not announced the replacement cost of the 2011 Volt’s 16-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, the 300-pound, T-shaped pack is widely expected to cost GM several thousand dollars to build.

Replacement parts costs are usually twice the manufacturer’s cost, or more. The rest of the 2011 Volt carries GM’s usual warranties of 5 years/100,000 miles on other powertrain elements (essentially the engine) and 3 years/36,000 miles on the rest of the vehicle.

The announcement came during a media event at the Brownstown Township plant where GM assembles the battery packs, using cells manufactured in South Korea by LG Chem.  Manufacturing of pre-production Volts in Detroit’s Hamtramck plant began on March 31.

The plug-in 2011 Chevrolet Volt, as GM hopes you know by now, travels up to 40 miles on battery power alone. After that, its 1.4-liter gasoline engine switches on to run a generator that provides electric power to the motor that drives the front wheels.

That “range-extending” engine differentiates the Chevy Volt from the other electric vehicle launching for 2011, the Nissan Leaf. The pure battery electric Leaf has an electric range of up to 100 miles, but no gasoline range extender.

To highlight the Volt’s unlimited travel and lack of range anxiety, GM drove a 2011 Volt from Austin, Texas, to New York City over the Fourth of July weekend. The so-called “Freedom Drive” covered 1,776 miles on a mix of grid power and engine-generated electricity.

GM has not yet priced the 2011 Volt, though now-retired GM executive Bob Lutz said two years ago that he expected the price to be around $40,000. Early Volt buyers are eligible for a $7,500 Federal tax credit and various state incentives as well.

Written by John Voelcker, this post originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: General Motors

California State Attorney General Jerry Brown has filed a lawsuit against controversial mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, for opting out of a program that encourages residential solar installations.

The initiative, called Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, lets local governments loan money to homeowners through property-tax assessments so that they can afford to install solar panels and energy-efficient heating systems. Local governments raise the money by selling municipal bonds, and are repaid by homeowners over the next 15 to 20 years.

Because property-tax assessments are required to be paid back before mortgage investors in the event of foreclosure, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their peers are up in arms. Their regulator, the FHFA, says that PACE does not ensure that homeowners have enough money to repay all their debts, leaving them dangerously vulnerable.

As a result, both mortgage giants have said they will not accept loans aided by PACE, even though the program has already won broad federal support and generous stimulus funding.

Brown, the Democratic nominee for California governor, says he filed the lawsuit so that the mortgage companies don’t get away with killing a program that could improve the state’s environment, boost its renewable energy generation, and create thousands of new jobs. His supporters say they will push for federal legislation to ensure PACE’s future.

If California wins the suit against Fannie and Freddie, both companies will be required to recognize PACE loans.

Tags: PACE, Solar

Companies: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

Trilliant provides mesh networking equipment that allows smart meters to communicate wirelessly with utilities and, increasingly, consumer-facing energy monitors. Its technology can beam this data over long distances and within local and even home-area networks, making it more versatile than what many of its competitors are offering.

The recent funding stands out for two reasons. First, it’s a massive amount for a company that has been relatively capital efficient so far. It already has a solid client base in the U.S., including Duke Energy, San Diego Gas & Electric and Union Gas. So $106 million should go a long way toward establishing footholds in other parts of the world — particularly Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, according to CEO Andy White.

Second, the capital came from a flock of prestigious investors, including General Electric and ABB, VantagePoint Venture Partners and Investor Growth Capital, among others. The new alliances with GE and utility equipment maker ABB will no doubt grease the wheels for further expansion.

Coinciding with the funding, Trilliant has also brought a new customer into its fold: Central Maine Power. The utility, distinguished by the rough and rural region it serves, will be using Trilliant’s SecureMesh communications network. If its offerings can work there, they can work anywhere, says Eric Miller, senior vice president of solutions. The Maine deal should help further prove out its technology.

The money, combined with powerful partners, may be enough to see Trilliant through to an IPO, according to Miller, who made it sound like such a move could happen in the next two or so years. But the company is far from alone in this ambition.

Trilliant has some tough competition to face — most formidably from Silver Spring Networks, which uses a radio network protocol very similar to Trilliant’s. That company, armed with more than $200 million in capital, partnerships with the likes of Pacific Gas & Electric, and clear intentions to IPO (it retained underwriters for a filing earlier this year), has positioned itself as the market leader. It’s unclear whether there will be demand for both companies on the public markets.

And Silver Spring isn’t the only play Trilliant needs to worry about. There are several other companies pursuing different protocols that accomplish the same thing. SmartSynch, for example, is relying on cellular and public networks for data transmission, while Grid Net is trumping up WiMax as the ultimate solution for long-distance data exchanges. If these ideas start to gain traction, then interest might migrate away from proprietary radio networks.

Still, Miller and CEO Andrew White are confident that Trilliant’s products are different enough to win over the market. Perhaps most convincing, they are lower-cost than many rivals’ products, which has helped the company win contracts with big utilities like British Gas, E.ON U.S. and Hydro One, as well as smaller municipal utilities.

Its multi-tiered solution is also special. Its SecureMesh networks can alternate between radio frequencies to adjust to different transmission distances, while keeping data secure. This was made possible by Trilliant’s acquisition last year of SkyPilot, which added in long-distance capabilities. Now its networks can serve major regions, as well as neighborhoods and extremely local areas.

“We are going to be expanding into each one of these areas,” says White. “Expanding our offerings for the wide-area and in-home area is underway, and that marketplace is just getting started.”

Going global should also help Trilliant maintain an edge over some of its competitors who have been bound to the domestic market, or only experimenting in one or two other countries. And now it has the cash reserves to make this happen.

It previously raised $40 million from MissionPoint Capital and Zouk Ventures in 2008. Both of those firms also joined the recent round.

Tags: Smart Grid

Companies: ABB, General Electric, Investor Growth Capital, MissionPoint Capital, Trilliant, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Zouk Ventures

Right now, Calisolar is churning out about 60 megawatts-worth of solar wafers and cells at its manufacturing facility in Sunnyvale, Calif. Adams says the $15 million, which is dwarfed by prior fund raises, won’t be enough to reach the company’s goal, but it should get it on its way. Calisolar is at a point where it might start considering an IPO to raise the remaining financing, he said, but the company isn’t disclosing how much more is needed.

Calisolar last raised funds in February, bringing in $23.5 million in equity linked to its acquisition of 6N Silicon, one of its primary material suppliers. Both companies’ investors contributed to that round.

In addition to increasing its output, the company hopes to continually bring down prices of solar modules, making solar energy more cost competitive with fossil-fuel sources. It accomplishes this by purifying its silicon in a liquid state, which requires far less energy and capital equipment. A small fraction of the business is involved in recycling low-cost scrap silicon as well.

Other companies like First Solar and Nanosolar are trying to reduce prices by slashing the amount of silicon needed — developing thin-film modules.

Calisolar has now raised about $186 million in capital since its inception in 2006. It is consistently backed by Advanced Technology Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Hudson Clean Energy Partners. It also benefited from a $51.6 million tax credit via the federal stimulus package. Its purchase of 6N brought investors Good Energies, Ventures West and Yaletown Ventures into its fold.

Right now, Calisolar employs about 300 people, but it’s bringing new staff on every week. Coinciding with the fund raise, the company appointed John Correnti as its new chairman of the board and Terry Jester as its executive vice president of operations.

Tags: Solar

Companies: calisolar

Today, it finally staked a claim in solar — the fastest growing segment for green investment — by leading a $21.5 million fifth round of funding for solar panel financing firm SolarCity.

Essentially, the company is the solar industry’s middleman, making rooftop solar systems more affordable for both residential and commercial consumers. It doesn’t make the solar panels, but it installs them, maintains them and retains ownership of them, selling the power generated back to its customers.

This allows the company to offer generous financing deals: no upfront costs for installation, and only monthly lease and electricity payments over the course of the panels’ lives. This brings the total cost of installing a solar system down from as high as $25,000 to the low four figures.

This business model isn’t too much of a departure for Mayfield. It may be new to solar, but SolarCity still falls neatly into the capital-efficient category, and it’s already profitable, making a quick, lucrative exit all the more likely.

“The way Mayfield sees the solar ecosystem, too much money has gone into early-stage companies developing the next best solar cell,” says Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield. “We decided to invest downstream, with a company that already has customers and is science agnostic.”

SolarCity says it will use its new funding (which it didn’t expect to raise), to accelerate its geographical expansion in the U.S. (it’s only operating in five states today) and to fuel its acquisition strategy. Already this year, the company bought up the assets of Building Solutions, maker of software used to evaluate building energy efficiency.

Partnerships are also playing a key role in SolarCity’s expansion. In March, the company started offering its panel installation services through 92 Home Depot locations — a tandem program that may soon go national, raising visibility of the SolarCity brand.

The most important partnership in the company’s arsenal is with Pacific Gas & Electric, which is funneling $60 million in tax equity into the company to install about 1,000 solar systems on roofs in its coverage area.

PG&E is the first utility to turn to tax equity to fund alternative energy projects. Basically, it set up a new entity called Pacific Venture Capital to invest the money, which will produce returns in the form of clean energy tax credits. Last month it used the same tactic to invest $100 million in SolarCity’s prime competitor SunRun for the installation of 3,500 rooftop systems.

SunRun, which provides similar installation and financing services for residential customers, is a year younger than SolarCity, but already claims to have the bulk of the existing market share. Chaddha says that this isn’t the case if you look at actual deployments instead of the companies’ pipelines. On top of that, SolarCity was the first to pioneer a tax equity deal with PG&E, opening up new doors in the market.

But that’s not the biggest difference between the two companies. While SunRun hands out a lot of the installation and maintenance work to local contractors, everyone involved in SolarCity systems actually works for the company — making it a tighter-run, vertically integrated operation, Chaddha says.

“Our feeling is, SolarCity is a one-stop shop for all of our customers’ solar needs,” he says, giving Apple as an example of how vertically integrated companies have better success. “If you look at the other companies, one person does the panels, another does the installation, someone else follows up. We want to do it all. We want there to be one company responsible for providing quality service and controlling the experience.”

Still, even if SolarCity is in the lead (its brand recognition is boosted by listing Tesla Motors’ CEO Elon Musk as its chairman), SunRun is growing big in its review mirror and is not to be discounted. Lately, the company is pouring more resources into developing software to help installers that could give it an edge going forward.

In the meantime, neither company is hurting for cash. SunRun has raised more than $275 million, including $90 million in tax equity from U.S. Bancorp, and counts Foundation Capital, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital among its investors.

SolarCity’s recent round of funding included Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DBL Investors and Generation Capital — boosting its total raised to around $169 million. Private share trading marketplace SharesPost pegs its valuation somewhere between $375 million and $443.8 million.

Mayfield’s other green investments include cPower, a company that manages energy demand and supply issues for utilities; LatticePower, which makes materials for LED manufacturing; and Inphi, a maker of high-speed electronic components that aid in energy efficiency.

Tags: Solar

Companies: Dbl Investors, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Generation Capital, Mayfield Fund, SolarCity, Sunrun

One of the hottest topics in energy independence is power grid technology, which enables consumers to save energy and money by powering homes and buildings in a smart and more efficient way. In fact, grid technologies have the potential to deliver a 10 percent savings on power bills – that equates to $36 billion a year! And the savings for Mother Earth are immeasurable.

Forward-thinkers who aspire to effect change with an eco-friendly, money-saving idea: Now’s your time to – literally – get on the grid. Thanks to the GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid, you can put some serious time into your ideas to protect your own wallet and help millions of others do the same, while making a huge environmental impact.

This sponsored post is brought to you by GE. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. GE had no involvement in the content of this or other posts.

Present your idea for integrating renewable energy, developing an intelligent monitoring system for electricity, or reducing the power demand of appliances and vie for $200 million in investments from GE and its partners. The winning innovations may be brought to life through a GE research center fellowship, a cash grant, an equity investment, and/or a cooperative agreement to develop a proposed product or technology.

If you think you have an idea that will change the way society relies on energy, visit the ecomagination Challenge by September 30, 2010, for the rules and to complete the online submission form. Sometimes trailblazing and innovation only require opportunity as the last ingredient to make a new idea come to life. Go ahead and forge your path on the grid!

Tags: contest, power grid, renewable energy, Smart Grid

Companies: GE

However, to this day we are yet to see anything come up to replace the existing four-stroke engine design currently found in most cars (not including the newer generation of hybrids and all-electrics). Most of these ‘alternative’ designs usually vanish as quickly as they appear but one company, America’s own EcoMotors International, has gained the spotlight following the announcement it has received $23.5 million in funding from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Vinod Khosla.

The funding is to be used to further develop a new engine design called the Opposed Piston Opposed Cylinder, or OPOC for short. According to EcoMotors, based in suburban Detroit, the new OPOC engines feature 50 percent fewer parts than regular engines, while also being 50 percent more fuel efficient. Everyone knows that a lot of energy in internal combustion engines is wasted due to frictional losses, and having 50 percent fewer parts should go a long way to remedying this issue.

But that’s only part of the story–the OPOC engine also features a two-stroke design. The benefit here is that a two-stroke engine delivers a power pulse with every revolution of the crankshaft, as opposed to the four-stroke engine which fires each cylinder on every other revolution.

Previous two-stroke designs were quickly banished as emissions standards started to get tougher. The design is such that unburned fuel and lubricating oils are released through the exhaust, causing emissions to be much higher. However, EcoMotors believes its design has overcome this challenge.

Its engine also generates one power stroke per crank revolution per cylinder. It comprises two opposing cylinders per module, with a crankshaft between them, and each cylinder has two pistons moving in opposite directions. This innovative design configuration eliminates the cylinder-head and valve-train components of conventional engines, offering an efficient, compact and simple core engine structure. The design also allows for multiple modules to be linked for more powerful applications.

The company is now working on the sixth generation of the OPOC engine design and eventually hopes to see it commercialized for use in cars, light trucks, commercial vehicles, aerospace, marine, agriculture, auxiliary power units, generators, etc.–essentially, anywhere conventional gas or diesel power is currently utilized.

Interestingly, the OPOC engine design was conceived by Peter Hofbauer, the former Volkswagen powertrain engineer that designed the German automaker’s first high speed diesel engine. Additionally, EcoMotors’ CEO, Don Runkle, is a former employee of General Motors and one of the key men behind the EV1 all-electric car.

Written by Viknesh Vijayenthiran, this post originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: Ecomotors

The company is partnering with venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital and RockPort Capital to host the smart grid competition. All of these firms have been eying the smart grid as a rich category for investment.

GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt predicts the grid innovation market will swell to $1.5 billion in as little as two years and will become 10 times as big over the next two decades. GE’s goal will be to dominate at least 50 percent of this market worldwide.

One of the major facets of the new smart grid is how it will handle an increasing number of electric vehicles. Envisioning a future where many consumers come home and plug in their cars at the end of the day, GE has launched a charging device called the WattStation that can fill up a car battery in four to six hours (pictured above). The company says the charger will hit the market by the end of the year.

The device, clearly intended for home use, is indicative of the growing attention being paid to electric transportation infrastructure. While General Motors, Nissan, Fisker Automotive and others are gearing up to launch their plug-in vehicles in the next several months, the infrastructure needed to charge their batteries and extend their driving ranges is still lacking.

Venture-backed companies like Coulomb Technologies and Better Place have jumped on the problem early — rolling out roadside-charging and battery-switching stations — but will probably not be enough to provide a fast, scalable solution. There’s a big opportunity here for major corporations, like GE, that have the capital to deploy many charging sites at once, while also investing in further R&D to reduce charging times.

In addition to the EV charging device, GE used today’s announcement to promote its home energy management system, dubbed Nucleus (pictured right). This is another device that will allow all GE smart appliances to beam their energy consumption information to a central dashboard or web site.

The idea is for consumers to be able to plug in the device and have it work immediately without any fuss or elaborate setup necessary. Immelt says that early testing of the system indicates that consumers, when armed with the knowledge of exactly how much energy they are using, generally cut their consumption by about a tenth.

Tags: Smart Grid

Companies: Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, General Electric, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Rockport Capital

That doesn’t mean, however, that sometimes their data isn’t misleading. It’s important to keep context in mind, and not miss the forest for the trees.

What’s got us thinking this way is a blog post from Pike Research, which neatly analyzed how much money average consumers in different countries could save by driving a plug-in vehicle versus a gasoline one.

Their data puts the poor old U.S. consumer pretty much at the bottom of the heap.

Buyers in European countries that tax gasoline heavily save far more ($2,000 in Norway, $1,735 in Great Britain and France) than U.S. buyers ($813), even though we’re replacing far less fuel-efficient vehicles. Only South Africans save as little as we do.

Pike notes that it believes “sales of EVs will grow relatively quickly,” but that plug-in sales would probably grow faster if the U.S. didn’t have such cheap gasoline (relative to other countries).

The missing context, though, is that U.S. buyers of plug-ins like the 2011 Chevrolet Volt and 2011 Nissan Leaf most likely won’t make their decision because they’ll save money over the course of their ownership.

Gasoline is cheap–as Pike points out–and for many years, electric cars will largely be bought by wealthier consumers who don’t need the marginal savings.

If we use the past decade of hybrid-electric vehicle sales in the U.S. as a model, the decision to buy a car with high fuel efficiency often has little or nothing to do with saving money for most buyers.

Instead, a survey showed, most Toyota Prius buyers did so not because they wanted to save money, but because they wanted to make a statement about what kind of a person they were.

So U.S. buyers won’t save as much money driving on grid power as Norwegians. Big deal. It’s true, but it’s also irrelevant to the sales prospects for electric vehicles in this country until at least 2015 or thereafter.

Trees, meet forest.

Written by John Voelcker, this post originally appeared on AllCarsElectric, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: General Motors, Nissan, Pike Research, Toyota

As the caliber of these investors suggests, eMeter is no arbitrary pick. Going up against public companies like meter maker Itron, it has quickly risen to the top of a brand-new field: smart meter management. It partners with the likes of Siemens, Oracle, IBM, and Accenture to expand its footprint. And now an IPO might be just around the corner.

“We have a unique offering for full integration of the smart grid into the existing utility infrastructure,” says eMeter CEO Gary Bloom. “This includes demand response programs and curtailment to cut back the amount of power being used when it becomes important, like it is now with the situation on the East Coast — all of the blackouts and brownouts happening now during the heat wave.”

With hundreds of utilities across the U.S. and the world racing to deploy digital meters capable of wirelessly transmitting data to utilities and consumers, demand for software to operate and control the devices and power flow has skyrocketed. Not only are utilities interested in software that can parse data to improve their services, but more homeowners than ever before are looking to keep tabs on and manage their energy use.

eMeter has jumped on this consumer-facing strategy in a big way. In addition to rolling out software for 24 million smart meters in the field, the company launched its own home energy management system, called Energy Engage, last year. Earlier this month, the company briefed President Barack Obama and the Department of Energy on the promising results of a pilot test of this technology. Called the PowerCents program, this included the installation of smart thermostats and meters in 900 homes in the Washington, D.C. area. Accordingly, eMeter has become an authority on real-time pricing in an increasingly competitive industry.

The company doesn’t seem to be at all intimidated by its crowded playing field. As an early entrant, it has gotten a generous lead on newer startups, achieving scale before many of them are even on the market.

“We’re global already,” Bloom says. “We offer an environment where our customers can build all sorts of applications to make the smart grid even smarter. And we have a lot of very successful customers.”

These customers include Texas utility CenterPoint Energy, Toronto Hydro Electric System, Bluebonnet Electric and Vattenfall in Sweden and Finland. Recently, it brought Westar Energy — the largest electric utility in Kansas — into its fold, to improve the company’s consumer engagement with a web-based communication portal, Bloom says.

Now, with strong momentum and cash in hand, eMeter is planning to expand its sales and marketing operations. Its products are already being distributed by some of its partners including IBM, which bundles the software with servers. But eMeter wants to beef up its own sales channels while it has the runway — the key to leveling up in scale.

“We’ve characterized this as a double-down round,” says Bloom. “We have to grow our sales capacity and, along with that, our services capacity. Now we can do both in parallel.”

The key to jumpstarting its sales is to convince utility partners that a software solution to their smart grid goals will be more effective and affordable than competing hardware approaches, the CEO explains.

“Over time, we saw a huge value shift on the internet from hardware to software companies,” Bloom says. “It used to be all about building a big enough server farm. Five to seven years later the internet is all about Oracle and Amazon — a whole generation of software. I think we’re going to see something very similar with the smart grid.”

As Earth2Tech points out, eMeter didn’t think it was going to need a fresh round of capital after its last, third round. Word on the street was that the company was going to go public, beating wireless meter communications company Silver Spring Networks to market as the first big smart grid IPO in a long time. This may still happen, but it looks like the company needs more cash to get it there.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company seems to have a pretty high burn rate. It previously raised $57 million from Sequoia and Foundation. Now Northgate Capital has swept in to join the most recent round. eMeter clearly still looks like a good bet.

That said, the public markets don’t seem to have warmed to cleantech candidates. Tesla Motors saw a blockbuster $226 million public exit last Tuesday, but it was definitely the exception to the rule. Investor enthusiasm has been dampened by poor performance of green technology stocks like A123Systems, Codexis and Jinko Solar. These unfavorable conditions even convinced solar module maker Solyndra to cancel its IPO filing.

eMeter my very well hold back on its public sale for the same reasons. The emphasis on revenue generation make sense in this light, but the company can only stay on VC life support for so long.

Tags: Smart Grid

Companies: EMeter, Foundation Capital, Northgate Capital, Sequoia Capital

Clad in a sheen of bubbly optimism, his mendacity nonetheless has consequences. Through Tesla’s IPO, he has now taken hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and public investors who expect not just a return but square dealing from the man who is managing their company for them.

So where has Musk spun the facts?

Critical reporting

Well, let’s go with the most recent one: He’s lied about me, and VentureBeat, apparently in retaliation for our aggressive and accurate reporting.

In an article published by the Huffington Post, he calls me “Silicon Valley’s Jayson Blair.” He accused me of making errors, but never once specified them. Here’s the truth: I cited Musk’s own words from court filings, which we had paid a freelance reporter to find and copy, legally, from a courthouse in Van Nuys, Calif. I also interviewed a host of other sources. I emailed Musk questions and called his lawyer repeatedly before publishing. We went to extra lengths to nail down the facts: Before publishing, VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall called Musk and had interviews with at least three Tesla board members.

We make no apologies for seeking the truth about Tesla Motors and Elon Musk, a vital company and an iconic entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Our reporting (here’s one example of our series) helped investors get a more truthful picture of a company that was going public and the man behind it.

Musk also accused me of “collaborating” with the lawyer representing Justine Musk, his ex-wife, in their divorce case. Also false: I picked up the phone and called her lawyer, and he had the courtesy to answer my questions.

Now, we should all be used to Musk insulting journalists who don’t report what they’re told to. But calling someone a “Jayson Blair” is a troubling assertion to anyone who prefers his insults to have a factual basis.

When I ran fact-checking at Business 2.0 magazine, here’s what I would have asked the writer to prove before I’d let him get away with that kind of factual assertion: So, you want to compare this Owen Thomas person to one of journalism’s most infamous miscreants. Is Owen Thomas a drug addict? Is Owen Thomas mentally unstable? Has Owen Thomas plagiarized or invented facts? The answer to all of those, in case you were curious, is no.

And so out comes the chief of reporters’ red pen.

The one specific claim Musk made about my reputation was that I had written that he was broke. Not true. If you review the story I reported on his personal finances and their impact on Tesla, you’ll see I merely quoted Musk’s own words from his divorce filing, in which he said that he “ran out of cash.”

When VentureBeat first started raising questions about Musk’s personal finances, his expensive divorce case, and the impact they might have on Tesla’s IPO, a Tesla spokesman initially said that the company had no plans to update its IPO prospectus to reflect our reporting. However, in the end, Tesla updated its SEC filings to acknowledge substantially all of the concerns we raised as potential risk factors investors should consider.

That is the ultimate correction of the record, and it stands today.

Musk’s personal spending

There are other whoppers in Musk’s piece, such as the suggestion that of the $200,000 per month he’s spending, a mere $30,000 a month is going to his own personal household expenses, with the rest going to legal fees in his divorce case. Actually, the figure he told a court is $98,023 a month, according to filings in that case, including $50,000 a month in rent.

The founding of Tesla Motors

An aside to Musk: Making false statements is something the law frowns on.

Oh, but wait, Musk should already know that. He and I met in San Francisco in 2008 for drinks, and over the course of the evening, he made several disparaging remarks about Tesla Motors cofounder Martin Eberhard’s management of the company before Musk had ousted him as CEO — specifically, Musk alleged, for misrepresenting the cost of making the Tesla Roadster. In 2009, Eberhard sued Musk for defamation, citing the comments Musk had made to me, among others. Musk filed a scathing response to the lawsuit, repeating many of his negative claims about Eberhard.

Then it headed to mediation, and the case was settled. Eberhard’s lawyer declared himself “very pleased” with the result, and Tesla issued a press release in which Musk said that Eberhard had been “indispensable” to the company in its early days.

The safety of customers’ deposits

When Tesla’s finances were at their most perilous, in the winter of 2008 and spring of 2009, the company was dependent on advance reservation payments from customers for cash flow. The company’s cash balance had run down to $9 million, and the company was struggling to raise $40 million in convertible debt. (He announced that that round had closed in November 2008, while in fact, according to Tesla’s SEC filings, it did not close until March 2009.) To raise funds in the meantime, Tesla began taking deposits on the Model S sedan, even though that car was far from production, and continued taking deposits on Roadsters. Musk first told customers that he would personally guarantee the deposits they were placing, “even in the worst case of an Armageddon scenario.” Then he said that their deposits were completely at risk and they could lose all their money. One of those statements had to be false.

Musk’s history as an entrepreneur

In persuading other investors to back Tesla Motors, Musk has frequently traded on his past success as an entrepreneur at companies like Zip2 and PayPal. But Zip2 was so troubled that one of its venture capitalists, Derek Proudian, had to step in as acting CEO, a move rarely seen at venture-backed companies. And Musk was ousted as CEO of PayPal by his own management team. To this day, Musk tells a version of PayPal’s history that few who were there at the time agree with.

Tesla’s investors

Most dangerously, Musk has repeatedly made misrepresentations about Tesla’s finances. In February 2009, he sent a letter to customers saying that Tesla would start getting funds from a Department of Energy loan in four to five months. In fact, it had not received the loan at that point and there was no certainty it would get it, a point a Tesla spokeswoman had to clarify. (Tricky, that, saying your CEO had misrepresented the facts without calling him a liar.)

He also said Tesla would turn profitable in 2009. Of course, it didn’t, as the company’s published financials later revealed. (Musk later claimed, using questionable accounting whose details have never been revealed, that the company had been profitable for one month of the year.)

In an interview for the May 2009 issue of Car and Driver, he told that magazine’s readers that General Electric had become an investor. It hadn’t, and it never did, according to Andy Katell, a GE spokesman who spoke with me at the time.

The Toyota deal

After unveiling an agreement to buy the NUMMI plant in Fremont, Calif., from the Toyota-backed joint venture which owned it, Musk claimed that Tesla and Toyota planned to jointly develop several models of cars and build them at NUMMI. It’s true that he got Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda to stand next to him and make grand promises. But in fact, as the company later revealed in its SEC filings, Tesla and Toyota had no agreement to develop any cars, and there was no guarantee that they ever would.

The pity of it all is this: I don’t believe Musk twists the truth out of malice. Rather, at this point, it may well be out of habit. He’s so used to getting his way that future possibilities just seem like present realities to him. And pragmatically, it’s worked. Whenever Tesla has been in a bind, Musk has spun his way out of trouble.

It’s a character trait of which elements are found among many successful entrepreneurs: the compelling presentation of an alternate reality in the hopes that so many people will sign on to the vision that it comes true. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, for example, is so masterful at this that people speak of his reality distortion field. But Musk may have taken distortion to extremes.

The question now is whether Musk’s past habits will serve him well as the CEO of a publicly traded company. Already, it seems the investors who have entrusted Musk with hundreds of millions of dollars are having doubts. With shares of Tesla having already fallen by nearly half since their post-IPO pop, perhaps Musk’s bubble is finally deflating.

But those who are still sticking with the company should ask themselves this: Has Tesla adequately disclosed to investors the risk of its CEO’s curious relationship with the truth?

Companies: Tesla Motors

People: Elon Musk

That won’t be known for many months yet, but Toyota has already taken a first step: It’s building Tesla’s battery into a test car so it can compare the Silicon Valley startup’s technology to its own lithium-ion pack.

Toyota president Akio Toyoda told journalists at a briefing today in Nagoya, Japan, that Toyota is building an electric vehicle with a Tesla battery pack.

The Japanese company’s in-house lithium-ion pack uses fewer, larger-format cells than the 6,831 commodity cells (essentially like mobile-phone batteries) that Tesla uses in the battery pack fitted to its 2011 Tesla Roadster 2.5.

Toyota’s cells are specifically designed for automotive use, but the company may feel it’s a bit behind the curve in lithium-ion adoption. The all-new 2010 Toyota Prius was meant to have a lithium-ion pack, rather than the carryover nickel-metal-hydride technology it’s used since 1997.

But Toyota bet on the wrong battery chemistry, meaning it had to start from scratch. And now it clearly wants to see whether the very different Tesla Motors approach could be used in a lower-cost, higher-volume vehicle.

Most analysts have concluded that the Tesla approach is simply too complex to be cost-effective when scaled up for mass production. The basic message: It’s fine for low volumes of $109,000 Roadsters, but too costly for Corollas.

As Autoblog Green notes, test vehicles like the one Toyota is now building–known as ‘mules’ for their sometimes unpredictable behavior–may never be seen by the public.

Instead, they may spend a short, hard life being pounded around a test track or running for hours on dynamometers to give test engineers all the data they can wring out, before the hapless car is finally dismantled or crushed.

Written by John Voelcker, this post originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Companies: Tesla Motors, Toyota

Now a young Israeli company called TaKaDu has developed an innovative solution to this multibillion dollar problem.

Water loss costs the U.S. $2.6 billion every year, and the world $14 billion. When you add in insurance premiums for coverage against the damage that result from leaks and pipe bursts, these costs increase substantially.

“That water has been moved, it has been treated, [and] as it leaks, it might be causing property damage,” said Peter Williams, chief technology officer for the Big Green Innovations group at IBM. “The economic value of [preventing leaks] is compelling.”

As water networks have aged, the challenge has grown. TaKaDu’s answer to this problem is to use the data that water utilities already collect. It claims to have developed a complex and proprietary mathematical algorithm that can be used to predict and detect leaks, bursts, inefficiencies and equipment failures — enabling utilities to quickly prevent and respond to breaks and minimize water loss and repair costs. Infrastructure monitoring therefore enables utilities to make the most of their service and pipe replacement budgets. Here’s what its web-based dashboard looks like:

“Utilities already have meters all over their networks, transmitting data all the time,” said Amir Peleg, TakaDu’s founder and CEO. “They measure water flow, pressure and quality. I asked several utilities what they do with the data and they said almost nothing. They just log the data. They use it for operational needs, not for early detection.”

TaKaDu, however, uses this information, combined with data gleaned from other sources, to identify local and regional consumption baselines, as well as daily and weekly use patterns. Common data sources include utilities’ supervisory systems, which keep tabs on water turbidity, acidity and temperature, as well as public weather services.

“TaKaDu is the first company to take all that data and analyze it and provide information to the utility,” said Heather Landis, an analyst at cleantech-focused Lux Research. “They are operating in their own space.”

Last summer, TaKaDu raised $3.5 million from Israeli venture capital firms Gemini Israel Funds and Giza Venture Capital. Peleg then assembled a team of researchers with advanced degrees in computer science and mathematics — many of whom, like Peleg, are garduates of Talpiot, the Israeli military’s elite science and technology training program. Together, they spent a year formulating and tweaking the algorithms that are now the basis for TaKaDu’s water monitoring platform.

These algorithms borrow from network theory and machine learning to identify correlations between the many variables involved in water distribution. To illustrate, Peleg offered a simple example based on readings from meters in two different neighborhoods served by the same utility.

“Imagine there is always a 20 percent difference between meter readings,” Peleg said. “Why? Because one is in a bigger neighborhood. If the gap grows, chances are one has a leak, or it is a problem of faulty meters. If you correlate among many meters, it is quite a powerful mechanism to learn what normal behavior looks like and where you have an anomaly.”

TaKaDu is operating on a software-as-a-service model. Water utilities can provide their network data to the startup via any web browser. The company’s servers then analyze the data in real time to identify events and abnormalities. But rather than selling the software directly to the utilities, which are notoriously risk-averse, Peleg and his crew are partnering with companies like IBM and Schneider Electric, which already sell products to tens of thousands of water utilities around the world. TaKaDu’s blog just posted an interview with Pascal Bonnefoi, the water segment director for Schneider.

“We like [TaKaDu’s] technology and we like their business model,” said IBM’s Williams. “It has very low barriers to entry. It doesn’t require the insertion of equipment in the ground, which is always expensive. We think of it as an excellent complement to what we sell.”

Already, the startup has several paying utility customers in the U.K., the Netherlands, Australia and Israel. Each of these customers pays a monthly fee of $10,000 to $150,000, depending on the scale of their water networks. Right now, TaKaDu counts Thames Water, the United Kingdom’s largest water utility, and Hagihon, Jerusalem’s water utility, among its clients. Both started paying for the service last quarter.

The company is also conducting ongoing trials across Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. At the Israel Cleantech Summit hosted by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce, TaKaDu generated considerable buzz. Peleg, who sold his previous company — online behavioral targeting and advertising firm YaData — to Microsoft, has since been hailed for his creative thinking.

“It is exciting to see entrepreneurs who have been successful with technology in a different sector apply the ideas behind it to water,” said Rachel Sheinbein, a water expert at CMEA Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm. “I like the entrepreneur. I also like that TaKaDu can create potential from [existing] data. We will continue to see [the company] grow.”

Such high praise for a new water play is rare in the venture capital community, which has been slow to invest in water entrepreneurship. Less than 3 percent of venture investments in 2009 went into water, according to the Cleantech Group. But TaKaDu seems to have won over some of the skeptics.

“TaKaDu can very quickly prove ‘Is there a return on investment?’ and shorten the sales cycle,” said Sagi Rubin, a cleantech specialist at private equity firm Virgin Green Fund. “There is scalability in the model and room to expand in terms of coming in with one offering for the municipality, and once in, add[ing] another and another and another. That’s a foundation for a very large business.”

Yoni Cohen is a JD-MBA student at Yale Law School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Israel, he is a former college basketball writer for Fox Sports. Follow Yoni on Twitter at @cohen_yoni.

Tags: water

Companies: CMEA Capital, Gemini Israel Funds, Giza Venture Capital, IBM, TaKaDu, Virgin Green Fund

Well, their luck runs out on December 31, the last day those stickers are valid. While Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill yesterday that extends certain HOV-Lane Access stickers for four more years, the ones for hybrids aren’t included.

Instead, the extended stickers apply only to far less common green vehicles: Fully electric cars (including the Tesla Roadster and 2002 Toyota RAV4 EV), and those that run on natural gas (e.g. the Honda Civic GX) or hydrogen (a la the 2010 Honda FCX Clarity).

Those vehicles have white HOV Access stickers, while the three eligible hybrids–the 1999-2006 Honda Insight, the Honda Civic Hybrid, and the Toyota Prius–stickers are yellow. And those yellow stickers still expire on December 31 of this year.

That impending expiration caused howls of protest earlier this year by the 85,000 lucky hybrid owners. But hybrids‘ success may have worked against them: Hybrids of all models are now almost 3 percent of overall U.S. vehicle sales, but considerably more in California.

In June 2009, insurance-claim processor Audatex calculated that one of the three models with an HOV-Access permit was worth $1,200 to $1,500 more than one without. Presumably that value has declined steadily as expiration approached.

The measure (AB 1500) signed yesterday by the Governator was one of several so-called Prius Perks, which many commentators expect to be superseded by similar perks to encourage purchase of plug-in vehicles that are just coming into the market.

New battery electric cars, primarily the 2011 Nissan Leaf, already qualify for the newly extended white stickers.

But a separate California bill, SB 535, would extend HOV access both to plug-in hybrids (e.g. the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid) and electric cars with range-extending gasoline engines (e.g. the 2011 Chevrolet Volt). That bill has not yet passed.

Extending the white permits through January 1, 2015, keeps at most a few thousand electric, natural-gas, and hydrogen vehicles in the HOV Lanes. Removing 85,000 hybrids, though, will free up space for electrics like the Leaf–and potentially the blended plug-ins too.

Plug-In America, an advocacy group that works to support and encourage plug-in vehicles, lauded the passage of AB 1500. The group has a list of current privileges for electric vehicles offered by 21 states and the District of Columbia.

Plug-In America is also working to build support for incentives at the Federal level, especially the Electric Vehicle Deployment Act (Senate Bill S 3442, House H.R. 5442).

For more detailed information on California AB 1500, see the text of the bill and the Legislative Analysis.

Written by John Voelcker, this article originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

While there isn’t as much money out there in 2010 as there was in 2007, it doesn’t mean your company can’t get funded. A good first step would be to avoid these pitfalls, which investors consistently tell me hold good companies back:

1. Letting the technology overpower the balance sheet

Of course, a breakthrough technology is top-of-the-list of priorities for many companies. But unfortunately, too many convince themselves they can neglect their balance sheet because their technology is so valuable.

A few years ago, a great idea was sometimes nearly enough to get investor attention. But the scarcity of today’s investor dollars means that your company needs to demonstrate more than this – a more mature business model that proves profitability, for instance. To do this, of course, requires more sophisticated resources in finance and marketing than many companies have, which brings us to the second pitfall:

2. Having engineers run the business

This is a sensitive issue. Many cleantech start-ups were founded by brilliant scientific or engineering minds that created breakthrough technologies. But pressure on today’s investor means that they want to see a CEO with business experience and a CFO with strong relevant experience – often with the SEC. They want to see not just a great technological idea, but also a company with revenues, and a team with the business acumen to make it profitable.

3. Isolation leading to obsolescence

Today’s fast-changing environment means you’ll need to be flexible. You may have to cede some control and join forces with another firm to survive. You need to be obsessed with learning the needs – both present and future – of the marketplace, so you can position yourself to meet them. Go to industry conferences. Read everything you can. Make connections even if they won’t pay off today, because they may down the road. Keep yourself from being isolated in this rapidly shifting marketplace.

Michele Ashby is the CEO of MiNE LLC, which is hosting the Modern Energy Investor Forum (MEIF) from Sep. 22-25, 2010, in Denver, Colorado. The Modern Energy Investor Forum is the premier invitation-only conference for clean technology firms and investors. For more information or to register for the MEIF, please go to www.MiNELLC.com or call (303) 377-6463.

One of the biggest challenges with carbon capture is that the equipment is often unwieldy, energy intensive, and expensive. Many power plants haven’t wanted to take on the extra costs, nor pump more of the energy they generate into these efforts. The goal behind the new funding is to reduce these costs by 30 percent for coal plants.

Carbon capture is one of the Obama administration’s major cleantech missions. The president has outlined objectives to make this type of technology cost effective within the decade and to establish between five and 10 demonstration-scale projects by 2016. A number of different methods are being tried, including carbon solvents, membrane filters and absorption systems.

Here’s a rundown of today’s funding recipients:

- American Air Liquide ($3 million): Coupling a membrane filter with cryogenic processing technology to see if cooler air temperatures can enhance membrane performance.

- Gas Technology Institute ($3 million): Developing hybrid separation methods that use a combination of absorption and membrane technologies.

- 3H Company ($2.7 million): Using a non-aqueous solvent to separate carbon dioxide into two liquid phases, the company will be setting up a demonstration facility at a power plant operated by utility E.ON in the U.S.

- Akermin ($2.6 million): Claiming to capture up to 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from flues with a special solvent formulation, the company will work to deploy its technology to filter 2,000 liters of gas an hour.

- ION Engineering ($3 million): Using an ionic liquid as a solvent instead of water, ION claims it can reduce the energy it requires to run by 60 percent and cause less corrosion.

- University of Illinois ($1.3 million): Investigating the use of carbonate salt as a solvent for absorption-based, post-combustion carbon dioxide capture.

- URS Group ($3 million): Looking into concentrated piperazine as a solvent for absorbing carbon dioxide from flue gas released by coal-fired power plants. URS says its method offers faster absorption rates and lower volatility.

- Membrane Technology and Research ($14.7 million): Constructing a 1-megawatt membrane capable of capturing 90 percent of carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant that releases 20 tons of carbon dioxide a day.

- Siemens Energy ($8.9 million): Designing, installing and operating a pilot-scale plant at the TECO Energy Big Bend Station. Siemens plans to use an amino acid salt formulation as a solvent.

- ADA-ES ($11.1 million): Refining the design of a commercial post-combustion carbon dioxide capture technology for a 39-month pilot-scale test.

Full descriptions of all of these projects can be found here.

Obama has been backing greater electrification of the automobile since his appointment to the White House but lately he has shifted his focus to pure electric vehicles like those built by Smith Electric Vehicles. The company was originally granted only $10 million but this was later raised to $32 million, a sign of the growing support within the Obama administration for a zero-emissions future.

The trucks being built by Smith Electric Vehicles have a payload of more than 16,000 pounds, can travel up to 50 mph and can cover a range of more than 100 miles on a single charge. A full recharge will take about six to eight hours.

On Thursday the president will be given a tour of Smith Electric Vehicles’ facilities and later present a speech on the economy and the role manufacturers play in the green movement.

Many more startups, just like Smith Electric Vehicles, will be receiving similar grants as a further $6 billion is to be spent on electric vehicle research and infrastructure. This is on top of the $2.4 billion already handed out to automakers, startups and battery companies last August.

Written by Viknesh Vijayenthiran, this article originally appeared on AllCarsElectric, one of VenturBeat’s editorial partners.

Companies: Smith Electric Vehicles

The startup’s service allows thermostats to modulate temperatures for comfort while simultaneously shaving energy demand and customers’ energy bills. After EcoFactor is installed, all homeowners have to do is adjust their thermostats as usual for several days. The software remembers what they like, in relation to seasons, weather conditions and square footage, so that they never have to worry about it again. EcoFactor’s software adjusts home temperature in real time as conditions change.

EcoFactor is one of several energy-efficiency offerings (eventually including Microsoft Hohm and Control4) that takes reducing energy consumption out of users’ hands. This is a tenet of the emerging smart grid and home efficiency industries: provide tools that automate energy use so customers literally have to do nothing on a regular basis to see savings.

Oncor is folding EcoFactor’s service into its Take a Load Off Texas program. It will allow the utility to run demand response programs — reducing demand when needed to avoid grid overloads — and allow customers to save as much as 20 to 30 percent on their heating and cooling costs, the company says.

It makes sense that EcoFactor is rolling out first in Texas. Utilities are not regulated in the state, meaning that homeowners are largely free to choose between several competing energy vendors. In order to retain customers, many of these utilities need to expand their portfolios to include extras like energy efficiency tools, energy monitoring dashboards made by companies like Tendril and OpenPeak, and more. Oncor partnered with EcoFactor early, launching a trial period with a handful of homes last November.

But EcoFactor doesn’t plan to depend on utility partnerships to grow. Because it is more consumer than utility-focused, the company says it will look for partnerships with telecommunications and cable companies who also want to offer energy-efficiency services to their customers. Both Verizon and AT&T have expressed interest in getting a slice of the smart grid and energy-efficiency pie.

Based in San Carlos, Calif., EcoFactor has raised close to $6 million from Claremont Creek Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners, and angels. It last raised funds in April, bringing in $3.5 million. According to a recent report, capital-efficient energy-efficiency startups are becoming a sweet spot for investors interested in the cleantech sector.

Companies: Claremont Creek Ventures, ecofactor, Rockport Capital Partners

Nick Hodge of Green Chip Stocks has taken a deep dive into exactly how bad the situation is — and it’s pretty bad with solar and clean energy stocks spearheading the decline. In the last 24 months, green equities have lost as much as 72 percent, making prospective investors very nervous about future sales.

We’ve seen this trend in several green IPOs already this year. Tesla and its 40.5 percent first-day jump in price are a big-time exception to the rule. More representative picks include Codexis, the biofuel catalyst company that went public in April for $78 million instead of its expected $100 million. Chinese solar wafer maker Jinko Solar also had a hard time in May, with shares opening at $11, the low end of its estimated range.

Capital-intensive green companies are largely dependent on raising money from their IPOs to keep things going. So raising smaller-than-average sums could seriously threaten their productivity and survival.

Combined with unfavorable market conditions, this risk turned back the IPO dreams of solar module maker Solyndra, even though it has $535 million in government loans at its disposal. The company opted to raise $178 million in private capital instead before taking another, hopefully more auspicious run at the public market.

This lukewarm attitude toward the green sector can be attributed, at least partially, to the disappointing performance of battery maker A123Systems since its public offering last September. The company’s stock spiked 50 percent on its first day from its $13.50 pricing to $20.29. Today, it’s trailing at $8.63 a share, justifiably giving green investors the jitters.

This is also having an impact on cleantech companies before they even start considering an IPO. As Hodge points out, less potential for lucrative exits means less venture capital firms pumping money into startups, regardless of how promising their technology may be. The fact that renewable energy stocks are limping threatens to lock up the whole development chain.

The problem has prompted bankers and venture capitalists alike to adjust their approach. Basically, venture-backed wind and solar companies can’t generate cost competitive energy yet, they require many years before producing returns, and they require massive amounts of capital to even get them to that point. Investors aren’t so enthusiastic. Their replacements: less pricey energy efficiency and smart grid plays with business models that save people money.

Hodge reports that Bank of America is buying into this strategy, predicting that investment in energy efficiency could rise as high as $216 billion in the next two years. If efficiency initiatives and grid upgrades can reduce energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020, as predicted, then not as much emphasis needs to be placed on renewable generation.

The new approach may be bad news for companies like Solyndra and turbine farm developer First Wind (which filed in 2008 to raise $450 million), but very good news for the smart grid companies on deck — namely, Silver Spring Networks.

The Redwood City, Calif. company, which provides wireless networks for smart metering systems, retained underwriters in preparation for an IPO in February. But it backed off after it got embroiled in a class action lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric (one of its major customers) over rate hikes associated with smart meters.

There’s been some talk of Cisco Systems buying the company, which has raised north of $200 million in capital. However, if investor sentiment shifts to favor smart gird plays, it could get its day in the sun before the end of 2010 after all.

One of the higher-profile sales in the hopper right now is Zipcar’s. The green car-sharing service filed for a $75 million IPO at the beginning of June. Right now it looks like it could defy market trends in the sector. Like Tesla, it has a glowing, sexy public image — and it seems different enough from standard solar, wind and biofuel companies to soothe fretting buyers.

But there’s still no telling how its stock will fare after an early pop in price. If Tesla’s current trajectory is any hint, future Zipcar shareholders shouldn’t get their hopes up.

[Image via Green Chip Stocks]

Tags: energy efficiencys, Smart Grid, Solar, wind

Companies: A123systems, Cisco Systems, Codexis, Jinko Solar, Silver Spring Networks, Solyndra, Tesla Motors, Zipcar

Microgrids are basically self-contained electrical ecosystems. Power is produced, transmitted, consumed, monitored, and managed all on a local scale. In many cases, they can be integrated into larger, central grids, but their defining characteristic is that they can operate independently if disconnected from the whole.

This Innovation Series is brought to you by Lexus. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. Lexus had no involvement in the content of this or other posts.

This is what makes microgrids so well-suited to university campuses, corporate research parks, military bases and other insular environments that want to run on their own energy from start to finish. But the concept underpinning this strategy won’t be so limited: These grids will be coming to your neighborhoods, office buildings, and beyond over the next several years.

Several trends are fueling this momentum. First and foremost, a lot of states are running out of money for pricey energy transmission projects. (Money is always the primary catalyst when it comes to change in the monolithic utility industry.) California certainly has had to tighten its belt in this respect. Spending billions of dollars stringing bulky, unsightly and expensive aluminum-steel cables across thousands of miles doesn’t sound convenient for anyone.

In an increasingly wireless era, transmission lines seem almost humorously antiquated. In addition to them being costly and a pain to install, they account for huge losses in energy every year. In fact, some analysts say as much as 10 percent of the energy produced is lost just in getting it to its destination. Neither utilities, their customers, or governments can afford this anymore.

By drastically shortening the difference between where energy generated and where it is being used, microgrids eliminate the need for heavy-duty transmission infrastructure, and thus reduce the amount of energy simply being lost along the way.

Another major boost for microgrids: the transition to renewable sources of power like solar arrays and wind farms. These efforts get a lot of good press that ignores some of the bigger challenges involved, namely how hard it is to get the energy produced by panels and turbines to customers that can and want to use it. Some of the most expensive transmission projects ongoing in the U.S. today are focused on delivering solar or wind energy (which are usually based in remote areas like the desert or the plains states) to utilities and their customers.

That said, these renewable sources have made distributed power much more practical. It’s hard to imagine generating energy for standalone neighborhood or communities using natural gas or coal. Fossil fuel-based electricity requires complex plants and refineries that cost billions of dollars and serve millions of buildings. But rooftop solar panels and small clusters of wind turbines can successfully generate enough energy to keep the lights on in just a handful, a few hundred or a few thousand homes. Renewables may not be able to meet the needs of entire cities today. But they can reliably serve people who live off the grid, or who want to declare independence from major utilities.

With government incentives on the rise, and solar equipment costs dropping, the idea of even individual homes creating and consuming their own power isn’t so outlandish. Rooftop solar is the obvious choice here, with companies like SunPower, First Solar, SunRun, SolarCity and more all cropping up to capitalize on what could be a very big market. But it’s the microgrids — which actually hook the panels into homes — that make distributed power work.

The third trend contributing to the rise of microgrids: growing distrust of utility companies. Last year, residents of Bakersfield, Calif. filed a class action suit against Pacific Gas & Electric, claiming that the new, digital “smart” meters it had just installed were inaccurate and causing rate hikes. After closer inspection by a third party, PG&E actually apologized for what it acknowledged to be a mistake. Since then, utilities have been taking a beating from the public and media for poor communication and execution when it comes to the smart grid. PG&E also just lost its Proposition 16 bid to block the formation of local, municipal utilities — and it may even find itself banned from rolling out smart meters in San Francisco.

Microgrids supply an appealing response to these problems. Because they can operate separately and independently, they provide one option for escaping utility rule while still responsibly monitoring how much energy is used and where it goes. Depending on the size of some of the cities and municipalities looking to start their own utilities now that they can in PG&E’s coverage area, microgrids could see a big spike in popularity.

In fact, they seem to be a win-win for both utilities and people who don’t want to be beholden to them anymore. Because microgrids are so easily integrated into broader grid systems, they allow surplus energy generated by rooftop solar arrays and the like to be fed back into the same grid used by utilities. That way, utilities get a bit of help handling peak demand, and the people generating the energy will probably soon be compensated for the energy they’ve chipped in. Microgrids provide a channel for consumers to profit from going green and ditching their utility — two coveted goals.

So why aren’t they taking off even faster? You’d think that more people would be all over the idea of micropower, considering its myriad benefits. But there are two hurdles standing in its way.

First, utilities are fighting tooth and nail against the development of microgrids. Notoriously slow-moving when it comes to any kind of change — especially if it will be expensive — these companies are scrambling to maintain control of the power supply chain, and its end consumers.

To be sure, they are battling some steep odds. Not only have utilities fallen in public favor, their whole relationship with people has changed. Utility subscribers used to be called “ratepayers” for a reason. They couldn’t choose between energy vendors, and they had to pay whatever rate was asked of them. But increasingly, ratepayers are becoming customers — customers that do have choices and need to be courted with additional offerings. In Texas, utilities are deregulated, allowing residents to go with another utility if they aren’t pleased with their current vendor, and the same thing is in the works elsewhere.

Utilities aren’t taking this transition lying down. Many of the big companies, like PG&E, Consolidated Edison, Oncor, Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy have millions of dollars at their disposal to lobby the government and crack down on threats. PG&E may have lost its Prop 16 fight, but it did have $46 million to spend on the campaign — just one indication of how much utilities are willing to spend to maintain the status quo.

The second major reason “microgrid” hasn’t become a household buzzword is that renewable energy sources are still too expensive for most people. Yes, many startups and programs have emerged to finance the purchase of rooftop panels — lowering upfront costs from $25,000 to $2,500 in some cases — SolarCity and SunRun among them, but they’re still more expensive to run than simply signing up for PG&E’s natural gas-fueled service.

It’s fair to say that microgrids depend on renewables gaining traction, since the two complement each other. So that means that local power has hit a bottleneck, waiting first for distributed solar and wind technologies to get to a point where they can be cost competitive with mainstream sources of energy. And this wait may last a few years yet.

Ironically, microgrids might also be the best and perhaps only way to jump these two hurdles. They seem to solve a lot of problems on both sides of the equation.

For utilities, microgrids have a chance to not only help them handle peaking demand (which could lead to billions of dollars in brownouts and blackouts, particularly when electric cars come online later this year), but also to help them hit stringent targets for renewable energy generation. PG&E, for one, is accountable for deriving 20 percent of its retail energy from renewables by the end of this year. On a larger scale, the state of California has a goal to generate 33 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020.

Microgrids are a practical way for them to get there. Especially if utilities start reliably compensating residents for the electricity they contribute back to the grid, buying and installing rooftop panels could become much more attractive to (and affordable for) average people — allowing customers to benefit too.

These forces are gaining too much strength to deny, making microgrids an inevitability. Whether it will take a year or a decade for them to catch on is a different matter.

Corporate involvement could be the deciding factor. Already, companies like IBM, Cisco Systems, Intel and General Electric are circling the market (estimated at $2.1 billion by a Pike Research report last year), looking for the best place to get their feet in the door.

If these giants can back the right plays, making every segment of the emerging microgrid industry more affordable, then utilities may ease up on the lobbying. It’s time they start accepting that the central power-plant model is already dead, and that a future of distributed energy ecosystems awaits.

Tags: microgrids, Smart Grid, utilities

Companies: First Solar, Pacific Gas & Electric, SolarCity, SunPower, Sunrun

The new funding will be split between Spain-based developer Abengoa Solar and Colorado-based panel maker Abound Solar in the form of low-interest loan guarantees (pledges that the money will be delivered when certain requirements and milestones are fulfilled).

Abengoa will receive $1.45 billion for construction of its Solana solar thermal development in Arizona. Its technology uses mirrored troughs to concentrate sunlight on a limited number of solar modules, lowering the costs of generation by saving on silicon and other pricey materials, while simultaneously boosting efficiency.

The company already has a power purchase agreement with regional utility APS — slated to serve 70,000 homes — and all the permits it needs to start building. This project alone is expected to create 1,600 new jobs. At 280 megawatts, Solana will be the world’s largest solar power plant when it’s brought online in 2013.

It will also be the first facility in the U.S. to store some of the energy produced. This is a big deal, considering that one of the biggest hurdles standing between solar and broader adoption is that it is intermittent. If plants can store up solar power that is generated but not in demand, then it can be made more reliable — and cheaper.

It sounds strange for the U.S. to be shelling out so much to a European company, but Abengoa has agreed to buy the bulk of its components from domestic suppliers. This should generate even more American jobs, Obama says.

The other $400 million loan guarantee went to Abound, which manufactures thin-film solar panels. It will use the money to construct two new plants, dramatically upping its capacity, and adding on 2,000 temporary and 1,500 permanent jobs in Colorado and Indiana.

On top of that, the new Indiana facility will convert an old Chrysler factory — yet another example of antiquated automotive infrastructure being used for green purposes. Just last week, hybrid vehicle maker Fisker Automotive got approval to turn a defunct General Motors plant into a manufacturing facility.

Tags: Solar

Companies: Abengoa Solar, Abound Solar

TSLA closed at $21.96 today, its third day of trading, after falling $1.87. Yesterday saw the wildest ride with shares skyrocketing up to $30.42 before falling back down to $23. The company may still be celebrating its rock star showing on Tuesday, when the stock price jumped 40.5 percent — but the gradual decline that so many analysts predicted may not end up being that gradual.

Tesla can attribute much of its recent success to the hype surrounding its sexy products. Even people who bought private shares of the company before the IPO admitted that the buzz influenced their decision to get on board. But now that the big day is over, people are taking a closer look at what Tesla has actually accomplished and what it is likely to do going forward.

The answers to these questions aren’t so happy and shiny. Tesla continues to lose more and more money, and its single product, the $109,000 Roadster, isn’t exactly selling like hotcakes (a little over 1,000 have been delivered in a year in a half). On top of that, its next product — which is less concrete than the company and its CEO Elon Musk let on — the Model S all-electric sedan, isn’t due out until 2012 at the very earliest. What does the company plan to do to maintain investor enthusiasm for two more years? No one knows yet.

It also hasn’t helped that the market has been unusually gloomy this week. The Nasdaq Composite Index  fell another 7.88 points (0.37 percent) today. Tesla defied poor market conditions on Tuesday, but it might be falling prey to them now.

The slide in the company’s stock price, while not altogether surprising, already has some analysts guessing that Tesla may just be glorified acquisition bait, with no chance of remaining independent. Who might be interested in buying the company? Look no further than its current partners and investors Daimler and Toyota, the experts say.

The core of this argument is that Tesla isn’t so much a car company as it is a technology company. When you boil down its business plan, the only component that’s special is its electric drive train. It could credibly sell only battery packs — like the ones it’s already assembling for Daimler — and its drive trains, as it might to Toyota, and probably still bring in substantial revenue. In striving to be a full-on automotive company, it’s facing unbeatable competition and a bundle of bureaucracy and red tape that it has no experience navigating, analysts say.

The rapid dip in stock price suggests that this fate isn’t so unlikely, despite the lofty dreams and fierce protestations of CEO Musk and his team.

In a VentureBeat interview with Alan Salzman, CEO of VantagePoint Venture Partners — the biggest venture investor in Tesla — he said he hopes Tesla’s rise to prominence will act as a catalyst for the automotive industry at large to migrate toward electric transportation infrastructure. And it’s arguable that it already has, hastening rivals like the Nissan Leaf and General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt to market.

Salzman didn’t say anything about Tesla remaining independent and becoming the next Ford as a measure of its success. In fact, its technology might be more influential if it is absorbed by a bigger player that can take it to mass commercial scale and alter the way everyone in the game makes cars going forward.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors

The portal for the interview, Google’s CitizenTube, allowed users to submit questions via Google Moderator so that they could be voted up or down by subsequent viewers. In all, 520 questions were submitted — some over video — by 931 people throughout the U.S., and 11,281 votes were cast to crowd-source the best selections.

Interviewed by PBS’s Ray Suarez, Dudley came across even-handed and contrite — almost sympathetic. The organization he heads up was created following BP’s meeting with President Barack Obama, when it became clear that the cleanup and response efforts were too complex and needed their own dedicated resources, Dudley said.

That means he is in charge of everything from determining how the disaster occurred in the first place — a mysterious compound failure involving almost every aspect of the failed rig — to capping the leak, to responding to the environmental, health and socioeconomic damage that has occurred in the region.

While a lot of his answers simply reiterated the company’s public position, there were several highlights providing new information, and even influencing how BP will proceed from this point:

- Dudley says he has actually not seen the popular coffee spill parody of the BP disaster that has earned 8.5 million page views on YouTube. This is somewhat hard to believe. It’s even harder to believe Dudley’s response that everyone involved already feels bad about what happened, and that this kind of criticism isn’t necessarily productive. Based on some of the vitriol I’ve seen around the web, the now famous parody is hardly anything.

- Hurricane Alex has made the cleanup efforts far more complicated, preventing surface skimming, stalling the use of dispersant chemicals, and making it too dangerous for crews to work around the clock. Dudley predicts that its strategy will start to remove upwards of 43,000 barrels of oil — instead of the current 23,000 barrels — from the water starting on July 8, when waters are predicted to calm.

- BP has been making a major push to employ local people in its relief and restoration initiatives. “It’s our objective and policy to hire as many local people as we can,” Dudley says, adding that the company had discouraged workers from coming from other parts of the country and has taken measures to prevent the use of boats from outside the region. He says BP is aware that many people have lost their jobs as a consequence of the spill, and it will do whatever it can to provide new jobs in reparation.

- BP has been conducting deep-water drilling operations extending as deep as 20,000 feet in the Gulf of Mexico for more than 20 years, and this is the first time it has had a major problem. So when it comes to suspending deep-water rigs, Dudley doesn’t think this is a practical solution, especially if BP is to remain a viable, and growing corporation. That said, BP is prepared to sell off some of its other assets around the world to meet its financial commitments resulting from the spill, he says.

- The chemical dispersant being used to degrade the oil in the water, called Corexit, has been certified by the EPA to be non-toxic. But it has never been used in such high volumes and concentrations before. The ramifications to people’s health and wildlife are largely unknown and unpredictable. Dudley said nothing to allay these fears, offering only that BP would spend as much time and money as it takes to repair any long-term effects from its use. Using the Exxon Valdez spill as an example — albeit a more modestly-sized one — these health claims are still popping up 21 years after the fact.

- According to Dudley, journalists have not been turned away from speaking to cleanup workers and company officials. He says he has seen interviews where people have declined to speak, claiming that the company has issued a gag order, but that they are unclear on the media policy. There has been no action taken to silence people, whatsoever, he says. In fact, the confusion has prompted the company to distribute cards to everyone in the Gulf explaining the company’s media policy so that they feel comfortable speaking to reporters.

- There is a demand for better web-based communications between BP and the public. Several people submitted questions complaining about the vagueness of BP’s blog and news updates and the low resolution and opaque-nature of its video feed from the site of the spill. Dudley seemed to take these concerns to heart, pledging to take another look at these resources to see if they can be improved.

“We have had a camera there looking at the spill from the very beginning,” he said. “I’m sure there are some very strange things happening on screen from time to time that people can’t follow, but we’re working on putting bubbled captions on there explaining what people are seeing.”

He added that engineers may be recruited to explain to people exactly what is going on on the video feed at any given time.

It’s interesting how much the internet and its diverse tools have impacted how a company like BP chooses to respond to and communicate with the public. These sorts of things probably wouldn’t have been a primary concern for people even two to three years ago, but now there’s little excuse for a company of BP’s size not to be using these outlets and channels to its advantage.

Dudley’s decision to submit to a candid interview via some of the most popular outlets on the web is a good start, but it’s clear that the company has a long way to go before critics, and even casual observers stop pounding on its doors.

Tags: oil spill

Companies: BP, Google, YouTube

The first quarter of 2010 saw a record number of cleantech deals: 192. So compared to that, the Q2 figures are a little lackluster, but still 43 percent higher than those from Q2 last year.

The report also noted a few trends shaping venture capital involvement in the sector. Perhaps most significantly, more funding is coming from major corporations looking to grow their presence in the green technology movement. General Electric, Chevron, Intel, IBM and Cisco Systems have all played a major role in helping solar, smart grid, wind, biofuel and even water startups achieve scale. Corporate investments jumped to $5.1 billion, a 325 percent increase from last year.

On top of that, power purchase agreements between utilities and solar, wind and other alternative energy companies became a much more common practice — predictable with so much new renewable energy generation connecting to the grid. The report states that the number of power purchase agreements rose 148 percent from 621 megawatts under contract to 1,539 megawatts between this year and last. With so many utilities needing to hit renewable energy mandates by nearing deadlines, this figure will no doubt continue to rise.

Here’s how the data broke down across the sector in Q2:

- Solar led with $811 million invested across 26 deals. The number got a big boost from the $150 million raised by solar thermal company BrightSource Energy, and the $129.4 million led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in concentrated solar outfit Amonix.

- Biofuels came in a distant second with $302 million across 13 deals. Amyris Biotechnologies is the vanguard in this arena, raising more than $105 million in two separate rounds and filing to go public.

- Smart grid companies bagged $256 million across 11 deals, led by the $165 million raised by Swiss smart meter maker Landis+Gyr. Home energy management system company OpenPeak also brought in a massive $52 million to bring efficiency tools to residential markets.

- Energy efficiency businesses took in $147 million across 31 deals. Clearly the most capital-efficient area of the sector — including mostly software and web-based application makers — energy efficiency got its biggest boost from investments in LED development, including $11.4 million for a startup called Nualight.

Around the world, 19 clean technology companies successfully went public, generating $2.31 billion dollars — an 18 percent increase from Q4 of 2009. Most of these sales occurred in China, with only three in North America. The biggest contributor to the $304 million made from IPOs in the U.S. and Canada: Tesla Motors, which raked in $226 million on Tuesday.

For the most part, the usual suspects in the venture community participated the most this quarter, including Kleiner Perkins, which invested in four rounds, and Khosla Ventures, which invested in three. But the winner, somewhat surprisingly, turned out to be U.K.-based Carbon Trust Investment Partners, with six deals under its belt this quarter.

Tags: cleantech

Tesla’s on a roll, it seems. Two days after its successful public stock offering, the company has released details of the latest updates to its Roadster electric sports car–known as “Roadster 2.5″ after software-release numbering.

The 2.5 version sports some new styling at front and rear, including a new front fascia (the grille-and-bumper area) that incorporates diffusing vents. There’s also a different rear air diffuser that reflects, says the company, “the future of Tesla design.”

The changes come, Tesla says, as the result of its “close feedback loop” with its customers. “These improvements are a direct result of customer feedback,” says CEO Elon Musk. In other words, they’re fixing things that buyers have probably complained about.

Other updates include new “directional” forged wheels, offered in black or silver;

Inside, the most significant alteration is undoubtedly more comfortable seats, which have larger bolsters and now include a lumbar support system. Interior noise has been reduced in several ways, including new sound-suppressing front fender liners.

There’s now an optional backup camera in a 7-inch touchscreen display as well.

Finally, Tesla has further modified the Roadster’s power-control system, adding unspecified hardware to permit “spirited driving” (which we presume means maximum electric power) in exceptionally hot climates.

The company is now taking orders for the 2011 Tesla Roadster 2.5, and it will appear shortly in Tesla’s network of stores in the U.S. and overseas. “Where feasible,” according to Musk, “we will also offer existing customers the ability to purchase the upgrades.”

Its two newest Tesla Stores–in Newport Beach, California, and Copenhagen, Denmark–will open with evening receptions. Both will have the Roadster 2.5 on display.

Tesla has now sold more than 1,200 Roadsters to buyers in 23 countries. It claims the cars have logged a total of more than 5 million miles. Questions remain, however, over whether the company can remain independent even after its IPO.

Here are more shots of the new car:

Written by John Voelcker, this post originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors

More and more startups are chasing the biofuels bandwagon these days, spending millions in capital on refineries and plants to churn out gallons of automotive and jet fuels made from feedstocks like algae, switch grass, and even greenhouse gas emissions. Names like LS9, Mascoma, and Coskata all seem to be working toward the same goal but gaining little traction.

What doesn’t get much note is that most of these companies are using the same techniques — micro-organisms and catalysts — to convert feedstocks into green chemicals suited for cleaning, pharmaceutical creation and other industrial purposes. These market have proved to be much bigger, and are already growing rapidly, generating cash to support the pursuit of less lucrative biofuels.

Siluria, however, is focusing on the chemical business. Formerly part of a startup called Cambrios Technologies, its specialty is using genetically-modified microorganisms that digest natural gas and secrete ethylene — an ingredient in plastic films, lubricants, antifreeze, rubber tires, footwear, and more. Occasionally, it is used in the biotech world as a hormone and to accelerate the ripening of produce like tomatoes, bananas and apples.

Right now, about 140 million tons of ethylene are used every year, representing a $160 billion market. Siluria says its catalysts are capable of reducing the time, energy and money needed to produce the reactions that create the compound. But it’s also experimenting with the unknown.

The processes the company uses can create thousands of genetically distinct organisms every day by changing the texture of their surfaces, each of which secrete slightly different byproducts that could be used for yet undetermined applications. Some of the bugs being studied originated in a lab at MIT led by Angela Belcher, where they successfully produced materials for batteries and semiconductors.

The key here is that all of these reactions use natural gas as a feedstock. It’s plentiful, cheap, and needs to be funneled into more applications that don’t produce harmful emissions.

San Francisco-based Siluria previously raised $3.3 million in venture funding from Alloy Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, Lux Capital, Harris & Harris, and Altitude Life Sciences in addition to Kleiner Perkins.

Tags: biochemicals

Companies: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Siluria Technologies

It was Ford Motor Company. The year was 1956.

Perhaps buyers of Tesla Motors stock were optimistic because they had little context to assess the company. Tesla’s stock soared from its offering price of $17 to close at $23.89 by the end of yesterday, meaning Tesla Motors is now worth $2.2 billion.

Not bad for a company that’s sold just over 1,000 cars and lost almost $300 million in its seven-year life.

“The hard work starts now”

Now what? We asked a pair of industry analysts to react to the results of Tesla’s IPO and offer their opinions on what lies ahead for Tesla Motors over the next two or three years.

Two themes emerged:  First, in the word’s of PRTM’s Oliver Hazimeh, “The hard work starts now.” Tesla has more than a few hurdles ahead in getting its Model S electric sports sedan into production by 2012 (or perhaps later).

Second, neither analyst expected Tesla to remain independent.

Both agreed that the brand’s only long-term future lay in being acquired by an existing global automaker that offered the manufacturing expertise, component sets, and economies of scale Tesla desperately needs to have any hope of future profitability.

“Not a car company”

Aaron Bragman, of IHS Global Insight, closely follows auto-industry news and uses his firm’s econometric models to project vehicle demand into the future and comment on current events.

He says he’s “not all that bullish on their prospects as a business case,” and adds bluntly, “Tesla’s not a car company; they have no expertise in automaking,” since Lotus did much of the fundamental design work on the 2010 Tesla Roadster electric supercar.

Lotus also builds that car for Tesla, which claims the Model S midsize electric sports sedan it hopes to launch by the end of 2012 will be a clean-sheet design, using a basic platform that can be adapted for a variety of models, including a cabriolet, a crossover/SUV, even a van.

Competition at their heels

Oliver Hazimeh, of PRTM, covers the supply chain for the components of electric-drive vehicles–lithium-ion cells, electric motors, power electronics–as well as assessing the many market demand projections made by others.

He notes that Tesla remains a tiny niche player in the competitive global luxury car market. Unlike the Roadster’s first-in-the-world position, he adds, the Model S will face all-electric entries from several global competitors by the time it arrives in 2012 or 2013.

One challenge, he suggests, is for Tesla to figure out “what it wants to be when it grows up” in, say, 10 years. It has “quite a bit of brand equity” already, but it needs to understand how to position itself: Is it a tiny-volume player? An early-adopter icon? Or can it really ramp up to sell hundreds of thousands or millions of electric cars a decade hence?

The second challenge is how the company will achieve the economies of scale to let it make money on volumes of 20,000 Model S cars a year. “At the end of the day,” says Hazimeh, “what saved their IPO was the Toyota deal.”

New partner Toyota clearly offers a wealth of manufacturing expertise, product engineering skills, and a global parts bin second to none, all of which Tesla desperately needs.

“How do you take that to Tokyo?”

The problem is that so far, no one outside the company understands the extent and terms of the Toyota-Tesla partnership.

The most cynical explanation is that Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla,  gets back $42 million for its Fremont, California, assembly plant, and rids itself of ugly political fallout from closing the last car plant in a state where it sells huge numbers of cars.

And how Tesla’s self-assured and volatile CEO Elon Musk will interact with Toyota’s grey-suited executives remains to be seen. Musk’s behavior is well-known but, as Hazimeh asks, “How do you take that to Tokyo?”

The Tesla saga will undoubtedly produce many twists and turns in future. But it’s hard to find a single auto analyst who believes Tesla has any hope of growing as an independent automaker; the capital needs, economies of scale, and low margins of the global industry pose hurdles the company is too small and too under-capitalized to overcome.

Meanwhile, in late-day trading, the stock stayed at roughly the previous day’s price after having risen above $30 a share.

Written by John Voelcker, this post originally appeared on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors, Toyota

Fisker’s story closely parallel’s Tesla’s. Both companies initially unveiled luxury sports cars: Tesla’s Roadster, released in December 2009, versus Fisker’s hybrid Karma, due out by the end of 2010. They both announced plans for a more affordable, middle-class sedan: Tesla’s Model S versus Fisker’s Project Nina. And they both landed massive loans from the U.S. Department of Energy: $465 million for Tesla and $529 million for Fisker.

Following its public sale, Tesla will move to re-open the shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont, Calif., a facility formerly co-owned and operated by General Motors and Toyota. And now Fisker — still far from an IPO, but certainly sizing up the possibility — will be converting its own old car factory, a vacated General Motors plant in Delaware, to get Project Nina up and running.

The company just got permission from the court to acquire the 3.2 million-square-foot facility for $20 million. This step was necessary because Fisker is technically buying the property from an entity called the Motors Liquidation Company, made up of all the assets General Motors said it would unload following its bankruptcy and federal bailout.

There is still a lot of red tape to be hacked through, but Fisker’s ultimate plan for the plant is to produce 100,000 plug-in sedans, priced around $47,400 each, every year shortly after manufacturing comes online in 2012. It expects to employ 2,000 workers.

How does this stack up against Tesla’s new digs? NUMMI is about 5 million-square-feet, it sold for $42 million, and has the capacity to churn out 500,000 cars every year. So while Fisker seems to have gotten the better deal space-wise ($6.25 per square foot versus $8.40), Tesla would theoretically be able to produce five times as many cars.

That said, Tesla has been very clear that it only plans to build 20,000 Model S sedans at NUMMI, with the rest of the capacity being saved for either a line of cars built in tandem with Toyota, or a line of cars (including a cabriolet, van and SUV), based on the architecture of the Model S. Both of these plans are still theoretical, predicted to come to fruition in 2014 or 2015, if at all.

Fisker, on the other hand, fully intends to be building 100,000 Project Nina sedans a year within the next five years. It already has the goal to sell 15,000 units of its hybrid Karma sports car by the end of 2011 for $87,500 each. This is a pretty ambitious goal, considering that Tesla was only able to sell a little over 1,000 units of its $109,000 Roadster in the year and a half since its launch.

Fisker will pay for the new plant in Wilmington, Del. with its $529 million low-interest loan from the government, received in September 2009. The company expects to put $175 million into the facility every year for the next three years.

In the meantime, the company has transformed its website into a countdown to a new unveiling, perhaps containing never-before-seen details about Project Nina vehicles, as well as the Karma. The timer expires tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Companies: Fisker Automotive, Tesla Motors

This is the first time that any senior executive at BP has taken questions since the spill began.

Dudley will speak directly from BP headquarters in Houston during the session, moderated by PBS host Ray Suarez. Questions are expected to pour in regarding solutions to the spill — which has been ongoing for the last 71 days — how BP should be held accountable for its role in the disaster, what the company will do to repair and reclaim the surrounding environment, how the U.S. government should respond, and how it will approach deep-water drilling operations in the future.

Users can already submit questions through YouTube’s CitizenTube portal. The site uses a tool called Google Moderator to deliver questions to the people being recorded in real-time. Viewers can also vote questions up and down so that the crowd favorites are asked.

So far, 39 questions have been submitted by 65 people, and 380 votes have been cast. Queries already listed include:

- “Many incredible minds in this country have submitted intelligent ideas to stop the oil leak. Why have none of them been tried?”

- “While other companies, such as Exxon, have relatively impeccable records with regards to regulatory violations, BP stands out as a habitual offender, some reports suggesting that your ratio to other companies is 100/1. How do you account for this?”

- “Is BP standing by your CEO’s promise to clean up ‘every drop’?”

- “Why isn’t BP charged with animal cruelty yet?”

As you can see, it’s going to be a pretty tough crowd.

Google and YouTube have been working to make footage of and related to the oil spill available and easy to find for the public. Soon after the spill came to light, YouTube and the PBS NewsHour teamed up to livestream the gusher. Earlier this month, the internet video site streamed President Barack Obama’s address on the situation through CitizenTube, and allowed viewers to ask real-time questions to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

PBS says that some of the footage from tomorrow’s broadcast will be used during the televised program that evening. YouTube will probably host more of these types of events as the oil spill persists unchecked, and in the future around other major news items.

Here’s Ray Suarez’s intro to the event:

Companies: BP, Google, YouTube

As you can imagine, he was pretty pleased yesterday, watching Tesla’s stock close 40.5 percent above its initial pricing of $17. His firm offered 238,748 of its 7.13 million shares (about 9 percent of the company) in the sale, raking in a little over $4 million. But Salzman dodged congratulations on the lucrative exit.

“Getting congratulated on something like this is like a man being congratulated when his wife gives birth,” he said, passing credit to the team that built the company, particularly in the early days, when VantagePoint first invested in 2006.

But Salzman seems sincerely less enthusiastic about the payoff than he is about what Tesla’s technology might accomplish.

“What I hope is that Tesla’s success reflects the public’s enthusiasm for electric vehicles more broadly,” he said. “Look at the oil spill in the gulf, the difficulties in passing climate legislation and the asinine assault on AB 32 [the California Assembly bill that would establish a price for carbon]. You see this sea of despair, but the reaction to Tesla is a positive beacon.”

As Salzman sees it, it’s impossible to connect Tesla’s current performance — its losses and slow sales (which he readily acknowledges) — with its now massive $2.2 billion valuation, without recognizing the company as the vanguard of major changes in transportation yet to come.

But how did VantagePoint spot this potential four years ago, when Tesla didn’t have any tangible products, and none of the sex appeal? Salzman’s answer: It didn’t. In fact, in early discussions about the company, many at the firm worried that Tesla would be to VPVP what the Segway was to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers: a funding sink hole that has become more of a punchline than a product.

“Our view and analysis gave us some confidence that you could make an EV using off-the-shelf components — that the technology had gotten to the point where it was possible to do what Detroit was still saying was impossible,” Salzman said. “We invested in Tesla because we believed the Roadster could be done [the company's first, $109,000 electric vehicles], and that once it was done, it would no longer be possible for the rest of the automotive industry to deny its existence.”

At the time, Salzman hoped the company would become an industry catalyst, just like Ford’s Model-T was at the start of the 1900s. Just like Ford, Tesla is not the first in its field, but it has a chance to lead a wave of new electric transportation infrastructure — the same way Ford led the wave of mass production in the U.S.

And lo and behold, Tesla has already become this catalyst, in Salzman’s opinion.

“It’s no coincidence that from the day the first Roadster rolled onto the street, it took no more than three years for Nissan to debut the Leaf [its all-electric vehicle] for less than $25,000,” he said. “Certainly the speed with which the Leaf has appeared was directly impacted by Tesla. I mean, if a bunch of Silicon Valley engineering types can put out a car like the Roadster, why can’t the major automotive makers? The answer is, they can, and now they will.”

But Tesla’s electric vehicle technology isn’t just a harbinger of change for existing carmakers — it’s a call to action for everyone involved in transportation infrastructure, particularly fueling companies. This attitude gave birth to one of VantagePoint’s newest, high-profile investments: Better Place.

Based down the road from Tesla in Palo Alto, Calif., Better Place is working to roll out a new type of fueling station for the forthcoming droves of plug-in cars: a station where you can switch out your depleted lithium-ion battery for a fully-charged unit and continue on your way.

“After we invested in Tesla, we thought long and hard about the missing links needed to make EVs broadly popular,” Salzman said. “Better Place is about providing the systems and environment to make owning an EV a seamless, simple experience. Basically, Better Place is to Tesla what iTunes was to mp3 players.”

This model would give carmakers from Tesla to Nissan to General Motors the permission to shrink the massive, unwieldy and expensive lithium-ion battery packs they are currently installing, Salzman explained. As it stands, batteries contribute more to both the weight and the price of most plug-in cars, while simultaneously reducing their range and speed.

“Our approach to cleantech is to invest in accelerating the inevitable. Solving this problem is inevitable,” he said.

Another Salzman inevitability: the transition to a completely electric transportation system. Why? Because it would actually be cheaper, he claimed, while sketching out some rough math.

Basically, it takes 0.25 kilowatt-hours to travel 1 mile in an EV. One kilowatt-costs an average of 11 cents in both the U.S. and Europe — that’s less than 3 cents a mile. The average internal combustion engine vehicle gets about 20 miles per gallon of gasoline. Assuming a gallon costs $3, every mile driven costs 15 cents. Based on this logic, driving an EV saves you a surprising 12 cents per mile. At this rate, a battery pack could pay for itself after less than 100,000 miles.

On top of that, making and maintaining EVs is less expensive than internal combustion cars too, Salzman said. They are usually smaller and lighter, requiring less material, and engaging fewer components that could degrade or break.

But if all this is true, why are so many people balking at the slightly higher price tags on plug-in vehicles? According to Salzman, consumers are still stymied by upfront costs. In his view, including the price of the battery in the overall price of an EV is like including the cost of 10-years-worth of gas in the price of any internal combustion engine car.

“If you can amortize the cost of the battery over the duration of an EV’s life — just like we do with gas today — you will see that electrifying transportation is way cheaper,” Salzman said. “This is Better Place’s model.”

But transportation isn’t the only area of cleantech where VantagePoint and Salzman want to upend a dying, monolithic industry. The firm’s other major green play is in lighting — highly energy efficient and long-lasting light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that are only now beginning to be used for general illumination (they have already become popular choices for backlighting television and computer screens).

“Here you have another antiquated industry using products developed centuries ago that sucks 22 percent of the electricity generated in North America and Europe,” Salzman said. “LEDs are 85 percent more efficient — creating enormous savings in electricity and money.”

When asked how LEDs, which remain costly at $50 to $60 per bulb (and there are very few bulbs that are bright enough on the market), can possibly challenge cheap, efficient compact fluorescents, Salzman had a snappy comeback:

“The quality of light is terrible and they contain toxic amounts of mercury. The saying is ‘Save money, live better,’ not ‘Save money, die sooner.’”

That said, most consumers don’t care about these issues as much as their budgets. That’s why LED makers need to drop prices fast. Even a bulb price of $25 — while higher than competitors on the market today — could go a long way toward wider adoption of LEDs. All of a sudden, buying a bulb that can last 10 years (versus the 2 to 3 year duration of CFLs and incandescents) starts to make more sense at that price point, Salzman said. Within a decade, he expects all general lighting to have switched over to LEDs.

The big challenge for the startups in this business, like VantagePoint portfolio companies BridgeLux, glo AB, and Huga Optotech, is that so many huge, traditional lighting makers are getting involved in LED technology too. Both General Electric and Philips recently announced the development of LED bulbs equivalent to 40 to 60-watt incandescents.

But Salzman is unfazed.

“In the 1980s, you had a bunch of giants in computing like NCR, Wang and even Honeywell, but then these little PCs popped up radically changing the industry and leading to the demise of huge Fortune 100 companies,” he said. “When Amgen and Genentech started no one thought they stood a chance against the likes of Merck and Pfizer, but today the pharmaceutical industry has been transformed into a biotech industry. We’ve all seen it happen.”

In fact this David vs. Goliath storyline is something VantagePoint boldly pursues as part of its cleantech strategy. Just look at its investments in unique wind design firm FloDesign Wind Turbine, next-gen fuel maker Cobalt Biofuels, advanced battery maker Premium Power, and more. Almost all of its cleantech portfolio companies are carving out niches in areas with powerful incumbents.

Still, Salzman is unwaveringly certain that the sector will see its own Google, Amazon or Cisco Systems emerge in the next several years.

In the meantime, there is nothing wrong with partnering with the big players in order to get the little guys some traction. This is something the VantagePoint team also proactively encourages. We saw it with Tesla signing deals with Daimler and Toyota. BrightSource Energy, the firm’s major solar investment, is getting a hand from Chevron, Bechtel, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric. Partnerships like these have become a very effective way for cleantech companies to drive up scale and volume while driving down costs.

VantagePoint, like the other big firms staking claims in green — Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures chief among them — is not shying away from capital-intensive deals, despite trends in the venture industry. It’s sticking with companies, despite high manufacturing costs and years of development, because it sees the opportunity for massive returns on good ideas, Salzman said.

Tesla seems to fall into this category for VantagePoint. But is it too early to see the company’s success as a good sign for the cleantech sector in general? Salzman thinks so.

“I hope Tesla demonstrates the enthusiasm that exists for novel green and clean technologies that have the ability to scale into big businesses,” he said. “But right now it’s a single data point. As much as I would like to put a positive spin on it all, it’s going too far to think that this is the start of the trend. So far, Tesla is unique.”

Companies: Better Place, Tesla Motors, VantagePoint Venture Partners

Village Green Global offers carbon accounting software called SMARTweb (pictured above); Greenopia analyzes the sustainability of lifestyle products and services; and Green Globe International administers green certification and benchmarking programs. Together, they plan to launch an end-to-end solution for small businesses that want to be environmentally responsible but don’t know where to start.

According to a Gallup poll taken last year, the weak economy has discouraged small business owners from taking green steps. Only about 27 percent said they would absorb extra costs to be more eco-friendly. That said, 73 percent responded that they would go green to boost their public image, 69 percent said it would attract more customers and increase revenue, and 59 percent recognized that it would eventually reduce their costs.

But there are other, lesser-known reasons why small businesses should take sustainable practices into consideration: tax deductions, loans and grants available through state and even local government initiatives, and green building incentives for construction projects like fee waivers and fast-tracked permitting. The joint venture announced today plans to help its customers take advantage of these perks.

Starting in mid-July, Village Green will be offering its SMARTweb software to Greenopia subscribers at a discounted rate. In addition to tracking enterprises’ environmental footprints, the tool makes recommendations for products and strategies that can up sustainability and shave energy costs. Village Green says the software can create savings up to 15 percent.

So far, SMARTweb — able to calculate the footprints of 30,000 devices — has been used to complete 6,000 environmental audits.

Earlier this month, Village Green signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Green Globe International to use the Green Globe Baseline Standard in its software. That way clients that comply with SMARTweb suggestions can be sure they are hitting an important certification standard.

Now when Greenopia, which brings 25,000 subscribers to the table, assesses environmental factors for small businesses, it can also provide options for how they can act on the findings, and directly demonstrate how much money they stand to make by implementing changes — like adding insulation, caulking windows, switching vendors, or taking billing digital.

Companies: Green Globe International, Green Village Global, Greenopia

Tesla Motors‘ IPO trumped even the most bullish of expectations today, selling 13.3 million shares for $226.1 million and earning a valuation above $2.2 billion.

Initially priced at $17 last night, the company’s shares started trading this morning at $19, and hit $23.89 by the time the market closed — an impressive 40.5 percent increase. It’s since increased to $24 during after-hours trading.

This is a huge victory for the company, its CEO Elon Musk (who celebrated by ringing the Nasdaq’s opening bell and posing with a Tesla Roadster in Times Square), and its flock of investors. Here’s a quick look at who got what in the sale (according to S-1 figures):

- The company itself sold 11.9 million shares, reaping $202.3 million

- Elon Musk sold 909,212 shares for about $15.5 million

- VantagePoint Venture Partners (the first venture capital firm to back Tesla) sold 88,586 shares for $1.5 million

- Bay Area Equity Fund sold 88,586 for $1.5 million

- Westly Capital Partners sold 72,625 shares for $1.2 million

- Compass Venture Partners sold 22,931 shares for $389,827

- Riverwood Capital sold 11,219 shares for $190,723

- Vertical Fund sold 3,156 for $53,652

- Kimbal Musk (Elon Musk’s brother who also sits on Tesla’s board of directors) sold 12,692 shares for $215,764

Other major stakeholders absent from this list, like Daimler, Aabar Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t put any of their shares up for offer in the IPO.

The question cleantech observers are asking now is whether Tesla’s success will make the public markets friendlier to green companies in general. But most industry analysts say no.

Basically, Tesla is an aberration. After all, the company’s stock spiked on the same day that both the Nasdaq and S&P bottomed out at their lowest levels all year. This is practically unheard of.

Tesla’s products (both the Roadster and forthcoming Model S sedan), unlike those made by other green technology companies, are consumer-facing, extremely sexy and tangible. They appeal to an established love of cars, and inspire people to look to a brighter future. This image and its dutiful marketing are mostly responsible for Tesla’s explosive debut.

The public simply doesn’t feel the same way about solar panels, smart grid technologies or biofuels. They seem too removed from everyday life. This is one of the chief reasons that cylindrical solar cell maker Solyndra’s IPO couldn’t make it to market: it didn’t have the investor interest it needed to survive such a dim market.

“We have a fascination with vehicles in this country, which I’m sure aided in the company’s success in the IPO,” says Nat Goldhaber, managing partner at Claremont Creek Ventures, which specializes in smaller IT startups in the green sector. “When you look at Solyndra you can see why they did what they did because the market was sour. But you couldn’t have had a more sour day than today, and Tesla still did well.”

So Tesla’s hot debut probably won’t thaw the IPO market for most other green plays. However, there are still some lessons here about how other cleantech companies should position themselves, Goldhaber says. For example, Tesla was wise to team up with Daimler and Toyota.

“I think Tesla’s success or lack of success will rest on its ability to continue to provide power packs or the intellectual property for the construction of power packs for electric vehicles built by other companies,” he says. “I think it’s much more important that it has deals with Daimler and Toyota than its development of the Model S. If they have stable, defensible IP in this area, I think they could have a sustainable advantage in the industry.”

Goldhaber identifies Silver Spring Networks, a venture-backed company that provides wireless communications for smart grid applications, as a cleantech contender that could follow in Tesla’s footsteps. With valuable IP and partnerships with General Electric, EnerNOC, Cisco Systems and Itron, in its arsenal, it has everything it needs (except perhaps the sex appeal) to see a lucrative IPO this year or next.

[Image via The Los Angeles Times]

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Claremont Creek Ventures, Solyndra, Tesla Motors

As of 20 minutes before 4 p.m. EST, the stock price was hovering between $21 and $22. It shot up above $23 in the last few minutes of trading, indicating delayed interest from investors not wanting to miss out on what has become one of the hottest picks on the market.

The closing price point pushes Tesla’s valuation to $2.2 billion, beating the company’s original goal of $1.4 billion by a long long shot.

Stay tuned for an accounting of how much each of Tesla’s private investors got in today’s sale. Big winners include VantagePoint Venture Partners, the company’s very first venture capital backer, Valor Equity Parnters, and of course CEO Elon Musk, who rang the bell opening the Nasdaq this morning.

Tesla was a rare bright spot in an otherwise dark market. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 85.47 points (3.85 percent) over the course of the day.

Companies: Tesla Motors

The electric car company seems to be defying gravity on several levels. The market is miserable today, with the Dow Jones Industrial average dropping 293 points (2.9 percent). The Nasdaq Composite Index is down 89 points (4 percent). But Tesla is still climbing.

The elevated stock price is consistent with analyst predictions that the IPO would pop on its first day, with prices trailing off several days to a week later after the excitement has died down. Even before the stock was priced yesterday, intense investor interest and media buzz suggested that the company would fare well on its first day.

One of the big questions coming out of today’s sale is whether Tesla’s success bodes well for the cleantech sector in general. Green companies have been having a tough time on the public markets recently, with both biofuel maker Codexis and solar module maker Jinko Solar seeing tepid sales.

For now, it looks like Tesla is a big exception that won’t have any bearing on the performance of other green companies in areas like solar, wind, biofuels and the smart grid. The company is different in many respects. Not least among them: you can’t equate a crystalline silicon solar panel with a sexy sports car, no matter how slick it looks.

Companies: Tesla Motors

The startup offers programs so that homeowners can choose whether to pay for pricey rooftop solar systems upfront (a steep price tag exceeding $20,000), or in subsequent, more affordable monthly payments. That is the heart of the company’s business model, but it is also developing software solutions that help contractors optimize rooftop solar installations, ensuring that end customers are getting enough bang for their buck.

SunRun has done an impressive job of raising capital in a young market. It had previously raised $85 million in venture capital alone from prestigious firms like Foundation Capital and Accel Partners. That doesn’t count the $90 million in tax equity it brought in late last year from U.S. Bancorp. The company doesn’t lack for resources or runway these days.

The deal with PG&E gives SunRun the opportunity to finance solar systems for 3,500 new customers across five states covered by the utility. Not only that, the company will be helping to install and maintain the panels, selling the energy generated to the homeowners and splitting the revenue with PG&E.

These homeowners have incentive to use the company’s services: its payment plans allow for flat fees over the course of 18 years, allowing customers to avoid inevitable electricity rate hikes. They also don’t have to worry about the panels at all once they are installed.

SunRun says the recent $55 million will be used to meet the rapidly increasing demand for it programs and products and to expand into new markets in the U.S. Right now, it has about 4,500 customers in California, Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

On top of that, the new financing, particularly with Sequoia’s name attached, will give SunRun even more of an edge over its most formidable competitor, SolarCity — another residential solar financing firm backed by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, among others.

Founded just three years ago, SunRun has raised $175 million to date.

Companies: Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, Sequoia Capital, Sunrun

Tesla’s debut marked the first IPO of an automaker in the U.S. since Ford’s 54 years ago. The company’s stock priced at $17 a share last night, exceeding the expected range of $14 to $16, with the potential to rake in $226 million and value the company at $1.6 billion. After an IPO, underwriters have the challenge of matching investor demand with supply of shares to set an opening price for trading. In Tesla’s case, that didn’t register until more than two hours after Tesla CEO Elon Musk rang the bell to open the Nasdaq.

The question now becomes how Tesla will perform in the weeks and months to come. Almost universally, analysts have predicted the stock to soar during its first few days before dropping off as excitement fades and the reality about the company and where it stands with its products starts to sink in.

A key test for the company will be how investors react to its second-quarter earnings report, its first as a public company. Sales of Tesla’s sole product, the $109,000 Roadster, have been disappointing as the company has largely tapped the potential pool of superwealthy buyers. Tesla has generated some sales by expanding into new international markets, but the one-time sales generated by satisfying waiting lists country by country are unlikely to be repeated.

And Tesla’s key product, the $60,000 Model S sedan, isn’t due out until 2012 at the earliest.

Companies: Tesla, Tesla Motors

The networking giant has been on a mission to establish its dominance in the smart grid market for over a year. But it has only recently been making good on all its talk, launching what it calls its lineup of “Connected Grid Solutions.” In May, it launched a substation router and switch designed to facilitate wireless communication between smart energy meters, utilities, and household devices, including energy management dashboards.

The new interface, called the Cisco Home Energy Controller (pictured at right), is intended for residential use and comes in the form of a display with an LCD touchscreen. Through this dashboard, users can view how much energy is being used in their homes, where it is going, and how much it is costing them in real time. The idea is that access to this data will encourage people to change their energy consumption behavior.

But there’s an interactive component too. The Controller will allow users to set energy rules and schedules for their households. For example, you could request that your refrigerator only make ice, or your plug-in vehicle only start to charge during off-peak hours when energy is at its cheapest. if you have a programmable thermostat, you could toggle it to turn the heat down late at night when everyone is in bed anyway.

The Home Energy Controller is designed to draw data from, and interact with smart thermostats, most smart appliances and water heaters, and wall sockets where wireless communication devices have been installed. To do this, it taps into a range of wireless protocols (so that it’s compatible with a number of brands and makes), including ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Encoder Receiver Technology (ERT).

The device will be available this summer in North America only, but you won’t see it on the shelves of Best Buy or Home Depot. Instead, utilities will be buying them and providing them to their customers as an additional service.

Making energy data available in a digestible format for average consumers is one thing. But Cisco also hopes that its home energy management solutions will give homeowners the information they need to work proactively with their utilities. After all, energy vendors like Pacific Gas & Electric here in Northern California, are launching more programs to help their customers reduce demand.

That’s why it’s also launching Cisco Energy Management Services — a complement to the Home Energy Controller that will allow utilities to aggregate and manage energy data collected from thousands of homes at once. This offering is designed to help utilities keep close tabs on demand, so they can respond quickly when it looks like demand will exceed supply, resulting in blackouts and other service disruptions. Duke Energy, based in North Carolina, will be one of the first utilities to try this out.

Both of these additions to the Connected Grid Solutions portfolio are intended for the residential market, but Cisco is also capitalizing on commercial smart grid opportunities by launching its Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager 6300. This platform allows building managers to centrally aggregate, monitor and manage energy use data from many buildings at once.

Like the Home Energy Controller, the Mediator Manager lets users set rules and schedules for across a number of facilities, increasing efficiency quickly and easily. Building managers can also view how each individual energy system is performing, including lighting, heating and air conditioning, server equipment and more. The idea is to save building operators the time and money they would otherwise spend on building-by-building maintenance.

The intro of these new smart grid products is significant for three reasons. First, Cisco’s entrance into home and commercial building energy management legitimizes this new industry. Just a few years ago, no one thought that presenting energy use data to consumers would make any difference in their behavior. But subsequent studies have shown that even just viewing this information can encourage homeowners to slash their energy use by up to 15 percent. Now it’s clear that there’s money to be made in this arena.

Second, Cisco’s new home dashboard has the potential to put a lot of smaller companies out of business. The home energy management space has been notoriously overcrowded for a while now, with startups like Tendril, Control4, AlertMe, People Power, and services like Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm, slugging it out for highly fragmented market share.

Enter Cisco, which has the manpower, capital, and capability to make most of these startup technologies obsolete. As a top provider of networking solutions, it offers an end-to-end system that can transmit and track energy data from appliances and other devices to smart meters to utilities and energy management dashboards. Now Cisco is making these dashboards too.

Third, the fact that utilities will be the ones to buy and distribute Cisco’s new devices underscores a trend toward energy vendors offering customers perks and additional services. It’s not just enough to deliver reliable electricity anymore. Especially with talk of deregulation and increased utility competition in the air, it’s suddenly critical for these companies to catch up and start treating their rate payers like paying customers.

Companies: Cisco Systems

No more flesh on Flash — The founder of well-known porn empire Digital Playground says that the site will be moving away from Adobe Flash as soon as HTML is fully supported by desktop browsers. ConceivablyTech identifies the porn industry as a surprising ally for Apple.

Google’s taking another run at social — After Buzz failed to impress, the search giant is trying again to leap into social networking, according to Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo. He says the company will be placing a higher priority on the project, dubbed “Google Me,” and dedicating more resources to ensure its success.

Google PowerMeter architect defects — Ed Lu, the long-time spokesman for Google’s PowerMeter and other energy efforts, has left the company to write a book on his experiences as an Astronaut before he joined the search company. What will this mean for the energy management tool’s business model?

PayPal with no strings — The online payment platform has announced that it will offer a new service for developers, allowing their apps to accept credit card payments without buyers first needing a PayPal account.

Facebook hits 60,000 servers — The social networking site’s servers now number above 60,000, twice the amount it had just six months ago, indicating the company’s rapid growth. The figure was estimated in a report just released by DataCenterKnowledge.

NYU launching venture fund — The university announced that it is starting a $20 million seed fund to identify promising technologies developed by students and to help them found their own startups. Here is the press release.

TechCrunch tunes in to TV — The technology news site has finally launched its television property, which will broadcast original programs featuring TechCrunch reporters discussing the day’s hottest news items. Relatively new hire Evelyn Rusli will be anchoring these conversations.

Froyo rolling out to Nexus Ones — Android 2.2 is being deployed over the air to all Nexus One smartphones. Users will receive a message on their phones’ notification bars that they can simply click to initiate the software update. The new edition comes with support for in-browser Adobe Flash and the ability to turn your phone into a wireless hotspot.

Xtreme Power bags $18M — The advanced battery maker has raised $18 million of an anticipated $29 million round of funding in order to churn out 2 gigawatts worth of grid-scale batteries on an annual basis. Earth2Tech has more.

Companies: Adobe, Digital Playground, Facebook, Google, paypal, techcrunch, Xtreme Power

With 13.3 million shares, or about 14 percent of the company, selling on the public market, the total take will be around $226 million. This is higher than the $178 million the company anticipated last week, and much much higher than the $100 million it originally filed for. The pricing sets its valuation at about $1.6 billion, beating even the company’s goal of $1.4 billion.

Existing shareholders will be selling 1.42 million shares, with the remaining 11.9 million being sold by the company itself.

It looks like the analysts who predicted Tesla to be a hot stock were right. Some dissenting voices thought that the IPO might be a bust considering recent public market trends in cleantech, and lingering doubts about the company’s long-term success. But they obviously underestimated the ability for sexy sports cars to stir investors’ hearts.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Tesla not only represents a breakthrough in automotive technology, it’s also making history as the first car company to go public in the U.S. since the Ford Motor Company in 1956. With this $17 victory, it has yet again earned its halo as the plug-in car player to watch.

Earlier today, we reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk will be selling close to a million of his own shares in the company, retaining 28.4 percent and a controlling interest in the company. He stands to personally rake in close to $16 million.

After tomorrow’s sale, Toyota will be buying $50 million worth of shares, as per the two companies’ agreement that also involved the electric car maker’s acquisition of the NUMMI automotive plant in Fremont, Calif.

Tesla previously raised $783 million, including both its $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, and venture capital from a bevy of sources, including VantagePoint Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Compass Technology Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, JP Morgan, Technology Venture Partners, and individuals like Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founding eBay president Jeff Skoll, and of course Musk himself. The IPO will tip the total amount raised into the billions.

So it looks like it will be a good first day out of the gate for Tesla. Whether the stock price will remain at this height for long is another matter, which we’ve explored extensively in other posts.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors

People: Elon Musk

The electric car maker just raised the bar on its IPO, slated for tomorrow, increasing the number of shares for sale from 11.1 million to 13.3 million. Shares are expected to price between $14 and $16, with the company’s valuation hovering around $1.5 billion.

The word on the street is that the stock is hot. Bankers and analysts alike are seeing a spike in retail investor interest, inspired mostly by hype and the objective sexiness of the vehicles themselves — both the $109,000 Roadster and the forthcoming $45,000 Model S sedan.

But even if Tesla has a blockbuster day tomorrow, there’s little guarantee that share prices will stay high. In fact, cleantech market trends all but dictate it won’t, and there are still towering hurdles standing between the company today and mass commercial success — hurdles it will have to leap in order to keep its shareholders happy.

So heads up, future investors: here are 10 of the most burning questions about the company and what it needs to do.

1. How will Tesla keep shareholders happy when its next product isn’t due out for two years?
Right now, Tesla is betting the farm on its all-electric sedan, the Model S. Problem is, it’s not due out until 2012, and if the delays the company experienced developing its Roadster (now on the market) are any indication, that deadline may get pushed back even further. In the meantime, the Roadster isn’t exactly carrying the operation. A little over 1,000 units have sold since its launch last year, and apparently only 10 cars are being sold every week at this point. How do you keep people excited about a company that’s basically pressing the pause button at the peak of its fame?

2. When will the company stop losing so much money?
Tesla has been around for seven years now, and it’s developed a couple of different revenue streams. In addition to its Roadster sales, it is also supplying battery packs to one of its major stakeholders, Daimler, to use in its electric models. You would think that losses would be shrinking, but this isn’t the case. In fact, they swelled from $16 million in Q1 of last year to $29.5 million in Q1 of this year. Now Tesla needs to shell out to get the NUMMI automotive plant — bought for $42 million — up and running, and to hire hundreds to thousands of new employees. Cutting losses doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

3. How is Tesla going to repay the government?
Tesla earned its stripes as the most promising electric vehicle company when it landed its $465 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy under the banner of its Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. This propelled it into the ranks of Ford and Nissan, which also won loans in that round, beating General Motors and Fisker Automotive. The loan is intended to cover 80 percent of Tesla’s new manufacturing operations, including NUMMI. The question is, how and when will the company be able to repay this loan?

4. How far will the company’s deal with Toyota go?
When the partnership between Tesla and the major Japanese automaker was first announced in May, the fanfare made it seem like they had a binding deal to create a new line of electric cars together. CEOs Elon Musk and Akio Toyoda stood next to each other and explained how Tesla would provide electric drive trains to bodies built by Toyota. But a week later, it came out that this part of the deal between the two companies — which also includes Toyota’s commitment to take a $50 million stake in Tesla after its IPO — was not so set in stone. In fact, some analysts believe that Toyota never had the intention to build a car with Tesla, that it just needed a nice green boost in its public image following its recall woes. But if the tandem car deal falls apart, how will Tesla, which only plans to build 20,000 Model S sedans at the NUMMI plant a year, take advantage of the facility’s capacity to churn out 500,000 cars a year?

5. What about its relationship with Daimler?
Daimler, the German auto maker known for its ownership of Mercedes-Benz, acquired a 10 percent stake in Tesla last May. The same deal gave Tesla access to Daimler’s commercial-scale production line technology. Before then, however, the two companies signed a contract for Tesla to provide 1,000 lithium-ion battery packs and chargers for Daimler’s Smart electric vehicles. Daimler has since sold 40 percent of its holdings in the company to Abu Dhabi-based firm Aabar investments. But Daimler will still be the second largest shareholder behind Musk after the IPO, with 8 percent of shares. The question is, how will its relationship with Tesla change now that Toyota is entering the picture? Will it hold onto its shares?

6. Will Tesla be able to rely on ZEV credits for added profits?
Under California’s Zero Emissions Vehicles Mandate, major car manufacturers must build a certain percentage of zero emission vehicles. This percentage is going to go up every two years. If companies cannot hit their targets, as none of them have in the past, they can buy credits from companies that are building zero-emission vehicles. Tesla has capitalized on this big time, selling credits to the likes of Honda and others. But now that all major automakers, like Nissan, Ford, GM and Mitsubishi, are coming out with their own plug-in vehicles, will there be enough demand for these credits? We hear Tesla is depending on selling every credit it is able to produce, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely — especially considering that it will have more competition in this area from companies like Fisker and Coda Automotive.

7. Will Tesla be able to hit its target of 20,000 Model S sedans?
As mentioned, Tesla’s long-term success seems to hinge on its ability to sell 20,000 units of the Model S when it comes out in 2012. None of the other cars it’s discussed theoretically, including the cabriolet, van and SUV it introduced during last week’s investor roadshow, are close to reality. If they happen, they will happen in 2014 or 2015. The problem is, Tesla only has about 50 retail locations worldwide, and those are the only locations where the cars are actually being sold. Yes, there are extensive plans to open up more showrooms, but again, where’s that money going to come from?

8. How will the Model S compete against the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf?
Tesla has captured the public’s interest for sure, but two other green cars have done a good job of generating buzz: General Motors’ Chevy Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf. Both of these cars are coming out before the end of 2010. They are both made by major automakers who have the manufacturing capacity and capital to support their long-term development and sales. And both are priced for average consumers. The Leaf, in fact, could cost below $20,000 in California after government rebates. This makes it competitive with regular cars on the road, not just the plug-in hybrid and electric models. How is Tesla supposed to compete with them when it’s trailing behind by two years and plans to sell the Model S for nearly $20,000 more?

9. Will Elon Musk be able to retain control?
As almost every article on Tesla notes, it is led by quite the colorful CEO. A co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk has set off to build things that most little boys only dream of: electric cars and rocket ships. That’s right, his is also currently CEO of Space X, one of the private companies pursuing manned spaceflight. How can he divide his attention between these two complex ventures? On top of that, he is notoriously detail oriented in his leadership strategy, leading to delays and disagreements with former colleagues, investors and others. Attempts have actually been made to dilute his controlling interest in the company to no avail. Now he has a messy divorce and a personal financial crisis to deal with (albeit one that might be alleviated by the IPO). Will he be able to maintain control of Tesla given his increasing interest in Space X? Would Tesla command the same attention if he was not at the helm? More importantly, will shareholders accept the fact that Daimler gets to pick the company’s next CEO, according to its S-1?

10. What will Tesla’s first public earnings call sound like at the end of Q2?
Recent reports have pointed out that Tesla isn’t doing so hot when it comes to sales. It has all these ambitious plans to build a new line of four Model S-based cars, but the reality is that it’s selling about ten of its luxury Roadsters a week. On top of that, and widening losses, and no surefire plans for future profit, what is Musk going to tell his new shareholders during the company’s first earnings call as a public company? It might not be a pretty picture — one of the reasons Tesla seemed to be rushing the public sale out the door. The company will face an unprecedented level of transparency and public scrutiny. One more reason why the IPO might be a loud pop followed by a fast fizzle.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors

People: Elon Musk

The company has declined to comment on the story. Private Equity Hub caught wind of the fundraising via internal sources, who also said that Northgate Capital may be joining existing backers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates. These investors have already sunk $400 million into Bloom, which is quickly becoming one of the most expensive green tech plays to date.

Despite the media blitz in February, a lot of mystery still surrounds the Bloom Box. Right now, it is sold only on a large scale, with units costing $800,000 apiece. Installations are already pumping out power for early adopters like Wal-Mart, Google and FedEx. eBay reported that its nine Bloom Boxes saved it $100,000 in energy costs over the first nine months they were installed.

This sounds all well and good, but the technology — initially developed by now CEO KR Sridhar at NASA — is still secretive, and its implications sound too radical to be true. Bloom says that in the next 5 to 10 years it will be selling fuel-cell boxes for individual households for less than $3,000. If this happens, the company could remove whole homes from the grid, supplanting utilities and their unwieldy, long-distance transmission lines. This would restructure the way energy is delivered the world over.

There is a camp of analysts and investors — like Kleiner’s John Doerr, a serious evangelist — that believes Bloom has the same game-changing potential as Google or Facebook, the first of its kind in the cleantech sector. But others wonder how the company will even afford to get its products to market if it’s already burnt through so much money and is now looking for more.

As is, there’s no way Bloom is going to compete cost-wise with utility-delivered energy for next five years at least. In order to encourage adoption, the government would have to launch a major consumer incentive campaign. But this is unlikely to happen, considering how powerful utility interests are in the U.S. It’s been suggested that utilities might become Bloom’s biggest customers, installing the boxes in their coverage areas and selling the energy they generate. But utilities aren’t going to want to do this until they absolutely have to.

Private Equity Hub has also heard that Bloom told investors that its last round of funding would provide enough runway to get it to its public exit. There’s a sense that the company doesn’t have a good grasp on its roadmap, and is trying to run on the same hype surrounding other cleantech stars like Tesla Motors.

This makes participating in Bloom’s rumored new round a hefty bet for new investors. Do they sit it out and hang their heads if and when the technology revolutionizes the global energy market? Or do they buy a stake and wait for years as the Bloom Box struggles to break into the mainstream? Both outcomes are equally likely at this juncture.

We will update the story as soon as we hear back from analysts and prospective investors.

Tags: cleantech, fuel cells

Companies: Bloom Energy

People: John Doerr, KR Sridhar

This 20 percent increase could mean the difference between a $178 million and $244 million IPO, depending on the price its underwriters set for its shares. This is much higher than the $100 million sale the company first filed for at the end of January. But when it announced its partnership with Toyota last month, its CEO, Elon Musk, predicted that the eventual total would be much higher.

Tesla, which hopes to sell shares at a price between $14 and $16, is responding to the IPO already being oversubscribed by both institutional and retail investors. VentureBeat reported last week that retail investor interest in the company has been heating up on private share trading sites like SharesPost for the last two months — leading market watchers to predict a stock price closer to $16.

Musk himself will be selling 909,212 shares (bringing in as much as $14 million), according to the newly amended S-1, but even after that, he will still be the majority shareholder with 28.4 percent of the company. The biggest venture investor, VantagePoint Venture Partners will be selling 238,748 shares. Its other investors include Bay Area Equity Fund, the Westly Group, Compass Venture Partners and key family and friends like Musk’s brother Kimball Musk, who is putting 12,692 shares up for sale.

After Tesla debuts, Toyota is contracted to buy a $50 million stake in the company, as part of a broader partnership that includes Tesla’s $42 million purchase of the NUMMI automotive plant in Fremont, Calif. The companies have announced, but not formalized, plans to build a new line of electric cars together.

Following the IPO, and Toyota claiming its stake, Tesla will still have 93.5 million shares to sell. This puts its market cap at $1.5 billion — higher than the $1.4 billion the company initially hoped for, but lower than the $1.84 billion estimated by NeXt Up! Research last week.

The electric vehicle maker is one of a tide of cleantech companies hoping to have lucrative public sales despite consistent losses and distant plans to turn a profit. Tesla reported a loss of $56 million for 2009, and $29.5 million for just the first quarter of 2010. The trend began last September when advanced battery company A123Systems saw a 50 percent spike in its stock price during its first day on the market, while never making it out of the red. Now, still lacking traction, the company has seen a major decline in its stock price, dampening investor enthusiasm for the cleantech IPO market.

This more lackluster approach has been held responsible for the middling public exits of biofuel maker Codexis and solar module maker Jinko Solar in the last two months. But most analysts, like John Gartner of Pike Research, are saying Tesla’s general sex appeal will probably yield a hot sale, like A123’s, with prices dropping off later .

Why the decline? The company doesn’t have its new product, the Model S, coming out for two more years at least. It’s only sold slightly over 1,000 of its electric Roadsters to date — and that $109,000 sports car is not a viable business model by itself. The company brings in some revenue by selling battery packs and chargers to one of its major investors, Daimler, but definitely not enough to go  profitable in the near future.

Gartner says he thinks the company will need to raise even more money between now and the release of the Model S, either from new, bigger partners, the government or by selling more stock.

In the short term, Tesla has done a bang up job generating buzz among investors. Musk hit the road last week to give presentations to prospective buyers — a presentation that included plans for a who new line of cars based on the Model S architecture, including a cabriolet, an SUV and a van.

Tapping its most loyal base — those who have already put down the $5,000 deposit on their Model S sedans two years in advance — the company has sent out gifts. A nice touch, according to one recipient, Hank Heyming, who noted that this “seems like a pretty creative way to build some hype pre-IPO without violating the quiet period.”

Tomorrow’s the big day. We’ll see if Tesla was right to up the stakes, or simply buying into its own bravado.

Companies: Tesla Motors

People: Elon Musk, Hank Heyming

Right now, the company is looking for about $178 million, hoping to sell 11.1 million shares for between $14 and $16 apiece, leaning toward the $16.

Apparently, Tesla’s dual announcement that it is partnering with Toyota to build a new line of cars, and that it will reopen the shuttered automotive NUMMI plant in Fremont, Calif., has had the intended effect: more hype and more confidence that the company is going places. Toyota also pledged to buy a $50 million stake in the company after its market debut.

“There has been a significant amount of interest among the high net worth community, and there was an explosion of interest after the Toyota-NUMMI announcement came out,” says Greg Dietrick, the broker on secondary market site SharesPost that oversees Tesla transactions — and the company’s discussion forum. “There’s an increased number of posts in general, and a big increase in the number of buyers.”

SharesPost has just published a report from NeXt Up! Research that values Tesla at $1.84 billion.

“It became a much hotter prospect as soon as Toyota put its seal of approval on it,” Dietrick says. “Getting that sort of approval from the auto industry makes Tesla look like a more viable business — that seems to be what a lot of investors are thinking.”

Apparently, these prospective investors have not been deterred by subsequent reports that the Tesla-Toyota deal is not as official as it initially appeared. While the major car maker will be ponying up the $50 million, there is no written agreement between the two companies to build cars together. In fact, some analysts say Toyota was never that gung-ho about building a car with Tesla to begin with.

“I think there is mutual interest, but Toyota will be conservative and use this relationship to monitor how Tesla does, whether it meets delivery deadlines, or if the Model S is successful when it comes out,” says John Gartner, an analyst at cleantech-focused Pike Research. “Until all of that is proven, I don’t think Toyota will take that next step.”

This raises a number of concerns about how Tesla will afford the NUMMI plant long-term. Its Model S sedan is not coming out for another two years at least, and even then only 20,000 units will be produced at the facility, which has a capacity to build 500,000 cars a year. The $465 million loan it got from the U.S. Department of Energy is covering a lot of the upfront costs, but eventually that money will have to be paid back.

It’s important to note that when sites like SharesPost report a spike in investor interest, they are doing so based solely on bulletin board discussions and the number of research downloads, not actual transactions. The IPO’s underwriters locked up shares in late January when the S-1 was originally filed, preventing trades.

Investors who purchased shares in advance of the lockup must also hold onto their shares for a year after the public sale, according to Larry Butler, CEO of TrashTalkFCM, and one such owner of private Tesla shares.

“The underwriters do this around the same time as the S-1 filing so that they can easily locate all the shares that are out there when it comes time to register them,” says Dietrick, who adds that this is a pretty standard practice for investment banks. Tesla’s underwriters include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank Securities.

“Based on everything I’ve seen on SharesPost, particularly the increased buyer interest, I think it will be a hot IPO,” Dietrick says, adding that he has heard mixed opinions, particularly from some of his colleagues on Wall Street who think the sale will be lackluster — mostly because the IPO market as a whole has been bleak for a while.

Butler, who has bought two tranches of Tesla shares via SharesPost, is very representative of how Dietrick perceives buyers.

“I bought it because it is the biggest name in electric cars,” Butler says. “It’s a sexy product, and I like that its name has a lot of resonance on the retail stock market. I think it will get a bounce in its valuation because most people have heard of the company.”

He is also unphased by the fact that he can’t do anything with these shares for a year after the sale — he is that confident in the company’s future performance.

“I think it’s a fundamentally good investment,” says Butler, whose portfolio includes private shares in gaming, social networking and online dating companies. “Any time you have to watch and wait on a stock it’s a bit nerve-racking, but I can’t see demand for its vehicles going anywhere but up, and I can’t see them not being well capitalized after the IPO.”

Despite the mostly positive interest and swelling number of buyers participating in SharesPost discussions, Dietrick says he has observed some sellers on the SharesPost bulletin board that have expressed concern about the amount of support the company has gotten from the government.

“Some sellers are wondering whether the business will be as economical without all the subsidies and economic support,” he says. Also, the fact that relatively few institutional investors seem to be interested in the stock, compared to the number of retail investors, has prompted some seller discussion on the site.

Analysts have generally been enthusiastic about Tesla’s debut, but less so about its longevity. Gartner, of Pike Research, thinks Tesla CEO Elon Musk has done a good job whipping up hype with his road show presentations to potential investors, but also that the stock price won’t stay up for long.

“It’s not the easiest sell to prospective investors,” he says. “The combination of a lack of a tangible product combined with continuous losses and no timeframe to become profitable makes raising enthusiasm for the IPO very challenging.”

That said, Tesla will probably pull it off, at least for one day. After that, Gartner thinks its trajectory will parallel that of advanced battery company A123Systems. That company, which went public last September, saw a 50 percent jump in its stock price on its first day. But it has slowly declined since, with the company still mired in the red and no profits or breakout products on the horizon.

The only difference is that Gartner doesn’t think Tesla will see as much of a jump in stock price out of the gate as A123 did.

“I don’t expect it to go that high because people have learned their lesson from A123,” he says. “People who bought that stock have seen it recede and lose all its value pretty quickly thereafter.”

That’s not to say that Tesla will be spared the same fate.

Tags: advanced transportation, electric vehicles

Companies: Sharespost, Tesla Motors

People: Elon Musk

Boston Power is a good example of a traditional battery company that has jumped on the new opportunities in cleantech markets. Initially, it was focused on making long-lasting batteries for portable and consumer electronics like laptops. It even has a lucrative supply deal with Hewlett-Packard. But last spring, it launched its first lithium-ion car battery.

In addition to developing its own batteries — in anticipation of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles flooding the market later this year and next (think General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf) — Boston Power is partnering with several car companies looking to go electric (the limping Saab brand, for one) in order to hasten its trip to market.

The $60 million announced today could be enough to more than double Boston Power’s workforce in the next three years, the company told the Boston Globe, although not all of them will be based domestically. The company already runs several plants in Taiwan and is looking to further expand in China, and maybe Europe.

Last year, when it raised $9 million in capital, the company said it was looking to build a manufacturing facility in Auburn, Mass. that would employ 600 local workers. But these plans hinged on Boston Power receiving at least $100 million in federal stimulus grants. This never happened, and the Auburn plant has since been scrapped.

Considering that this is the company’s fifth round of financing — with capital now totaling about $185 million — the question of the future is more salient than ever. Will Boston Power end up selling its technology to another, bigger battery interest? Or will the launch of the plug-in car market be enough to carry it through to profitability with its current runway?

The company is facing a lot of tough competition. The car battery business is getting more crowded, with A123Systems going public last year, and runners up like Valence Technology also capturing some market share. The grid-scale industry may also be tough to break into, with Panasonic, Hitachi, Siemens and a host of other major corporations gearing up their own solutions for utility storage, a more pressing need now that intermittent sources of renewable energy like solar and wind are coming online.

Regardless, its investors are sticking by the company. The recent round of funding came from Oak Investment Partners, Foundation Asset Management, Venrock Capital, and Gabriel Venture Partners — all of whom participated in the $9 million round for Boston Power last June.

Tags: batteries

Companies: Boston Power, Foundation Asset Management, Gabriel Venture Partners, Oak INvestment Partners, Venrock Capital

The company has seen great success with the program so far. Five years ago, it allocated $5 billion to it, and since then it’s reaped $70 million from the products and investments supported by Ecomagination ($18 million in revenues last year alone). This is a huge return on what was essentially an experimental idea.

It’s no wonder that it’s doubled up on its investment through 2015.

So far, Ecomagination has produced highly efficient compact fluorescent lighting, smart appliances that automatically conserve energy while still doing their jobs, advanced batteries for utilities and portable electronics, innovative new wind turbines, fuel-efficient jet engines, and more. All of these products have found a niche in the existing market, generating healthy revenue.

According to GE, revenue from the products created under the banner of Ecomagination is expected to grow at double the rate of the company’s overall revenue over the next five years. That’s indicative of the rapidly increasing demand GE is observing in this area.

All told, more than 90 products have emerged from the initiative. None of the money sunk into Ecomagination will go to outside startups. Those entities are usually backed by GE’s Energy Financial Services branch and GE Capital, which have together invested $175 million in 21 companies.

In addition to the hefty investment, GE also aired news that it has cut its own greenhouse gas emissions by 22 percent in the last three years and its water consumption by 30 percent in the last four.

General Electric is just one of several massive corporations that have earmarked billions to pursue greener technologies. In April, LG Electronics said it would invest $18 billion in greening its product lines and internal practices. Sony says it will spend about as much in an attempt to dominate the green electronics market while simultaneously achieving carbon neutrality. And just last month, Samsung launched its own $21 billion green roadmap.

Companies: General Electric

Now six years old, the Omidyar Network has invested more than $300 million in tools that can presumably be used to empower individuals while also improving communities. Not all of them have a strong social impact mission, just the potential to make a positive impact. The fund is viewed by many as being on the forefront of a movement known as venture philanthropy, which mixes for-profit investing with nonprofit grantmaking.

For example, the network invested in social news aggregator Digg, Second Life-maker Linden Lab, group-building site Meetup, and Eventful, and made a large grant to the Wikimedia Foundation. At the same time, it has contributed to rounds for peer-to-peer loan service Prosper and thin-film solar developer Nanosolar (demonstrating an interest in green technology).

Now it has added D.light to its portfolio. And the company fits well with its model. By replacing expensive and toxic kerosene lamps in areas off electric grids, the company’s LED lanterns allow people to spend more time being productive or with one another after dark. Its case studies show that children are able to study for longer, small businesses are able to extend their hours, and that work actually goes faster in quality light.

What makes D.light different than many other developing world innovators, is that it has a business model and plans to turn a profit. This also complements Omidyar’s goals, since, like any other venture capital firm, it is looking for returns.

D.light will be selling its lamps for between $12 and $25 to consumers who make less than $5 a day. It’s supposed to be a significant purchase, but also within reach of most households and businesses in the regions of Africa, China and India the company is targeting.

The startup sells three models for different applications. If the lamps are left in direct sun all day they can provide between 8 and 15 hours of light.

It previously raised $6 million in November 2008 from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Mahindra Group, Gray Matters Capital, Acumen Fund and Nexus Venture Partners.

Companies: D. Light Design, Omidyar Network

People: Pam Omidyar, Pierre Omidyar

Linden Lab, creator of the 3D virtual world Second Life, said today that Mark Kingdon (right) has resigned as chief executive and is being replaced by company founder Philip Rosedale, who will serve as interim CEO.

Chief financial officer Bob Komin has assumed the additional role of chief operating officer. In a statement, Rosedale thanked Kingdon for his contributions, including growing the user base and revenue, increasing the stability of the platform and building a world-class team.

Such niceties, commonplace in press releases acknowledging the resignation of a top executive, do nothing to explain Kingdon’s seemingly abrupt departure.

San Francisco-based Linden Lab was founded in 1999 and it launched Second Life in 2003. That sparked the craze for 3D animated virtual worlds. The company went through a hype cycle as Second Life hit the cover of Time magazine and tons of companies opened up virtual storefronts in the world. Many of those closed, but the users stayed and built virtual goods businesses that generated real income.

Second Life users have logged more than 1 billion hours and generated more than $1 billion in user-to-user transactions. But the company recently cut 30 percent of its staff as it eliminated its enterprise team. Prior to the cuts, Linden Lab employed more than 300.

Back in April, Kingdon said Second Life was bucking the trend of a decline in traffic for virtual worlds. Social networks are the new craze, but Second Life saw $160 million in user-to-user transactions in the first quarter, up 30 percent from a year ago. The company’s monthly unique user number hit a peak of 826,000 in March, up 13 percent from a year earlier. This happened even as virtual worlds such as Vivaty, There.com and Metaplace were shutting down.

Linden Lab declined an interview request, but Rosedale wrote in a blog post, “This is a big, tough change but one the board of directors and management team deeply believes in.”

Companies: Linden Lab

People: Mark Kingdon

Smart grid data communication is a hot-button issue in the burgeoning industry. Several camps have emerged, supporting much different modes for sending energy consumption data from smart meters back to utilities or to consumer electronics (like home energy management dashboards and smart appliances).

Silver Spring Networks and Trilliant champion proprietary networks to get this job done, while competitor SmartSynch taps into public mobile networks provided by carriers like AT&T, and Grid Net wants to use WiMAX networks to do the same thing.

Now Spectrum Bridge and Google are adding a new dimension to this skirmish, claiming that the “white space” is capable of exchanging data at much faster rates than even standard internet Wi-Fi. Distance and physical obstructions also don’t present as much of a problem.

White space is a relatively new concept. After the FCC enforced the transition from analog to digital television broadcasting, a bunch of channels were left empty, and the the commission made them available for unlicensed use. There have been several proposals to use them to supplement current wireless service in some areas, but this hasn’t gained serious traction.

Spotting the Smart Grid opportunity, Google teamed up with Smart Bridge and Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative & Telecommunications — the utility in Plumas-Sierra County, Calif. — to test out the use of white space for sending energy data.

The county in the Sierra Nevada Mountains was chosen for the experiment because it is remote, and fairly isolated from wireless coverage. So far, the white space has successfully channeled information between parties, the local utility says. This is one of several white space tests that Spectrum Bridge has been involved in.

Google is involved because it is providing its PowerMeter tool to monitor the white space network. PowerMeter shows users how much energy they are using in their homes in real time, to monitor the white space network.

In addition to using the white space for smart grid communications, the local utility will also be tapping it to provide broadband internet connections to homes that haven’t had them before. Usually, smart grid communications are built on top of existing broadband networks, but, notably, the reverse is true in this situation.

Tags: Smart Grid

Companies: Google, Spectrum Bridge

This isn’t the first time the company has worked with Recurve. They teamed up about a year ago to sell energy efficiency-audits and modifications to Lowe’s customers. This boosted Recurve’s business, which has been around for about six years.

In that time, the startup has evaluated about 2,000 homes, and actually supervised efficiency retrofits — like window caulking, insulation additions, programmable thermostat installations — for about 700. But this isn’t all the company has to offer. Its secret sauce is actually a software program it has built. Used primarily by housing contractors, it pinpoints where the most effective changes could be made, how much customers stand to save, and how much the work will cost them.

This slashes the amount of time contractors spend on a single project, freeing them up to spend time with more customers. It also cuts down on the price tag of contracting jobs for homeowners. It used to be that contractors would have to make multiple visits to a building with revised plans and quotes before actually going to work. Recurve’s software allows all of this back-and-forth to be accomplished on the spot, the company says.

Recurve has uncoupled its software offering from its audit and retrofit services, bringing in revenue by selling just the software to contractors in multiple states. Some of the $8 million just raised will be allocated to filling the orders pouring in for this product. Recurve says it will need to hire more people to make this happen too.

Prior to today’s funding announcement, Recurve displays had been set up in Lowe’s stores around the San Francisco Bay Area, where the startup is based. Now that the two companies are expanding their relationship, these promotions may be rolled out to Lowe’s 1,700 locations nationwide.

Energy efficiency services like Recurve’s appear to be ripe for consolidation. It doesn’t look like Lowe’s will be buying the company any time soon, but this wouldn’t be a surprising move. Just last month, SolarCity, a company that helps homeowners finance and install solar panels on their roofs, snapped up Recurve competitor Building Solutions, which also makes software for home energy efficiency audits. These types of tools could easily be folded into larger companies’ service portfolios.

Lowe’s has been going greener in several ways. In addition to its investment in smaller companies like Recurve, it is partnering with solar panel makers Ankeena Solar and Brightwatts to offer the equipment homeowners need to install affordable, user-friendly solar panels on their roofs.

Recurve, formerly called Sustainable Spaces, previously raised $6 million from RockPort Capital Partners and Shasta Ventures, which also participated in the recent round.

Tags: energy efficiency

Companies: Lowes, Recurve, Rockport Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures

Drumming up excitement about the impending $178 million IPO, CEO Elon Musk is shopping the business around to potential investors, including a line of several different vehicles that most people have never seen before (not the Roadster or Model S). It’s unlikely that any of this is set in stone, but it’s interesting to see how the company is selling itself.

Here’s a look at the presentation Musk is delivering on this so-called roadshow.

This new line of cars includes a cabriolet, a van, and a crossover/SUV in addition to the sedan. The Model S platform will be used as the base for all four, according to Musk, but the sedan will no doubt come first. It’s timed to launch in 2012, but if it experiences the same delays the Roadster did, 2013 might be more realistic.

The four-vehicle line is still very much theoretical, much like the line of electric vehicles Tesla says it has plans to build in tandem with Toyota. That deal — which isn’t all that official — is for Tesla to provide powertrains to frames built entirely by Toyota.

In another blog post, Tesla Vice President of Marketing Gilbert Passin described in detail how the $50,000 Model S will be assembled at the NUMMI automotive plant the company just acquired in Fremont, Calif. The process isn’t exactly revolutionary, resembling that used by most major car makers, but it is new territory for the company itself.

The only car Tesla has produced so far, the Roadster, came in the form of a complete body and frame from Lotus. The company only had to drop in its unique drive train. But for the four-door Model S, it’s starting from scratch, making its own body panels with stamping equipment, and piecing it all together at one site, Passin says.

After the body is assembled, the battery pack, motor, axle and rear suspension will be bolted into the frame as one bundle in a single step. This is where Tesla’s expertise lies — the powertrain that will supposedly carry the Model S 300 miles, and from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5.6 seconds (not quite as zippy as the roadster, but still good for a sedan).

The detailed nature of the post is significant for several reasons. First, Tesla has drawn a lot of criticism for being so secretive about the Model S, especially in light of its public sale. The company is aiming to go public with at least two years to go before it puts out its next major product. Prospective investors would obviously want to know as much as possible about this phantom car that’s supposed to pull the company out of the red.

Some analysts say Tesla doesn’t even have an honest prototype of the Model S yet — that images we’ve seen so far are simply concept cars that could be scrapped and redesigned. But the specificity of Passin’s blog post suggests that this isn’t the case.

Secondly, the manufacturing walk-through leads watchdogs to believe that the NUMMI plant is adequately equipped for Model S production. When the acquisition of the plant was first announced, it was unclear how much more Tesla would need to spend overhauling the space with the right machinery (which would cost more on top of the property purchase). Passin’s post is designed to make it sound like Tesla already has this under control.

The pre-IPO presentation outlines ambitious plans for growth, but with the Toyota partnership still up in the air, and cash flowing out for the NUMMI plant and no other products besides the Model S even close to the horizon, it’s unclear how the company plans to accomplish its goals.

That said, it’s proven to be teflon in the past, bouncing back from a dreadfully low bank-balance, and other apparent catastrophes. Sex appeal and hype has carried it through before, and probably will again. It will be interesting to see if it’s enough to fetch a high share price if and when the IPO goes down next week.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors, Toyota

People: Elon Musk

This is a huge win for SunRun, which has been locked in a dead heat with rival SolarCity — a firm that’s gotten a lot of press simply because it’s backed by Tesla Motors’ colorful CEO, Elon Musk. Both companies help homeowners find financing options that fit their budgets and desires, including relatively low monthly payments. But PG&E only signed on for $60 million, and 1,000 rooftops with SolarCity in March.

Based in San Francisco, SunRun also competes — albeit less directly — with Sungevity, a startup that uses satellite technology to measure and stake out roofs, and then help people pay for panels. It’s unclear whether its satellite spin will be enough to keep it afloat with the big boys in the space getting even bigger.

PG&E will be funding the rooftop systems in question via its subsidiary, Pacific Energy Capital II, a tax equity fund. Tax equity is usually the province of large banks. For example, SunRun took in $90 million in tax equity from U.S. Bancorp in December. Basically, it’s a tool to finance cleantech companies that receive support from the government. In lieu of traditional returns, the investor — PG&E in this case — gets tax benefits in addition to some cash returns. Considering how much tax equity has dried up among banks since the 2008 economic downturn, this is a pretty innovative move for the utility.

“We see this as a harbinger for the future — a company like PG&E entering into an arrangement like this shows that energy companies are seeing distributed photovoltaics as a real business that will grow and become ore important over time,” says SunRun CEO Edward Fenster. “This could be a turning point in the industry at large in terms of who is providing capital.”

The deals with both SunRun and SolarCity are part of a push by the utility to rapidly expand its solar presence. All told, it has allocated $1.45 billion, or $20 to $30 million a year for five years, to adding 250 megawatts-worth of solar energy to California’s grid.

With the money coming from PG&E, SunRun’s role will be to manage the financing deals — ranging from power-purchase agreements to panel leasing contracts — as well as the actual installations and panel maintenance. The program will cover California, Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

SunRun will also be providing software for the metering, monitoring and billing operations associated with its panels. According to Fenster, the company’s financing business represents less than 10 percent of its headcount. Its software development team is actually much bigger.

In the past, SunRun has retained ownership of the panels after they are installed and has opted to charge customers for the power generated. That way homeowners don’t have to buy the panels, just the energy they put out. But the deal with PG&E restructures this system. Customer payments will instead be divided between SunRun and the utility. Revenue will flow to a limited liability corporation call SunRun Pacific Solar, which will own the approximately 3,500 systems installed. PG&E and SunRun are partners in this new entity, and will split different ratios of cash and tax benefits over time, Fenster says.

In addition to turning a profit, PG&E has a lot to gain here in terms of its public image. The utility has been taking a beating in the press lately over its smart metering plans. Ever since residents of Bakersfield, Calif. filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, claiming rate hikes following digital meter installations, public opinion has turned against the idea of slick, new — and potentially inaccurate — meters being installed in their homes.

Third-party accuracy testing revealed minimal inaccuracy, but it was enough to prompt the company to offer a public, poorly received apology. Now San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herera, is petitioning the California Public Utilities Commission to block smart meter roll-outs in the city. He is arguing that the technology needs to be fool-proof before millions are spent on a new wave of installations. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial supporting his position today.

On top of all that, Proposition 16, the measure PG&E backed to prevent municipalities and local governments from founding their own utilities, failed on Election Day. Not only is the company out the $46 million it spent on the campaign, it could be looking at a lot more competition soon.

So a big, high-profile investment in making solar power more feasible and affordable for average consumers looks like a pretty good move for the utility right about now. Its rate payers are enthusiastic about the integration of renewable energy; the alliance with a hot new company like SunRun could make it look eco-friendly and cutting-edge at once; and it’s boosting California toward its goal of generating 33 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

For SunRun, this is the most recent in a series of plum funding deals. Before it scored the $90 million from Bancorp, it took in $30 million from Foundation Capital and Accel Partners.

“We will continue to raise capital, and will have some announcements in the near term about that,” Fenster says, emphasizing that the company is still working closely with Bancorp as well. “We have grown very fast in the last nine months, and in certain respects we’re shasing a shopping cart down hill, but a couple of new transactions are nearing the finish line.”

Located down the road from San Francisco in Foster City, Calif., SolarCity has raised $148 million, including its $60 million from PG&E. It started down somewhat of a different path in May, acquiring Building Solutions, a company that helps homeowners find the information and contractors they need to make their houses more energy-efficient. It’s unclear whether diversifying its offerings will give it a leg up over SunRun, or take its attention away from the growing residential solar financing market.

Tags: Solar

Companies: Pacific Gas & Electric, SolarCity, Sunrun

People: Elon Musk

D.light is one of a number of Silicon Valley startups determined to mix money-making with having a positive social impact. It believes there are viable markets to be tapped in the poorest parts of the world, and its investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the Acumen Fund and Nexus Venture Partners, seem to agree.

The number of homes in Africa and India with no access to power grids is staggering, not to mention small businesses, schools and other public buildings that would benefit greatly from keeping the lights on after dark. D.light offers three different models of lights.

Its Nova model resembles a floodlight, emitting a cool, white light than can run for 12 hours after absorbing sunlight for an entire day. It can also be used to charge cell phones — an increasingly important double-feature as more residents of the developing world rely on mobile phones for internet access — in as little as two hours. D.light says it is about 10 times brighter than an average kerosene lantern and almost 50 percent more energy efficient than fluorescent lights.

Its Kiran model (pictured above), which looks a lot like something Apple might make, shines for 8 hours on a full charge and is four times brighter than kerosene. A single unit, with no detachable parts, it casts off 360 degrees of light to illuminate whole rooms for cooking, and after-school homework. It could make a major impact on the lives of children and women, who might otherwise be restricted to cooking or housework during daylight hours, giving them less time for school or other, potentially empowering, employment.

One of D.light’s case studies is of a 14-year old girl named Monika Singh, who was able to use a D.light lantern to study longer each day. It replaced a kerosene lamp that would continually blow out or fill her house with smoke. The quality of the light (cool, bright, and unflickering) also helped her finish her homework faster, Singh said.

Lastly, its Solata model — an average-looking desk lamp — provides 15 hours of light on a full charge and is five to six times brighter than kerosene. Like the Nova, it comes with a portable, detachable solar panel.

All three products are manufactured fairly cheaply, and sold for more than $10 but generally less than $20. This sounds like a hefty price tag for regions where the average daily income is significantly below $10, but that’s built into D.light’s business model. It wants its lamps to be a significant household purchase. Considering that households in its target regions spend up to 30 percent of their monthly incomes on kerosene, this seems justified.

That said, the company has been making a major push to lower its own costs — allowing it to continually drop prices. After starting up in Silicon Valley, it moved operations to New Delhi, India. And is now based in Hong Kong, where it can build relationships with and oversee even lower-cost manufacturing facilities. In 2008, when the company initially raised $6 million, its high-end products ranged up to $30, so prices have clearly come down.

That original $6 million came from the investors named above, in addition to Garage Technology Ventures, Mahindra Group, and Gray Matters Capital. The fact that D.light has been able to secure another round of funding is indicative of a trend toward more venture interest in social impact enterprises — especially from firms like Acumen and Gray Matters, which specialize in the field. Doing good may no longer mean that a company can’t do well. It’s a concept that’s catching on.

Companies: Acumen Fund, D.light Designs, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Gray Matters Capital, Mahindra Group, Nexus Venture Partners

There’s a pattern emerging in the biofuel industry. Startups generate good ideas for producing car and jet fuels from a variety of feedstocks, ranging from corn to carbon emissions, from algae to municipal waste. They take in a moderate amount of funding to develop their products, but inevitably hit a glass ceiling when it comes time to scale commercially. To jump this hurdle, they usually require help from a major corporate interest, like Chevron or Shell — or, in the case of LanzaTech, Baosteel.

The company, based in New Zealand, has hit each one of these milestones. Spotting the opportunity, it launched a successful pilot plant at a steel mill in Auckland in 2008 (pictured above). Its process traps the gases emitted by steel manufacturing — particularly carbon monoxide — and then ferments them with specially engineered microbes to produce ethanol. The pilot plant ran for 2,500 hours, churning out 1,000 liters of fuel at a time, while simultaneously diverting harmful emissions that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere.

China, now hyperconscious of air pollution following the criticism it drew during the smog-choked Olympics hosted in Beijing, has taken a special interest in technologies that reduce emissions from industrial plants. (Despite the shuttering of much of Beijing’s industrial sector in the run-up to the Olympics, the Chinese capital still remained heavily polluted, drawing a sharp focus on the need to manage the environmental impact of economic growth.)

On top of that, LanzaTech could produce ethanol that is incredibly cheap. Carbon monoxide is plentiful and inexpensive, and the resulting fuel could replace 90 percent of the gasoline needed to run a car, thereby dropping  the price of gassing up for average drivers.

Its this potential that caught the eye of Khosla Ventures, which led the company’s first round of funding, $3.5 million, in 2007. The prestigious Silicon Valley venture-capital firm has distinguished itself by backing cleantech companies that operate within existing infrastructure (traditional gas tanks, for example). It’s invested in biofuel startups LS9 and Coskata for the same reason.

LanzaTech’s investors may still have to wait for a while yet, however, as it plans first to build a demonstration-scale plant at one of Baosteel’s mills before fully commercializing its ethanol. The deal with Baosteel also brings in a third party, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which aims to study and improve LanzaTech’s process, and apply it to similar products, including fuels derived from biomass and other organic waste.

The last time VentureBeat reported on the company, its business was on track, but it was unclear how it would achieve the necessary scale. It said it hoped to bring a demonstration plant online by 2013. Now the Baosteel deal has helped it beat this target by three years, bringing its ethanol that much closer to market, and giving it a leg up over competitors.

The relationship between LanzaTech was encouraged considerably by the 2008 free trade agreement between New Zealand and China.

Tags: biofuels, ethanol

Companies: Biosteel, Khosla Ventures, LanzaTech

Air conditioners are a pain. They use an incredible amount of energy, reflected in incredibly high electricity bills in the summer months. But in some places, like Texas and Arizona, it’s hard to go without them. Now, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory may have an answer to the problem: A brand new air conditioning design that could make AC units 90 percent more efficient than they are today.

This is not just a new spin on the traditional design. NREL has ditched major components of today’s AC units, including their condensers and compressors. It generates colder air by evaporating water off a wet surface with a built-in fan. There is a desiccant included to make sure the air is dry.

In addition to slashing the amount of energy needed to run a typical AC unit, the NREL model, called the DEVap, also eliminates the need for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), toxic chemicals used in many of today’s air conditioners that pollute the atmosphere.

Previously, this evaporative air conditioning process only worked in dry, hot climates, because the cool air generated would otherwise contain too much moisture. The addition of the desiccants has made it functional in a range of climates, even very humid environments, NREL says.

The challenge now will be to make the NREL air conditioner cost competitive with those already on the market. It might be as many as five summers before consumers can get buy the units to cool their houses, the laboratory says. It will be licensing the deign for commercial distribution.

Steeply reducing the amount of energy sucked by air conditioners could have a major impact on overall energy use in the U.S. and abroad. After all, air conditioners account for 5 percent of energy used in the U.S. every year.

[Photo: boliston]

Tags: air conditioners, DEVap, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL

Taking another step in this direction, the department announced today that it is allocating $76 million in stimulus funding to make buildings, commercial and residential, more energy efficient. On top of the technology, the money is also being funneled into training programs for building owners, operators and inspectors so that they know how to establish and maintain energy-saving practices.

In March, Obama launched a $6 billion “cash for caulkers” initiative dubbed HomeStar, intended to provide monetary incentives (up to $3,000) to homeowners for making efficiency-oriented changes to their homes, like adding insulation, installing programmable thermostats, or caulking windows. According to the administration, families that opt to weatherize their homes can save up to $350 a year on their energy bills.

Only a few days later, a couple of senators banded together to propose a “Building Star” bill that would provide similar incentives to commercial building operators. These buildings account for 40 percent of the energy used in the U.S., no small matter. The legislation may still be pending, but it looks like the DOE has decided to take matters into its own hands in the meantime.

In addition to slashing energy demand, and saving people money, the department urges that today’s funding announcement has the chance to create new jobs for contractors and specialized construction workers.

About $68.4 million of the stimulus money will go to 45 technology projects at corporations and academic institutions. This amount will be matched with $31.4 million from private investors, to bring the total to about $100 million. The DOE selected projects that could improve building automation controls and management, windows and building exteriors, heating and air conditioning systems, and water heating mechanisms.

Companies receiving the funds include:

National Semiconductor ($2 million) — Battery-powered wireless sensors allowing for advanced HVAC system controls.

Honeywell International ($1.8 million) — An automation system that controls when home and building appliances turn off and on based on set rules or external conditions. The system would also monitor energy use patterns and make recommendations based on findings.

Soladigm ($3.5 million) — Development of affordable dynamic windows, and a manufacturing process that can produce them at scale.

Dow Chemical ($3 million) — Improved insulation for walls, roofs and foundations. Said to be more durable, this material could reduce U.S. energy use by 36 percent.

General Electric ($1.5 million) — Magnetic refrigerant materials that could improve the efficiency of residential refrigeration by as much as 30 percent.

Whirlpool Corporation ($2 million) — A sequential dual evaporator cycle that could improve residential refrigeration efficiency by up to 50 percent.

Thirteen organizations and universities split the remaining money for training programs. That way, once the technology being developed comes online, there will be a skilled workforce to put it in place and keep it running, the DOE says. You can see a full list of recipients, and the amounts allocated to each, here (PDF).

Companies: General Electric, National Semiconductor, Whirlpool

People: Barack Obama

While this amount should be enough to keep the company’s plans on track for now, it’s still falling far short of the $300 million it had hoped to get from its public sale. It has cited the volatility of the public capital markets as its chief reason for canceling the IPO, but things haven’t been looking up for the company itself for a while now.

The Fremont, Calif.-based company was able to secure a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, propelling it to the top of the venture-backed solar flock. But in April, an audit mandated by the DOE determined that Solyndra’s mountain of debt and consistent losses could present a real problem. Even then, analysts predicted that this revelation, stapled to its S-1 filing, could dash the company’s IPO dreams.

On top of Solyndra’s own problems, it’s facing a public market that hasn’t been so hot on cleantech lately. Both biofuel maker Codexis and Chinese solar firm Jinko Solar went public in recent months, with shares selling at the low end of their price estimates. Solyndra would have probably met the same fate if it carried through on its filing.

The $175 million will give the company a much shorter runway toward the construction of its second manufacturing complex in Fremont, but it should still come online by the end of this year, the company says. If it can make its unique cylindrical thin-film solar panels at the ambitious scale its predicting, it might be able to survive. But it’s going to be a squeaker.

Solyndra has been working on this manufacturing plant — the one President Barack Obama visited late last month to raise the company’s profile and stump for climate legislation — since fall of 2009. The DOE loan funds are also going to be used for this purpose, in addition to $198 million in equity raised from Argonaut Ventures. This may be enough to get the plant up and running, and it’s doubtful that the DOE will allow one of its high-profile cleantech selections to fall on its face, but this remains to be seen, and depends heavily on Solyndra’s burn rate.

For now, the company says it is confident that, with 300,000 panels already sold, it will be able to churn out 300 megawatts worth of panels every year by the end of 2011.

Founded in 2005, Solyndra has raised more than $950 million from backers like Argonaut, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and RockPort Capital Partners.

Tags: Solar

Companies: Solyndra

While anyone can download the app from iTunes ($9.99) and install it on their iPhone, the app was designed for a special Smart Drive kit, which includes a cradle and special sound-system head unit.

Opens up more entertainment possibilities, too

The application plays several roles. It displays maps, like the mapping features on navigation-system screens. Another feature unique to the app is that it provides access to hundreds of Internet radio stations and shows as well as to what’s on the iPhone. Through the touch-screen interface, users can access audio functions by tapping on a musical-note icon, where they can easily play what’s on the device through the sound system, change tracks, or receive calls via audio speakers. Artist and song title info shows whether playing music from the iPod function or Internet radio.

Chris Carde, senior systems manager at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development, based in California, says that because the application, which was more than a year in the making, was developed in-house at Mercedes-Benz, and directly involved Daimler engineers in Germany, it stands up to higher vehicle security and reliability considerations than any other mobile app.

According to Carde, the interface went through some rigorous safety checks and uses a font much larger than what’s used in other mobile applications so it would pass muster with Daimler’s standards.

The app was developed primarily for deployment in the U.S., as well as Germany, Italy, France, and the U.K.—all markets where the initial lot of 1,500 Smart Electric Drive cars will be leased, and markets where the iPhone was a relatively common smartphone. The app has already been released for those markets and will be out in Switzerland within a few weeks.

A lot more than an EV charging app

Even if you drive a Smart Fortwo, rather than the electric version, you’ll soon be able to take advantage of kit and app for mapping, Internet radio, the car locator, and other features.

There’s already a set of charging-station locations shown in the application’s map system, but as Smart gathers more information about charging stations available through energy companies, municipalities, and other initiatives, it’s finding that there are often caveats regarding access to the stations.

In the short term, the company hopes to add a real-time charging feature that would seek out the closest station that’s currently accessible. To start, a full navigation system will be available later this year, as part of an upgrade.

Data from the application’s use, as well as the user’s charging habits, will be gathered by Daimler as part of the project, but drivers will be able to opt out for privacy with no sacrifice in functionality.

This article, written by Bengt Halvorson, was originally posted on GreenCarReports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Companies: Mercedes-Benz, Smart

As part of the deal with TSMC, the semiconductor giant has bought a 21 percent stake in Stion for $50 million — included in the $70 million provided partially by existing investors, including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst Partners and Braemar Energy Ventures. Venture Tech Alliance led this most recent round of funding.

In exchange for its investment, TSMC is getting the license to Stion’s patented CIGSS thin-film solar technology, a design known for reducing the amount of silicon needed in solar installations and thereby lowering costs. Together, Stion and TSMC will continue product development to increase panel efficiency and make its thin-film more competitive with crystalline silicon panels.

Today, Stion makes panels for a diversity of applications, including rooftop residential, commercial and government installations, as well as utility-scale arrays and off-grid use like streetlights (see photo above).

The new $70 million in venture capital will be applied to expand Stion’s manufacturing operations by 100 megawatts worth of panels. This plant already churns out panels that generate 120 to 130 watts per square meter. Growing the facility will add 500 new temporary and permanent jobs in the San Jose area in the next two years, according to Stion.

Between this Stion plant, solar maker Solyndra’s manufacturing complex in Fremont, Calif., and Tesla Motors’ potentially huge plant in Fremont’s NUMMI automotive plant, San Francisco’s South Bay area may become the epicenter of the green collar economy in the next several years.

Stion previous raised $44.6 million and is talking a big game about breaking into profitability without taking any more private money. It will be interesting to see if the boost from TSMC is enough to make this happen — so many other venture-backed thin-film producers have struggled for years in the red.

Tags: Solar

Companies: Stion, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

The former New United Motors Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) plant was the old GM-Toyota factory that built vehicles like the Toyota Tacoma and Pontiac Vibe, until the companies ended their joint venture in the wake of the GM bankruptcy last year.

Earlier this month, Tesla and Toyota announced the Japanese automaker would invest $50 million in Tesla, which would in turn acquire NUMMI from Toyota, in a deal that could lead to cooperation on future electric cars from both companies.

In a blog post, Tesla’s VP of Manufacturing, Gilbert Passin, says the Model S will follow a more conventional path to the showroom than the Tesla Roadster, which has a body fabricated by Lotus in England, and is teamed with its battery packs and motors in nearby San Carlos, Calif. The Model S sedan–the vehicle that won Tesla $459 million in loans from the U.S. government, to encourage green-car development–will have its body panels stamped at the factory from aluminum sheets, will go through Tesla’s own paint booth and quality traps, and will be built essentially from scratch in California.

The Model S’ body will be glued, welded and riveted together, according to Tesla’s blog post–a technique that sounds like a blend of typical car manufacturing, and the semi-exotic construction style used for Jaguar’s aluminum cars, like the 2011 Jaguar XJ sedan, not to mention the way airframes are assembled.

Tesla also says the Model S’ suspension and powertrain assemblies will come in relatively few pieces that can be fitted into the car in one or two steps. It also hints at a swappable battery pack that could enable the sedan to drive longer distances–something like the business plan touted by Project Better Place. The interior will be fitted in modules, too–from the dash to the rear-facing third-row seat, an unusual solution for a sedan, and one that will need to meet some tough safety standards to make into production.

Tesla’s purchase of NUMMI marks a sharp turnaround for the company and for the state. As recently as this spring, Tesla had been expected to pick a former aerospace facility in Downey (an L.A. suburb) for its manufacturing facility. When NUMMI shut down, it ended a long era of mass production of cars in the state, if only for a short time. The deal came together quickly, Tesla says, and though it won’t fill the entire NUMMI facility at first, it hopes to grow into the sprawling plant, which at one point could produce more than 200,000 vehicles annually.

Tesla’s post today also introduces a little more fudge factor into the timing of the Model S sedan. The company confirms its factory will open in 2012; while it’s not confirmed the Model S will be a 2012 model, it’s possible the official designation for the new four-door could be as a 2013 model.

This story, written by Marty Padgett, was originally posted on AllCarsElectric, an editorial partner of VentureBeat.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors

Siemens has an extensive web of relationships with utilities, energy vendors, city and state governments, and automotive companies. Now these contacts will be at Coulomb’s disposal as well, giving them access to new types of deals. In particular, Siemens will be able to supply utilities, municipalities and the like with Coulomb equipment that can monitor energy consumption, run demand response programs, and provide accurate billing.

Siemens has its hands in almost every segment of the emerging cleaner, more efficient smart grid. It’s involved in energy monitoring systems, as well as solar and turbine development, and storage innovations. The deal with Coulomb to market its smart grid products alongside the ChargePoint EV charging stations, gives Siemens a new foothold in advanced automotive infrastructure, where it hasn’t been so strong yet.

Pike Research, which concentrates on cleantech, recently released a report that electric vehicle charging infrastructure could represent $297 million in new business in the U.S. alone and $1.5 billion globally in the next five years. This is a big market, and all of the corporate interests swooping in on the smart grid as it heats up are sure to get involved, including General Electric, Cisco Systems, and IBM, among others. Microsoft has already sliced into the pie, partnering with Ford to manage charging for its all-electric Ford Focus due out this year.

The alliance with Coulomb is very representative of Siemens’ approach to other pieces of the smart grid, including microgrids, smart metering, and grid-scale storage. It usually partners with smaller venture-backed players closer to the ground in each of these areas, just like Coulomb, in hopes of expediting distribution of its technology, bundled with what is already being rolled out.

The vehicle charging company already has ambitious roll-out plans in the hopper, stating earlier this month that it plans to install 4,600 new ChargePoint stations for plug-in vehicles in homes and commercial centers across the U.S.

Coulomb, based in Campbell, Calif., last raised funds in February, bringing in $14 million in a second round of capital. Before that, it raised a $3.75 million first round from Estag Capital in January 2009.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Coulomb Technologies, siemens

The deal is two fold. TSMC has bought up a $50 million sake in the company, in addition to signing a licensing and joint development agreement with Stion. According to the terms, TSMC is effectively acquiring the CIGSS design that makes Stion’s panels so compelling. In exchange, it will churn out the solar modules Stion needs to commercialize its products.

Stion’s funding history follows standard thin-film trends. There was a lot of interest in thin-film two to three years ago when it first emerged as a cheaper alternative to crystalline silicon. At the time, silicon prices were sky high, and thin-film panels used much less of the material. So Stion was able to land $6 million in 2006 and another $15 million in 2007.

Today, however, venture capitalist have shifted their interest away from thin film, toward more capital-efficient investments in solar components and information technology. Microinverters, devices used to optimize solar power output, are a perfect example, with companies such as SolarEdge and Enphase Energy recently scoring generous funds from VCs.

It looks like Stion is one of the few thin-film operations lucky enough to wrangle corporate financing, a loophole that should save it from the private capital drought that’s already begun in this area. Yesterday, we ran a piece on SunPower, and how its crystalline silicon panels are trucking along as thin-film loses its glow. This doesn’t mean that all thin-film companies will go belly up — rather, only a couple will find the partnerships and money needed to move from laboratory testing to commercial sales.

TSMC could give Stion the backing it needs to make this jump. But its also hedging its bets geographically. It may be betting on a horse in Silicon Valley, but its also taken a stake in a Taiwanese peer, Motech Industries. Reportedly, TSMC paid $193 million for a 20 percent share of the company. With China and the U.S. rising to become solar super powers, it makes sense for a player like TSMC to be playing both sides.

Previously, Stion was able to recruit a prestigious roster of investors, including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Braemar Energy Ventures, Moser Baer Photovoltaic and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Tags: Solar

Under the deal, TSMC has bought up a $50 million sake in the company, in addition to signing a licensing and joint development agreement with Stion. According to the terms, TSMC is effectively acquiring the CIGSS design that makes Stion’s panels so compelling. In exchange, it will churn out the solar modules Stion needs to commercialize its products.

Stion’s funding history follows standard thin-film trends. There was a lot of interest in thin-film two to three years ago when it first emerged as a cheaper alternative to crystalline silicon. At the time, silicon prices were sky high, and thin-film panels used much less of the material. So Stion was able to land $6 million in 2006 and another $15 million in 2007.

Today, however, venture capitalist have shifted their interest away from thin-film, toward more capital-efficient investments in solar components and information technology. Microinverters, devices used to optimize solar power output, are a perfect example, with companies such as SolarBridge and Enphase Energy recently scoring generous funds from VCs.

It looks like Stion is one of the few thin-film operations lucky enough to wrangle corporate financing, a loophole that should save it from the private capital drought that’s already begun in this area. Yesterday, we ran a piece on SunPower and how its crystalline silicon panels are trucking along as thin-film loses its glow. This doesn’t mean that all thin-film companies will go belly up — rather, only a couple will find the partnerships and money needed to move from laboratory testing to commercial sales.

TSMC could give Stion the backing it needs to make this jump. But it’s also hedging its bets geographically. It may be betting on a horse in Silicon Valley, but it has also taken a stake in a Taiwanese peer, Motech Industries. Reportedly, TSMC paid $193 million for a 20 percent share of the company. With China and the U.S. rising to become solar super powers, it makes sense for a player like TSMC to have a foot in both the U.S. and Asia.

Previously, Stion was able to recruit a prestigious roster of investors, including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Braemar Energy Ventures, Moser Baer Photovoltaic and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Tags: Solar

VentureBeat got a chance to peak inside SunPower’s manufacturing facility in Richmond, Calif., today, to take a closer look at its crystalline silicon solar panels. Founded in 1974 with technology spun out of Stanford University, SunPower is one of the oldest photovoltaic companies in the U.S. and one of the first exclusively solar companies to go public, beating giant First Solar to market.

Today, its business is built entirely on crystalline silicon panels tailored for residential and commercial rooftops, distributed power stations, and utility-scale solar plants. It manufactures and installs both the panels and the tracking equipment that dramatically ups their efficiency. It’s known for achieving the highest solar efficiency rates to date, with tracked panels converting more than 30 percent of the sunlight absorbed into usable power.

SunPower’s panels — protected by a flurry of patents — have a reported minimum efficiency rate of 22 percent. Compare that to the thin-film solar panels being churned out by SunPower competitors like First Solar, NanoSolar, and (much hyped) Solyndra. They have average efficiency rates slightly above 10 percent, and many have only been tested in laboratory conditions.

But thin-film seems to be where the venture capital has been flowing over the last several years. The recipients boast that their products require less silicon, dropping their cost, and making them more feasible for more markets. With all this buzz, crystalline silicon has started to seem almost passe — even though it makes up the bulk of current installations.

The fading limelight also belies SunPower’s recent gains. The company is seeing steady gains in sales and utility contracts and has no interest in branching into thin-film, according to the company’s founder, Richard Swanson. In fact, he thinks investor and media interest is going to start migrating away from thin-film as the solar industry at large starts to heat up.

“I certainly wouldn’t pitch a thin-film concept today,” Swanson said. “It seems like the window on that is closed. It turned out to be harder than everyone thought.”

Of course that’s going to be SunPower’s position, but there’s some logic to it. Venture capital dollars have started to swing away from thin-film solar plays. By and large, they are too capital-intensive and take too many years to produce returns, analysts say. The price of silicon has also plummeted over the last year, making business models based on sparing the material less compelling — and at a basic level, thin-film efficiency rates just aren’t all that competitive.

So what accounts for all the initial VC hype around thin-film? Solyndra, maker of cylindrical solar modules, was able to score $535 million from the U.S. Department of Energy for its thin-film solution, based largely on this enthusiasm; Nanosolar landed $300 million in 2008, and Heliovolt more than $100 million in 2007. Swanson’s guess as to why: A poor understanding of the industry early on.

“When it came to solar, venture capitalists got caught with their pants down,” he says, adding that investors didn’t really start to pay attention to the sector until after SunPower’s IPO in 2005. “Early on, there was very little expertise within the VC community.”

Now hip to the facts, investment firms seem to be turning their attention to less pricey solar component deals — just look at the rash of funding rounds secured by makers of solar microinverters, devices that optimize the power pumped out by panel arrays, like Enphase Energy and SolarBridge. There is also a lot of excitement about software systems designed to remotely monitor and even repair solar arrays to ensure maximum energy output.

In this environment, SunPower’s consistent, upward trajectory is a victory. Its R&D operations continue to improve panel efficiencies, and it’s been very successful at expanding its plant development goals via the acquisition of its own customers. Just this year, it bought European developer SunRay Renewable Energy for $277 million, its first major growth spurt since its $333 million purchase of PowerLight in 2006.

But not all is smooth sailing. China has become a formidable foe in just the last two years, and there’s no getting around the sudden ascent of competitors like SunTech Power. Regulations are lax in China, and development and labor costs are staggeringly low. As Swanson puts it, “They’ve been able to move price points that the industry here thought couldn’t be moved.”

SunPower is admittedly, and legitimately, concerned.

“China was the big story in 2009 — the progress was stunning,” Swanson says. At first, the industry and media dismissed the panels produced in the country as low quality, far behind western producers, particularly in leading Germany and Spain. But quality has quickly caught up, and the companies at the forefront have a huge domestic market to tap.

Swanson’s response: “We are always scared. We follow the saying that only the paranoid survive.”

But China’s looming threat is more of a long-term worry. In the present, SunPower is more concerned about making new sales and deals. One in particular is a high priority: a $1.2 billion joint venture with Taiwanese display maker AU Optronics to produce 1.4-gigawatts worth of solar cells. All of the manufacturing will take place at a new, co-owned facility called Fab 3 in Malaysia, which will derive much of its own power from, what else, SunPower rooftop panels.

Here’s a video walk-through of SunPower’s facility in Richmond, Calif. The building was initially owned by Ford and used to build its A Frame vehicles. Just another example of antiquated automotive plants being revamped into cleantech manufacturing centers.

An overview of the utility-scale tracking technology from Howard Wenger, president of utilities and power plants:

A look at the rooftop panel assembly line:

Rolling off the assembly line:

A tour of the upstairs offices, where some of the company’s sales, marketing nad engineering operations are based:

Tags: Solar

Companies: First Solar, HelioVolt, NanoSolar, Solyndra, SunPower, SunTech Power

People: Richard Swanson

Planning to trade on the Nasdaq as TSLA, the company is representative of the handful of green companies that have made it to market without ever turning a profit. This hasn’t dampened the confidence of CEO Elon Musk, who told VentureBeat last month that the sale would be much higher than the $100 million mark.

Nor has the company’s bravado been shaken by a number of other hurdles along the way, including the revelation that Musk is personally out of cash (and thus unable to invest more in the company, as he has done since its inception), skepticism of the company’s ability to stay afloat until the Model S sedan release in 2012, and, most recently, Toyota confirming that it hasn’t actually agreed to build a new electric car with Tesla, despite much fanfare at a joint press event. You have to hand it to a company that can weather all this and still seem sexy to both consumers and investors.

But will Tesla’s winning attitude — the same one that made its purchase of Fremont, Calif.’s NUMMI automotive plant appear downright heroic — be enough to carry off a lucrative IPO?

On top of the odds already stacked against a blockbuster sale, cleantech IPOs have been lackluster lately. Both biofuel maker Codexis and solar firm Jinko Solar went public at the lower end of their estimated stock price ranges. Tesla could fall prey to the same trend — though it should be buoyed by the $50 million that Toyota has officially pledged to invest upon the IPO.

Regardless, Musk will end up with at least 28.8 percent of the company’s shares following a market debut, if the company does pull off its IPO. There’s no telling what the stock price will do after that, though several analysts have told VentureBeat since that they foresee a steep decline in the price with no new product forthcoming in the next two years.

Something similar happened to advanced battery maker A123Systems when it went public last September. A123’s offering was the first cleantech IPO of 2009. Its stock price shot up 50 percent on its first day, only to slowly and disappointingly decline over subsequent months, chilling investor enthusiasm for other green companies following in its footsteps.

Like A123, Tesla has never broken out of the red. The electric car company reported losses of $25.5 million for the first quarter of 2010, much higher than the $16 million it lost during the first quarter last year. And it has steadily burnt cash—first its investors’ money, and more recently the first tranches of a $465 million loan from the United States Department of Energy, which is being slowly disbursed as Tesla builds a powertrain facility in Palo Alto and makes progress towards the Model S coming to market.

Tesla is backed by an eclectic array of investors who stand to profit—or at least get some liquidity—on June 29, including Google, its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, VantagePoint Venture Partners, the Westly Group, Daimler, Fjord Ventures, Aabar Investors, JP Morgan, Technology Venture Partners — the list goes on. Perhaps the most notable investor, however, is Musk himself, who, as we all know, could use the money right about now.

Tags: electric vehicles

Companies: Tesla Motors

Twitter goes down — In the wake of rolling out its new Twitter Places geolocation feature, and in the midst of World Cup excitement, the micro-blogging site went down for several hours. Visitors were either greeted by the fail whale or profile pages blank of tweets.

Wikipedia gets more flexible — The editable online encyclopedia is rolling out revised editorial policies, tipping the site’s hand in favor of more and easier editing despite the risks of vandalism. ReadWriteWeb has more.

Hacker Angels scouting for early-stage IT startups — The angel funding firm, started by Delicious creator Josh Schachter, along with Punchfork’s Jeff Miller, Duck Duck Go’s Gabriel Weinberg and Going.com’s Roy Rodenstein, is made up of individual backers that will pool ideas and advice, but not money — at least yet.

Sprint won’t limit smartphone data use — Even though its competitors AT&T and T-Mobile have announced intentions to limit data use on their networks in order to avoid congestion, Sprint says it won’t do any such thing, at least for its smartpone users. Those on the carrier’s broadband plans won’t be so lucky.

Kevin Costner vs. the BP oil spill — The star of Waterworld says that a company he helped found, Ocean Therapy Solutions, could have the solution to the destructive BP oil spill in the gulf: centrifuge technology developed by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1993. But will it work?

A news feed for YouTube — In order to make it easier for the video site’s users to find breaking news footage, YouTube is introducing the YouTube News Feed in tandem with UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It will track and index news videos as they are uploaded.

Yahoo nabs Flicker.com — Yahoo has won its high-stakes cybersquatting lawsuit against the owner of Flicker.com. A year after the company filed suit, it has added the domain name, to complement its photo Flickr product, to its repertoire.

Companies: BP, Hacker Angels, Research In Motion, sprint, Twitter, Wikipedia, yahoo, YouTube

People: Josh Schachter, Kevin Costner

The company’s innovation isn’t its only distinguishing feature. It also has several prestigious backers, including Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures and now Charles River Ventures. All three participated in this recent, second round of financing. Their endorsement goes a long way, since all three have staked a claim in this sector, mostly supporting renewable sources of energy like wind and solar.

TerraPower, which spun out of Intellectual Ventures (founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold), isn’t just rehashing nuclear power under a new brand name. Rather, its goal is to commercialize a new spin on traditional reactors, building what it calls traveling-wave reactors. They are able to generate electricity from a much smaller amount of enriched uranium, combined with recycled uranium from existing nuclear plants (and even the same plant). Considering that it’s the hazardous nature of this uranium (and its disposal) that most nuclear opponents object to, this change could very likely win the energy source new supporters.

A lot of people are unnerved by the thought of radioactive material and waste being shipped across great distances in the U.S. The ‘Not in My Backyard’ attitude that shut down nuclear growth decades ago is still prevalent. TerraPower counters this approach, claiming that its recycling reactors could run on their own byproducts for many more years than current reactors.

This sounds good, but the technology isn’t quite there yet. This recent round of funding is a stepping stone on a long journey toward a working commercial reactor. In fact, the company’s goal is to have a demonstration-scale reactor up and running 10 years from now. And this is actually fast by nuclear standards — one of the reasons new nuclear technology has been too expensive for many to pursue.

It’s amazing that TerraPower was able to find as much funding as it has. It’s going against many cleantech investing trends — first and foremost, the shrinking of venture deals, with many firms preferring to sink money into capital-efficient green IT plays that turn around quickly rather than ambitious, manufacturing-heavy solar and wind developers. Nuclear is even more pricey and long-term.

A lot of the company’s success seems to step from Gates’ support. The Microsoft chairman has been very outspoken about the need to come up with practical clean sources of energy, combined with energy efficiency strategies that go beyond anything we’ve done before. He champions nuclear as one of the most feasible sources of energy in the next decades, and has — together with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr — been after the U.S. Department of Energy to invest up to $16 billion every year in R&D in the area.

Gates happens to be a limited partner investing in Khosla Ventures, which makes its participation seem more logical. But the firm, by and large, has favored deals with startups working to improve existing clean energy technology. It backs biofuel and combustion engine companies for similar reasons. It wants the planet to go green, while still being able to use existing infrastructure.

TerraPower’s resulting high profile has attracted interest from unlikely sources, including Toshiba, which has been in talks with the company to help it build its traveling-wave reactor.

Tags: Nuclear

Companies: Khosla Ventures, TerraPower

People: Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla

According to the New York Times, the minerals — worth upwards of $1 trillion — were discovered by a roving band of Pentagon officials and geologists. The group then had to inform Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, about the lucky strike — which also includes iron, copper, cobalt and gold — and which could turn the country into one of the most important industrial mining hubs in the world. The unnamed player here: China, owner of 97 percent of the rare earth element refining operations in the world.

“China has positioned itself very well as the clean technology minerals leader,” says cleantech analyst Dallas Kachan of Kachan & Co. “The rest of the world is years behind them. The U.S. has no commercial rare earth element refining operations. China effectively has a strangle hold on the rare earth elements needed for cleantech — including those needed to build wind turbines and other things, not just batteries.”

According to Kachan, the global community is just now waking up to this.

This budding face-off with China is the subject of most of the stories covering the Afghanistan mineral find. Not only is China keen on cornering the lithium-ion battery market, it’s also looking to meet demand for green consumer vehicles, now that it’s become the biggest automotive market in the world. Just look at China’s BYD — founded as a battery maker and funded by Warren Buffett — it has rapidly branched into electric vehicles with ambitions to break into the U.S. and European markets too.

But there’s no telling yet if the Afghanistan mineral deposit will yield this much profit for anyone involved. Bolivia was recently discovered to contain an estimated 50 percent of the world’s supply of lithium, but the country has resisted outside investment — meaning no money on all sides.

There are too many factors to take into consideration, and no report has yet put a number on how much lithium or any other substance is actually available. All that’s known is that the deposit is widely dispersed, which Kachan says is pretty common for lithium. Sometimes veins of the element can be thinly spread over hundreds of miles, making it incredibly difficult and costly to extract.

On top of that, lithium is more difficult and time-consuming to mine in some regions than others. In Bolivia, it is frequently mixed in with magnesium, which is very hard and expensive to evaporate and then separate. Lithium is found in higher concentrations in Chile and Argentina, where it has actually become a profitable business. If the lithium doesn’t evaporate easily in normal conditions, it could be cost prohibitive to mine at all, Kachan says. None of this information is available yet on the Afghan deposit.

“This is not a slam dunk for the countries that stand to profit from it,” Kachan says. “It sounds promising for the economy of Afghanistan, but there’s no guarantee that it will have Saudi Arabia-like prosperity. There are too many unknowns. The importance of Bolivia’s reserves was overestimated. It has half the world’s lithium but it doesn’t make economic sense to mine it.”

Assuming the deposit could be more easily mined, it’s hard to imaging Afghanistan choosing not to develop what could become the new backbone of its faltering economy. As many reports have stated, the country lacks any meaningful mining operations or native expertise, so it looks like foreign investment would be vital to the establishment of a successful mining sector. But its relations with the U.S. are strained, at best, these days.

“The market is wide open at this point, but China is best positioned to take advantage of the discovery,” Kachan says. “China understands the power of dominating the building blocks of cleantech, so expect it to be aggressive.”

But even if China does make a deal with Afghanistan to set up lithium mining and refining operations there, that won’t make it the automatic winner in the advanced battery and plug-in vehicle industries, Kachan emphasizes.

“Lithium makes up such a relatively small percentage of lithium-ion batteries,” he says. “So whoever owns the storehouse won’t necessarily win in the electric vehicle marketplace.”

He also points to the development of lithium recycling efforts in countries other than China. In anticipation of the shortage, major U.S. automakers and smaller startups all over the world are starting to invest in technology that could turn lithium into a renewable resource. This could make China’s lead in the rare earth elements game less of an issue, but probably not obsolete.

Amid all this speculation, few media outlets have called attention to how fishy reports of the Afghanistan element deposit sound to begin with. Is it really realistic that a small band of Americans was able to dig up something the native population has been sitting on for years? Kachan says its possible, given lithium’s typically thin dispersal over large areas, but didn’t disregard skepticism.

The U.S. has an array of motives for playing up news of the discovery. Afghanistan’s economy has basically been decimated by the ongoing war there, and the U.S. military hasn’t had any good news come out of that region for a while. In one shot, the mineral deposit seems to be solving the country’s financial woes while positioning America to capitalize on the potential profits. This seems pretty convenient.

On top of that, the Pentagon memo revealing the mineral deposit states that the elements are scattered throughout the country, with concentrations near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where conflicts with Taliban insurgents are still frequent. Calling attention to the prospective wealth in this region could draw in new allies for the U.S. China has been traditionally resistant to sharing its burgeoning rare element monopoly, but might it make an exception and help the U.S. in this situation, or will it deal directly with the country’s reportedly corrupt government?

More information is surely forthcoming.

[Image via Vanity Fair]

Tags: batteries, electric vehicles

Companies: BYD

People: Dallas Kachan

Why? Because of limited production runs, demand is outstripping supply. Is it part of some big conspiracy with big oil, automakers dragging feet or a plot to ensure EVs never become popular?

Orwellian conspiracies aside, the answers behind limited EV production runs at the present time are more practical and pragmatic. Here’s five reasons why EVs are being produced in limited numbers right now, and why it could be a good thing for the long term EV future.

Limited initial production is less risky.

Making sure that buyers exist for a product even before it is officially launched is a great way to ensure that there is a constant flow of money to help offset retooling costs, research and development and retraining of staff.  As car companies have found to their peril in past years, making lots of something doesn’t necessarily ensure it will sell.

Exclusivity comes from limited numbers.

Remember what happened when the Toyota Prius launched? Every movie star, environmentalist and politician had one. Toyota created a desirable, ecologically sound vehicle which initially had a huge waiting list.

Nothing says desirable like limited numbers, and nothing attracts attention like an unusual car. If you’re lucky enough to be an early adopter of the 2011 Volt or 2011 Leaf then expect to be stopped regularly by people wanting to know about your new ride.

Limited initial numbers equals a test fleet.

It’s easy to make an electric car, but it’s hard to make a good electric car.  With any new vehicle or new vehicle technology there are bound to be some hiccups which need smoothing out along the way.

With any first generation of a new vehicle problems crop up in the wild which were never conceived of in the prototyping process.  Selling a limited number of first generation vehicles allows car companies an easy way to make any final tweaks before ramping up production.

New technology is always expensive.

It doesn’t matter if the technology is the latest computer chip, the latest OLED television or a plug-in vehicle; new technology costs more to produce.  Naturally, that cost filters down to the consumer. High ticket items have less buyers and as the cost comes down, more consumers can afford them. By that time, the new technology isn’t all that new.

Not everyone is ready for an EV.

Unless you’re a hardened EV nut or early adopter the chances are you may not be ready for an EV in your life. Not everyone has parking space with power, not everyone is comfortable with the concept of charging up, and not everyone is aware of what driving an EV means.
A large proportion of the population struggle to comprehend how the 2010 Toyota Prius works. In fact, it is often mistaken for an electric car that ‘you don’t have to plug-in’.

Range anxiety is also rife. Many consumers panic about being stuck without a charge, a fear the 2011 Chevrolet Volt should easily overcome with its range-extended gasoline engine. Initially, more consumers will feel at home with the Volt than they will with a Leaf.

But until the general image of EVs change, many consumers still feel unable to make that switch.

Developing new products is risky, both to the companies creating them and the consumers buying them. Electric cars are no different. For now, demand outstripping supply is a good thing. It creates buzz, fosters good relationships with natural EVangelist drivers, minimizes risk, and proves the vehicles have what it takes to tackle the mainstream auto market.

This story, written by Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield, was originally posted on AllCarsElectric, an editorial partner of VentureBeat.

Companies: General Motors, Nissan, Toyota

The loan for geothermal is earmarked to aid the construction of a 22-megawatt power plant in Oregon, creating an estimated 150 temporary jobs and 10 permanent, full-time positions, when it opens in two years. U.S. Geothermal, Inc. claims that the technology behind the facility will be more advanced, allowing energy to be drawn from the earth’s crust more efficiently for higher yields.

The method being used, called binary geothermal, requires the drilling of wells 4,500 to 6,000 feet deep. Incredibly hot water is then sucked up toward the surface, where it is used to heat another liquid that is vaporized to turn turbines and generate electricity. Goethermal, Inc. says it has perfected the way it extracts heat from the water, meaning more energy output from single sites. This is a notable breakthrough, considering how sparse optimal geothermal locations are in the U.S.

The power generated by the new plant is already set to be purchased by the Idaho Power Company for the next 25 years.

Carbon capture, like geothermal energy, exists at the fringes of the cleantech sector. When you think green technology, you probably envision solar panels, or wind turbines. The fact that the DOE is pumping so much money into both of these less glamorous areas demonstrates just how holistic the department is hoping to be in its approach.

Carbon capture had a big day today, receiving $612 million in stimulus funding from the DOE, which will be matched with $368 million in private financing to round out nearly $1 billion of new capital. The money is going to three projects charged with developing large-scale carbon capture and storage technology.

This initiative feeds directly into one of the Obama administration’s primary cleantech goals: to commercially deploy practical carbon capture systems within the next decade. To hit this deadline, between five and ten of these smaller demonstration projects need to be up and running in the next six years, the DOE says.

Just the three selections made today are supposedly capable of removing 6.5 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of removing 1 million cars from U.S. roads. Here’s a brief overview of the recipients:

Leucadia Energy — Based in Louisiana, the company is using its $260 million to sequester 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide from a methanol plant. The carbon will be piped over 12 miles and used in oil recovery operations. It is partnering with General Electric, Black & Veatch and Denbury Onshore, among others to make this happen.

Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. — The Texas company says it will be capturing and sequestering 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from a steam-methane facility. The carbon will also be piped 12 miles to be used in oil recovery for Denbury Offshore at its West Hastings oilfield. Air Products will get $253 million for the effort.

Archer Daniels Midland — Based in Illinois, the project will capture and sequester 1 million tons of carbon dioxide every year from an ethanol plant in Illinois. The carbon will be stored indefinitely in a saline reservoir near the plant. The company, known best for its scandalous attempt to fix the global price of Lysine, is receiving $99 million from the DOE.

The Department of Energy faces a real challenge with elections in the fall. Republicans are solidly opposed to big spending on clean energy initiatives, with many criticizing the department’s generous grant and loan programs. They are also lining up against the energy and emissions legislation pitched by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) There’s a distinct chance that — if they regain the majority in the Senate and/or House of Representatives — the DOE’s tap of green funding will be shut off.

This isn’t just an issue for entrepreneurs in the sector — but also their private investors. Initially, it was anticipated that government intervention would mitigate risks for venture capital and private equity firms, especially in the wake of the economic downturn. But in many cases, the reverse has been true — with prospective backers holding off on funding companies until they see what happens when they aren’t being buoyed by big stimulus package sums.

In the meantime, the DOE, with Secretary Steven Chu at the helm, shows no signs of slowing down. It is still slated to provide follow-on rounds of funding to projects working on solar, wind and the Smart Grid.

Tags: carbon capture, DOE

Companies: Air Products & Chemicals, Archer Daniels Midland, Leucadia Energy, U.S. Geothermal

It’s not an empty claim either. The company has reported that its thin film converts 13.8 percent of the sunlight it absorbs into usable energy, a world record — and that fact has been verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an independent third party.

This efficiency rate has been achieved and exceeded by several companies in laboratory settings, but not in commercial production. MiaSole says that it will be ready to ship its modules, measuring about 1 square meter with efficiencies exceeding 13 percent, by next year. The only thing holding the company back is the proper certification.

MiaSole’s achievement are even more impressive considering the composition of its thin film. Most of its competitors are still relying on polysilicon, and while the costs for this material are coming down, they still remain relatively high. MiaSole makes its modules out of copper indium gallium selenide (known widely as CIGS), which makes them much cheaper (50 cents per watt) than most of the other, similar products on the market.

CIGS has mostly been dismissed by the solar industry, because the companies working on it have had very little to show for themselves. If MiaSole positions this efficiency milestone successfully, it could validate the technology at large, not just its designs.

Given this momentum, the company plans to ramp up its production. In the first half of 2010, it shipped about 6.5 megawatts worth of solar modules. By the end of the year, it plans to bump this figure up to 22 megawatts. It’s targeting utilities and independent energy vendors with its products — but has actually already brought Chevron on as a client). MiaSole says its panels are ideal for both rooftop and ground mount solar arrays.

The company has been the quietest contender in the thin-film race for too long, it seems. But maybe that will give it an edge as it cranks up manufacturing to churn out hundreds of megawatts worth of panels by the end of 2011. To accomplish this, it has a new manufacturing plant in the hopper, to be located in the southeastern U.S., according to Earth2Tech.

MiaSole also seems to be taking aim at Solyndra, the unofficial player to watch in the solar space (distinguished by the $535 million loan guarantee it received from the U.S. Department of Energy). The company says it will be able to make its modules for much cheaper than Solyndra will, making it a superior choice for commercial deployments.

Even though it’s been flying lightly below the radar, MiaSole has raised a great deal of capital already, exceeding $300 million. It also has some prestigious backers, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and VantagePoint Venture Partners. These two are joined by Firelake Capital Management, Garage Technology ventures, and Nippon Koatsu Electric.

Companies: Miasole, Solyndra

Specifically, if passed, Prop 16 would have required a super-majority of two-thirds of voters to support the formation of a municipal utility (the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are good examples) before it could happen. Very clearly, PG&E’s dominance is threatened when other utilities are permitted to spring up in its coverage area. But that wasn’t its argument. Rather, the company positioned it as a burden for taxpayers to not have more of a say over their local governments spending money on new energy ventures.

The measure’s failure is a major victory for its opponents — a group that includes the Sierra Club, the AARP, and the city of Palo Alto, Calif. All told, they only raised $90,000 to defeat the proposition. Obviously, their argument that PG&E was actively working against the incorporation of renewable forms of energy — and the insincere nature of the utility’s motivations — were enough to persuade voters. The vote was actually so close that PG&E didn’t concede until this morning, and PG&E’s campaign seems to have won voters over in Southern California (ironically, where Southern California Edison provides power).

Prop 16’s defeat has major ramifications for the energy industry in California. First and foremost, it says a lot about public sentiment against PG&E. Since residents of Bakersfield, Calif. filed a class-action lawsuit against the utility over smart meter-related rate hikes, public opinion of the company, its suppliers (including Silver Spring Networks), and even smart grid deployments in general, has soured. Clearly, this has come back to bite the company in other areas. In fact, the Prop performed the worst in large population centers served by the utility, namely San Francisco.

Secondly, this result could mean great things for energy and grid innovation in the state. With most Northern California residents required to use PG&E’s services, there was very little incentive for the company to diversify its offerings, provide consumer-facing energy management tools, or extend its reach in renewable energy sources. Now that municipal utilities are easier to set up — adding some competition to the market — new advances are sure to follow.

As the largest electric company in the entire U.S., PG&E is often held up as an example and precedent for the hundreds of other utilities across the country. Many of them look to the company to see what their next moves should be, or what challenges they should pay more attention to. So this decision, while contained to state borders, could have national consequences.

Companies: Pacific Gas & Electric

While not especially exciting on its own, the investment in Tigo — which has now raised $27 million — is significant as part of a larger trend. Investors and corporations alike are increasingly interested in funding makers of solar components, rather than more capital intensive panel manufacturers and plant builders. It’s indicative of an even broader trend toward smaller funding rounds in the cleantech sector.

Last week, National Semiconductor, announced the introduction of its new SolarMagic chipset, which can be installed in solar panel junction boxes, to monitor solar arrays and optimize energy output. Also last week, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers joined a $63 million round of capital for Enphase Energy, maker of solar microinverters that accomplish the same task. And STMicroelectronics just debuted its own integrated circuit to up the power generated by arrays.

The watershed of funding in this area is also a sign that more companies are focused on fine-tuning existing solar products, particularly rooftop systems for residential and commercial markets. These chipsets and microinverters prevent one faulty, obstructed or shaded panel from lowering the energy output of whole arrays.

Tigo’s device, called the Tigo Energy Maximizer, can increase the output of solar systems by up to 20 percent, according to the company. Like most competing products, it also channels data about how well individual panels are working to a web interface, where system operators can easily view and respond to it.

Based in Los Gatos, Calif., Tigo brought in $6 million in May 2008 from OVP Venture Partners and Matrix Partners.

Tags: Solar

Companies: Inventec Appliances, Tigo Energy

The Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX will need to get $1 billion from somewhere in order to achieve its goal of busing astronauts back and forth from the International Space Station in the next 10 years. Considering that Musk likely can’t pump any more money into the company, and Congress is still blocking the Obama administration’s desire to support privatized space exploration, it’s unclear where these funds will come from. In fact, Musk has already had to sell off 20 percent of his stake in SpaceX.

But now SpaceX has responded to this question: Board member Luke Nosek of Founders Fund, a major investor in the company, told PEHub that SpaceX has been profitable for the last several years, and that it will be again in 2010, with or without federal funding. The company successfully sent its Falcon 9 rocket 155 miles up into orbit last week, and has more than 24 orders (totaling $2.5 billion in revenue) to deliver satellites into space over the next five years. The plan is to reinvest this cash in the company.

This is pretty impressive, considering that older, more established companies in this arena have failed to trump this achievement, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin. SpaceX also has the attention of NASA, which has selected it, as well as Orbital Sciences, to supply the International Space Station.

If no federal money is forthcoming. Nosek says he’s very confident about the company raising a sufficient amount of private capital to keep moving forward. Founders Fund told PEHub that it would be enthusiastic about doubling up on its investment.

That said, Musk told PEHub that the company doesn’t “anticipate needing to bring on additional investors and will not be conducting any equity financing rounds.” He didn’t rule out strategic investments. He also noted that the WSJ article touching off concerns about the company’s finances erroneously estimated the costs of the launch system SpaceX is developing.

Musk was also negative about potential government funding, stating that, “Under no circumstances would SpaceX be seeing a financing round from the taxpayers.”

Going public may also be an option for SpaceX to raise the money it needs to deliver on its promises to NASA and other satellite-building companies. The launch of the Falcon 9 attracted a lot of attention and positive press suggesting that privatized spaceflight might be a viable industry.

Going the IPO route seems to be the chosen strategy for Musk. Many analysts are saying that Tesla Motors, his other high-profile venture, needs to go public (it filed at the end of January) in order to keep its plans on track as well — plans that include the acquisition of the NUMMI automotive plant in Fremont, Calif., and vehicle-building partnership with Toyota.

Companies: Founders Fund, Spacex, Tesla Motors

People: Elon Musk, Luke Nosek