Andrew de Pass, a senior advisor with cleantech-focused investment bank Greentech Capital Advisors, tells GER that the firm could  launch a cleantech-focused investment fund early next year.

The investment fund  would not provide early stage venture capital. “We are looking to do later stage private equity investments,” de Pass tells us.

Investments would support companies across the whole green / sustainable space, including  renewable energy projects.

No word on expected size of capital commitments or the fund’s potential investors.

Jeffrey McDermott, a former i-banker with UBS, launched Greentech Capital last Summer as an M&A advisory business. The firm has been on at least four deals. Most recently,  advising solar power developer Ausra as part of its acquisition by Areva, the French nuclear reactor maker.

But from the start New York-based Greentech Capital has set out to become a full service shop for the green industry. As part of this strategy last week it announced that Heather Smith, Deutsche Bank’s former head of structured private placements, would join the firm to build its own private placement group. Former Goldman Sachs banker Timothy Vincent oversees project finance for the  firm.

Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound CEO Audra Parker

In April, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will decide the fate of the most contentious green energy project in the U.S. – a 420-megawatt offshore wind farm in Massachusetts called Cape Wind. It’s Audra Parker’s job to make sure the developers don’t plant 130 turbines five miles out in Nantucket Sound.

Parker leads the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which brings together homeowners, tourism organizations, local fishermen and native tribes that oppose the project. The groups say Cape Wind is sited beside key shipping and ferry routes, would disrupt wildlife in the area and would hinder tribal rituals that require unobstructed views of the sound. Cape Wind supporters, including Greenpeace, say the Alliance’s stand is misguided and Business Insider recently called the group “wine-sipping hypocrites.”

Critics who say the Alliance is a “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) group, Parker fires back, ignore legitimate concerns. She says the privately-held Cape Wind could win broad support by moving from the Horseshoe Shoal site to one  further offshore called South of Tuckernuck Island. GER caught up with Parker last week for our Cornerstone Conversations series.

Green Energy Reporter: How did you get involved in the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound?

Audra Parker: I started working at the Alliance in January 2003. I had grown up here in the summertime and I had moved here a couple of years beforehand. I heard about the Cape Wind project and it was really the first time that a [wind] project was being proposed offshore. It seemed that it was public trust land that belonged to everyone and it seemed in a variety of ways an inappropriate location for an industrial scale development.

GER: Who are your major backers?

AP: We’re totally funded by private donations and we probably have 5,000-plus donors. They range from small donors to large donors. Over time, we’ve raised over $20 million. It’s fishermen, it’s tribal members, it’s wealthy people, it’s everyone. Every affected stakeholder that wants to protect the sound knows that this is not the right location.

GER: How have you been able to marshal all of the various objectors into one cohesive group?

AP: We are an alliance of various stakeholders. The tribes will do their own thing. The fishermen will do their own thing. For the most part, everyone is on the same page but for different reasons. The airports are writing to the Federal Aviation Administration to say this is an aviation safety issue. The ferry lines are talking to the U.S. Coast Guard.

GER: Your Web site says there’s still 45 days to make a difference in this eight-year fight against Cape Wind. Do you think authorities in Washington have already made a decision?

AP: I don’t think there is a decision made yet. I think Interior Secretary [Ken] Salazar was genuine in saying he has three priorities: first, respect of tribal rights; second, promoting green energy; third, historic preservation.

The Advisory Council on Historic Properties [which will make the recommendation about Cape Wind to the Interior Department in April] is definitely sensitive to tribal issues. I’m hopeful that they will recommend that Cape Wind be relocated or that it is denied and Secretary Salazar will accept their recommendation. Clearly this is a special place. It’s not an issue of being opposed to renewable energy, it’s not an issue of being NIMBY, it’s an issue of being the wrong location for Cape Wind.

GER: Is there an acceptable halfway solution for your members, like if Cape Wind digs for artifacts in the seabed or pursues other mitigation measures?

AP: When Cape Wind says, ‘We’ll go ahead and dig in the middle of an ancestral burial ground,’ that’s hardly mitigation. The South of Tuckernuck Island site already is a compromise. The downside for Cape Wind is that they claim it’s slightly deeper and it’s 12 percent more expensive. The towns [on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod] have come forward in an electrical cooperative and said they’ll help offset the additional cost. There’s no financial reason for Cape Wind not to support this. It’s a pretty reasonable scenario.

The ferry lines alone transports 3 million passengers alone through Nantucket Sound, which has 200 days of fog per year. The ferry lines are calling the project an accident waiting to happen. It’s put in the most conflicted area you could imagine.

It’s not an issue of being opposed to renewable energy, it’s not an issue of being NIMBY, it’s an issue of being the wrong location for Cape Wind.

GER: After Cape Wind released a study about the projected cost savings from the project, you said that the company was propagating “the myth of cheap offshore wind.” Are you opposed to all offshore wind?

AP: We support renewable energy including offshore wind, but appropriately sited and without being an excessive burden to ratepayers.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came in [to review the site] eight years ago, there was no process in place for permitting renewable energy in offshore waters. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 put the Department of Interior in charge instead of the Army Corps. They also charged them with establishing rules and regulations for permitting. Those didn’t come out until summer 2009. We feel that regulations need to precede the project. In June, President Obama introduced ocean zoning and again we believe that needs to precede any project. Had there been ocean zoning in place, had they not picked such a conflicted location in the first place there wouldn’t have been a problem.

Also, I think there’s a public perception that wind is free and it has been fed by Cape Wind and offshore wind proponents. Land-based wind is far less expensive than offshore. Cape Wind would get anywhere between $1 and $2 billion in federal and state subsidies and tax credits. It is a hugely expensive form of electricity generation and that should be transparent to the public.

GER: Green energy companies complain that they’re being forced to jump through too many regulatory hoops to do produce renewable energy. What’s your take?

AP: South of Tuckernuck Island may not be the ideal site but [Cape Wind doesn’t] have to go back to the drawing board. It’s far better from a public interest standpoint than what they picked. It’s already in the federal review, they’ve already studied it.

GER: Does Cape Wind get more flack because it is an offshore wind pioneer in the U.S.?

AP: I think that they truly have not listened to opposition. They have tried to steamroll the local community. They’re trying to ignore the very legitimate issues that exist in this community.

GER: Is there a “green on green” war between cultural, wildlife and land conservationists on one side and renewable energy companies on the other?

AP: I think to some extent it’s unavoidable because, if you’re talking wind, your windiest areas are going to be offshore or on ridgelines. I can see why it would come to that. If you think of the reality of wind at this point it requires a fairly large footprint. If we could go into deeper waters and make that more cost effective I’d think you’d have far fewer siting issues.

GER: Do you think Cape Wind is a bad test case for offshore wind in America?

AP: I think if it goes forward it’s going to be at the expense of public safety and at the expense of the tribes. This is a test case for that commitment. If it’s allowed to go forward obviously that commitment wasn’t taken seriously.

Interview conducted and condensed by GER.

Anton Milner: Out as Q-Cells CEO

Q-Cells SE Chief Executive Officer Anton Milner has resigned, effective immediately, from the German photovoltaic cells maker, according to a company release.

Chief Financial Officer Nedim Cen, who joined the company from the restructuring consultants Alvarez & Marshal on an interim basis in June 2009, will take over the CEO duties and hold both positions. Cen will remain with the Q-Cells while it restructures and Alvarez & Marshal will support him in the program, called Q-Cells Reloaded.

Q-Cells reported losses of 1.36 billion Euros ($1.84 billion) on Feb. 23. The company blamed a drastic decline in prices and a time lag in its Calyxo subsidiary becoming competitive.

Milner, one of the company’s four founders, said in a statement:

The very dramatic negative 2009 figures have consequences and have in particular led to a loss of confidence in the financial markets.

Analysts have battered Q-Cells for constant revisions in its 2009 sales outlook, Reuters noted.

Director of Finance Carsten Simon will support Cen in the day-to-day duties of CFO.

Milner photo: Courtesy Q-Cells

There is obviously a lot of interest in China’s growing renewable energy industry. Over the past year, China’s $586 billion green stimulus has emerged as a serious contender to win the global clean energy race at the expense of the U.S.  In a recent post for the Green Leap Forward,  Chief Editor Julian Wong dissects the Chinese stimulus and asks how green it really is. Wong is also a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

– By Julian Wong

I had the opportunity to answer this question as a member of a panel discussion at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington DC foreign policy think tank, two weeks ago.   The event was held on February 17 to mark the one year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and sought to explore the effectiveness economic stimulus packages in the US and globally in catalyzing green investments (Wong’s remarks start at about 24′21).

My simple answer?  There is no simple answer.  The lack of transparency of what exactly is being allocated, how those allocations are being spent, and how the uncertainty around the lesser known story of bank lending (or monetary policy), that is separate from the fiscal stimulus figures into clean energy investments makes it nearly impossible to know just how much money is hitting the clean energy road in China.

Watch:

Link to original post

Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are pushing ahead to get their bi-partisan climate change and energy bill on the Senate floor for a full vote.

Yesterday, the three Senators and 11 of their colleagues — many representing coal producing states — met at the White House to chart a path to get some sort of climate change legislation passed. The House passed its own legislation, with its cap-and-trade provision, this summer.

Ahead of yesterday’s White House meeting with President Barack Obama, Kerry, Lieberman and Graham met with the American Petroleum Institute (API) and other pro-carbon industry groups.

Oil and gas companies have been arguing that hydrocarbons are here to stay. This has not prevented some, including BP and Royal Dutch Shell, to back cap -and-trade.

Actually, many carbon-dependent industries would prefer a legislated cap-and-trade pricing scheme instead of a regulatory regime administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

That’s what Exelon CEO John Rowe said  over the weekend at the MIT Energy Conference where he urged for a full cap-and-trade system. Anything less, he said, would not work.

On the meeting yesterday on Capitol Hill, in a prepared statement, API CEO Jack Gerard said:

As a critical part of the nation’s economy, supporting over 9.2 million jobs, the oil and natural gas industry was pleased to participate in the senators’ briefing as they develop climate proposals. We look forward to seeing details of the senators’ proposal and hope to be a constructive participant as discussions move forward.

API did not support Waxman – Markey. The organization does  support some sort of carbon pricing measure, but has been lobbying to have transportation fuels left out of cap-and-trade.

To ensure its oil and gas agenda is heard, earlier this month the API hired green activist Deryck Spooner. At the API he’s expected to organize grassroots campaigns in support of offshore oil and gas development and other key oil and gas-friendly measures.