Mark Zanoli, managing director of investment banking at JP Morgan, said his bank is working on two solar IPOs slated for the fourth quarter of this year.

Speaking at Intersolar North America in San Francisco this week, Zanoli said he is seeing investors "running out of place to put money, and they will start to take risks. That means there is a mass amnesia of what happened in the fourth quarter last year, and thank God."

I caught up with Zanoli briefly after his talk and asked him about the two IPOs, and he didn't want to say much. He said the two companies make thin-film and crystalline silicon panels. They are not based in the United States or Europe.

How about Asia? "Most likely," he said coyly.

Incidentally, a Chinese polysilicon maker, GCL Solar Energy Technology Holdings, today withdrew its plan to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, citing poor market conditions.

Other investors also are seeing (hoping) for a return of IPOs. Steve Westly of the Westly Group in Silicon Valley said he expects to see a dozen IPOs in the next 12 months (see Earth2tech post).

Venture capital investing also is on the rise. Data from GTM Research showed that VCs pumped more than $1.2 billion into 85 startups in the second quarter of this year, compared with roughly $836 million into 59 startups in the first quarter. 

DayStar Technologies, one of the first companies to jump into copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells, has sold off "non-core" assets in its Halfmoon, N.Y. office, where the company conducted much of its R&D, to Veeco Instruments. DayStar didn't say how much it would be worth, but said it would cut about $2 million from the operating budget. DayStar retained rights to its intellectual property.

The sale will allow Veeco to further elaborate on its plans for selling equipment to the CIGS market.

In May, Stephan DeLuca resigned as CEO and a director at the request of the board. It also laid off 30 percent of its staff at the time. Ratson Morad, who came over from Solyndra last year, recently resigned as COO.

In the first quarter of the year, DayStar lost $7.7 million, up from the $4.5 million loss in the same quarter the year before.

"DayStar had cash and cash equivalents of $6.5 million at March 31, 2009, compared with $17.1 million at December 31, 2008," the earnings release stated. "As of March 31, 2009, DayStar had total liabilities of $16.0 million, and total stockholders’ equity was $37.0 million."

Ugh.

DayStar employed one of the most tested, but perhaps one of the more expensive, methods for growing CIGS: evaporation. Although it works, competitors say it isn't as efficient as sputtering or evaporation. On the other hand, most competitors are also still just approaching mass manufacturing.

Like others, DayStar also wants to produce CIGS cells on metal foils, rather than glass, but making that transition has taken longer than expected.

The company has laid everyone off but essential staff, and they are staying on to file for bankruptcy proceeding, according to the company.

I rode this thing once (see masterpiece of video from 2007 here.). While it was a fun silent ride, the scooter had a big problem: an $11,000 price tag. For that, you can buy a good used car.

The scooter and motorcycle market is far smaller than the car market. Others have had issues too. Zero Motorcycles only recently came out with its delayed street-legal all electric bike and it sells for more than anticipated.

Still, the market holds promise. Motorcycles can get by with far smaller batteries than cars, so you could see the price come down considerably. Additionally, some megacities in Asia are passing regulations banning small gas engines, like the kind found on scooters.

The company filed the request with the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission Friday. GCL filed to go public in July 2008.

GCL runs its operation in China through Jiangsu Zhongneng Polysilicon Technology Development Co. Only last month, the news broke that it was selling Jiangsu Zhongneng to Hong Kong-based GCL-Poly Energy Holdings for about HKD $26.35 billion ($3.4 billion).

GCL-Poly Energy operates mostly co-generation power plants in China. By the end of 2008, the company was running or co-operating 19 power plants totaling 1.05 gigawatts in capacity.

The company had hoped to raise up to $600 million by selling American depositary shares and be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to its SEC filing last October. It initially wanted to raise up to $862.5 million.

Founded in 2006, GCL has a polysilicon manufacturing complex in Xuzhou in the Jiangsu province, and it was planning to start making wafers there this year. The company had been outsourcing wafer production, said the October SEC filing.

GCL produced its first batch of polysilicon in September 2007. For the first eight months of 2008, the company churned out 1,021 metric tons of polysilicon.

The company also was planning to build a polysilicon plant in Xilinhot in Inner Mongolia.

Gills Onions has come up with a clever way to dispose of its daily 300,000-pound load of onion waste - turn it into methane, and use the gas to power fuel cells that can cover the plant's baseload electrical needs.

That's the gist of the $9.5 million project unveiled Friday at the Oxnard, Calif.-based onion processing plant.

The savings of $400,000 a year from deferred waste hauling, plus about $700,000 a year in deferred electricity costs - not to mention a $2.7 million self-generation incentive check from Southern California Gas Co. - should pay back the investment in less than five years, said Steve Gill, co-owner of the business.

The first step comes in taking the onion tops and skins normally thrown away at the plant and squeezing the juice from them, he said. That juice is fed into an anaerobic digester made by Biothane, a wastewater treatment company with offices in Moscow, the Netherlands, Indonesia and Camden, N.J., he said.

Anaerobic digesters are used by a number of agricultural plants to generate gas from waste like livestock manure. Companies like Microgy are installing them at dairy farms and other livestock operations (see Green Light post).

At Gills Onions, the resulting methane has a lot of sulfur in it - part of what makes onions smell - and that's stripped out before being fed into two 300-kilowatt fuel cells made by FuelCell Energy (NSDQ: FCEL), he said.

Using fuel cells instead of burning the methane lowers the greenhouse-gas emissions of the project. Added to the emissions avoided by not trucking away the waste that yields a 30,000 ton-per year reduction in the plant's carbon emissions, he said.

Southern California Gas - part of Sempra Energy, which also owns San Diego Gas & Electric Co. - is working on more waste-to-energy projects, including one with a "major waste hauler" and another involving treating wastewater and yielding "pipeline-quality" natural gas, said Hal Snyder, vice president of customer solutions at the utility.

Wal-Mart plans to ask all of its more than 100,000 suppliers to show how sustainable they are. Helping them prove it could become a big business.

The world's largest retailer announced Thursday that it would start asking suppliers to track their greenhouse-gas emissions, water usage and waste production, among a host of other social and environmental items.

That's the first step in a multi-year plan that will eventually lead to a consumer label that can tell Wal-Mart shoppers how sustainable each product is, the company said. To get there, Wal-Mart wants other retailers, suppliers, governments and non-profit groups to join a consortium to come up with standards that can be applied to every retailer, not just itself.

But while that labeling system may be years away, Wal-Mart's U.S.-based suppliers have been asked to answer its 15-point initial sustainability checklist by October.

And for many, the first question on the list - "Have you measured your corporate greenhouse gas emissions?" - may provide a kick in the pants to the small but rapidly growing field of carbon accounting.

Companies promising software and services to track carbon emissions have a relatively small market of $10 million or so today in the United States, according to a study released last month by Groom Energy Solutions and Greentech Media.

But it's expected to double each year or so, the report says - and while impending national cap-and-trade legislation now being debated in Congress is one reason, meeting the demands of the public for more sustainability information is the driver today, says Paul Baier, Groom Energy's vice president of consulting (see Carbon Accounting: It's All About Appearances).

Carbon accounting startups have been getting venture capital interest - and have been getting acquired - as a result. Startups Planet Metrics and Carbonetworks raised millions in the past year (see PlanetMetrics Launches Carbon Modeling, Raises $2.3M).

Fellow startups Clear Standards and eQuilibrium Solutions were bought by SAP and demand response aggregator EnerNoc, respectively, in the past (see stories here and here). And enterprise software giants like IBM, Microsoft and CA are entering the carbon management field, Baier said (see IBM Focuses Supply Chain Heft on Green).

Wal-Mart's request that suppliers report water use and the solid waste generated from their facilities could give a boost to companies that track those as well. That includes IBM, which has made water management a new line of business (see IBM Dives Into Smart Water Management).

Software startup Hara, which promises to track energy, water and fuel use and waste production, among other metrics, landed $6 million from VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers earlier this year and is working with clients including Coca-Cola (see Energy Management Startup Nara Grabs Coke as Client, $6M From Kleiner).

Most companies use spreadsheets to calculate things like carbon emissions, water use and waste output nowadays. Whether or not that level of tracking will be sufficient for Wal-Mart's purposes remains to be seen, but it has come under criticism from both a environmental responsibility and a business efficiency standpoint.

Nonprofit groups Trucost and Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute released a report in June saying that two-thirds of the companies listed on the S&P 500 index don't disclose enough information about their greenhouse-gas emissions.

And an IBM report last month said that most companies it surveyed weren't collecting data on internal sustainability efforts frequently enough to use in business decision-making (see Corporate Social, Environmental Efforts Need More Data, IBM Says). 

While some people despise them, I think they play an integral role in the technology industry. They are the modern day equivalent of the trade fairs conducted by the Hanseatic league. Besides, it gives me a chance to socialize. Here are some of the tidbits from the floor at Intersolar that took place in San Francisco this year:

--More than one person talked about dust and debris and the effect it could have on solar performance, particularly in desert nations like Abu Dhabi. It will also be a problem that Europe has to tackle if it wants to get large amounts of power from solar thermal plants in North Africa. Skyline Solar, which makes silicon modules with reflective concentrators, argued that the design of its module may lead to less debris. Dew that forms on the concentrator will roll off, carrying some solids with it.

--David Gelbaum, the secretive investor behind the Quercus Trust, was allegedly in town. I didn't see him. Then again, he might have been that guy in the Gavin Newsom mask.

--There are two companies using the name Solar Magic. National Semiconductor, of course, sells a product called SolarMagic to boost the performance of solar modules. Meanwhile, a Chinese company called Heze Solar Magic brands its solar thermal water heaters as solar magic. (National's SolarMagic helps get around the debris issue by allowing solar panels to act more independently.)

--Abe Yokell of Rockport Capital Partners stopped by. We chatted about storage. One of the issues that will likely begin to crop up in the hot, but almost nonexistent, storage market is the fact that the price between expensive, peak power and cheap nighttime power isn't that great. Or at least maybe not large enough to justify buying millions of dollars worth of equipment to balance electrical loads. Still, Rockport is looking into storage investments.

The company, which has created a system that combines silicon solar cells with a concentrator, gets its solar cells from five different suppliers, said Tim Keating, vice president of marketing and operations of the company during a meeting at Intersolar taking place this week in San Francisco. It then hires contract manufacturers to produce its modules.

And the concentrator? "We build them on auto body lines. There is a lot of spare capacity for stamping metal out there," he said.

Whether or not concentrators for PV systems remains one of the big debates in the industry. VCs plunked millions into concentrators back in 2005 and 2006 because demand for silicon skyrocketed. After raw materials fell, people began to question whether concentrators would ever pay off. To get around this problem, of course, start-ups are trying to devise concentrators out of cheaper and cheaper materials. Cool Earth Solar has concentrators made from 8-foot diameter Mylar balloons. (The balloons require a pumping system to keep them full of air, which adds costs, but you get the idea.)

Stamped, reflective metal surfaces will be cheaper than mirrors, argues Keating.

Another really interesting thing about the design. Skyline mounts its solar modules onto the tracking system horizontally, rather than vertically. It also positions the aluminum heat sink on the back of the module so that the metal fins run vertically, rather than horizontally. This allows the heat sink to passively dissipate heat.

And if Skyline's concept gets popular, you could start to see more panels that are Ford tough.

Keating, by the way, spent several years at Intel, making him one of the many of the former Blue Shirts entering the industry.

Mark Goldman is the CEO of Armageddon Energy, a very early stage firm with two full-time employees.   Armageddon is focused on 1kW and 2kW, flat packed, consumer-branded hexagonal-shaped solar panels.  Three of the panels installed along with microinverters generates about 1kW and attaches to the roof really quickly.  According to Goldman,  "Solar is a gateway drug to energy efficiency."  Armageddon tries to make solar a low-involvement sale akin to buying a large appliance instead of a large handyman project.  He adds, "Forget about ROI - it's all about purchase price."

The 26 employees at Sungevity are working towards internet based solar sales as per CEO Danny Kennedy.  They already "have a couple of hundred happy customers - we're a branded sales company for residential customers any where on earth."   

Jeff Wolfe of groSolar spoke of a $6 per Watt installed cost. 

Barry Cinnamon of Akeena Solar started as a solar installer in 2001.  But he, "was lazy and wanted to get off the roof as fast as possible."   So they racked and wired the PV panels off the roof - this inspired the now branded "Andalay" panel which has the racking and wiring essentially pre-assembled on the panel. 

 

This is not exactly DIY home-owner solar - the panelists pretty much discouraged couch potatoes from climbing on their roof to install solar as a weekend project.  But it does allow roofers, rather than specialists to quickly and safely mount these solar modules.  The microinverter keeps the voltage relatively low and AC rather than DC.
 
Some other companies involved in this: Renewable Power Solutions’ claims their 1.2-kW solar system costs less than $5,000 after California rebate incentives, tax credits, and first-year energy savings.  The system consists of six 216W Sharp solar panels and six Enphase microinverters .  Other players looking to go after this emerging "consumer" or pre-assembled market sector include Ready Solar  and Veranda Solar.

About four years, according to Peter Owen, president of Linde Electronics, during a break at Intersolar U.S. taking place this week in San Francisco. Linde, like other equipment manufacturers such as Sixtron Advanced Materials, is increasingly touting the sustainability of its products. Factory equipment is being tailored so that more chemicals inserted into vacuum chambers gets used or can be more easily recycled.

Linde, for instance, is promoting a system for cleaning chemical vapor deposition chambers with fluorine rather than the more traditional nitrogen trifluoride. NF3 is one of the more dangerous greenhouse gases and enough of it leaks out of industrial plants to make it a problem.

Switching to fluorine can cut the carbon footprint down to two years. The industry's goal is to get it to a year.

Fluorine cleaning systems have been used for years in the flat panel TV industry but only recently have been promoted for solar panels. Why? Florine can be used with thin films, and the volumes are only beginning.

It's a solar panel from Solyndra, the maker of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar panel. It is a somewhat radical design. The active CIGS material is coated on those black cylinders. The cylindrical shape allows the panel to capture direct sunlight and light that bounces off the reflective white surface right below the panel. The panel is also propped up with fairly inexpensive racking.

Solyndra came out of stealth last year and has shown off the panels on the roof of its own headquarters, but most people in the solar industry haven't seen them. Both solar researcher Sorin Grana and investor Alain Harrus were pretty excited to see this thing on the floor. (Harrus was actually the one who spotted it in the Satcon booth. Satcon is working with Solyndra, according to Renewable Energy World's Stephen Lacey.)

If you are at the show, it is on the first floor toward the back of the hall. It is drawing crowds all day.

The decision gives the FutureGen Alliance the go-ahead to start the preliminary design of the project and figure out how to raise money for building the project in Mattoon, Ill. The alliance, made up of coal, metal and power generation companies, was considering four locations in the country and settled on Mattoon.

FutureGen was conceived to demonstrate the commercial viability of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, which would gather the carbon dioxide produced by a coal-fired power plant and store it underground instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. CCS has been seen as a promising method of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but it has remained in pre-commercial stages.

The DOE expects the preliminary design and funding plan to be completed in early 2010, when the DOE will decide whether to proceed with the construction and operation of the project. The government and the alliance would have to sign a cooperative agreement.

The 275-megawatt project would be designed to capture 90 percent of the emissions by the third year of its operation, the DOE said. The goal is to harvest and store one million tons of carbon emissions per year when it reaches commercial operation.

The current FutureGen project is a resurrection of a previous attempt. The DOE nixed the project in late 2007 when it determined that the proposed project cost was way too high. The government had anticipated the cost to be $950 million, but the alliance estimated it to be $1.5 billion. Others in the industry put the cost at $1.8 billion.

This time around, the DOE said the project could still cost nearly $1.8 billion. It expects to dole out $1.073 billion for the project. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would provide $1 billion of that amount.

The alliance's contribution is pegged at $400 million to $600 million, and it would have to raise non-federal money down the road to complete the project, the DOE said.

As part of that project, Amsterdam and Dutch utility Nuon will be installing energy management systems in about 500 homes to give residents a view into their gas and electricity usage to help them save energy (see The Smart Home, Part I).

Cisco will be providing the IP-based home energy management system, which involves an energy display that links to appliances and other power-using systems within the home, as well as to smart meters provided by Nuon, through both WiFi and powerline carrier communications network, according to a Cisco spokesperson.

Cisco has said it hopes to make in-home energy management devices as part of a broad-based move into the smart grid industry (see Cisco Wants to be Everywhere in the Smart Grid). But it hasn't specified whether it will be providing such devices in the U.S. smart grid projects it's working on with Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy (see Duke Energy Enlists Cisco in Smart Grid Efforts and A Million Smart Meters for Miami).

As for IBM, it will work with Nuon to develop the applications used within the home energy displays, as well as link each home's energy management system and the datacenter where all that data will be stored.

IBM has done a lot of work helping utilities integrate various aspects of their smart grid projects. Most of that work has been linked to utility-side data management and analysis, rather that in-home energy management applications, although IBM is taking a lead role in a broad energy and water metering project in the island nation of Malta (see IBM Snags Another Smart Grid Deal and IBM Brings Smart Meters to Malta).

Smart homes are just one part of the Amsterdam Smart City project, which also includes a "ship-to-grid" program to link cargo vessels in the city's busy port to its power grid, as well as a "climate street," adding sustainable trash collection, lighting and smart meters to businesses along the city's busy Utrechtsestraat shopping corridor.

Accenture, another partner on the project, will also install "smart" systems at its Amsterdam office to identify energy consumption, as well as work with the overall project.

Semicon West, the chip manufacturing convention, and Intersolar U.S. are taking place together in different buildings in the convention complex. Intersolar is pretty well populated and there is traffic on all floors of the convention center. The educational seminars are somewhat full as well. Tigo Energy, which makes a control unit for maximizing output from solar panels, seems to be getting a steady stream of interested parties.

Cut to Semicon. The place is a ghost town.

"It's depressing," said one attendee.

"They are selling stuff they sold back in the '80s," joked another.

"You should try to figure out the male to female ratio," commented another.

Applied Materials has a booth in Intersolar. (We also ran into Applied CEO Mike Splinter and Applied Solar president Charlie Gay here.) Applied, however, does not have a booth at Semicon, according to one person. I have to go check on that and confirm it, but it's an interesting symbolic fact if true.

The survey, conducted by Greentech Media and the PV Group (part of SEMI), sought to gauge the views of chip and solar companies on setting up manufacturing in the United States. Most of the 106 respondents said they already are investing in solar or plan to do so soon.

For those firms that don't have the money or inclination to buy solar companies, the next-best approach is to either develop in-house manufacturing technologies or purchase factory equipment designed to cut short the process to building commercial solar panels, the survey found.

Makers of crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon solar cells already can buy standard-issued equipment from vendors, while makers of cadmium-telluride and copper-indium-gallium-selenide solar cells tend to design their own factory equipment.

More respondents said they would pick crystalline silicon technologies if they were to enter the solar market. The choice "next-generation PV technologies" received the second-most vote, followed by amorphous silicon.

"It's clear to go with what you know," said Scott Clavenna, CEO of Greentech Media, in presenting the survey Tuesday. "Semi companies have tremendous experience in crystalline silicon."

When asked what technologies they would pick to ensure the United States is competitive in the global market, more respondents chose "next-generation PV technologies."

The pick corresponded with the respondents' sentiment that what makes the United States an attractive place for manufacturing is the proximity to research and development resources. Skilled workforce, government incentives and proximity to end customers rounded out the top reasons for producing solar equipment in the United States. 

Speaking at Intersolar, Newsom pointed out that Suntech Power Holdings, the solar module giant, opened its U.S. headquarters here last year with four employees. It now has 50 and in about a year it will have 100.

Trina Solar also planted its U.S. headquarters here and just recently so did Yingli Solar.

"Hundreds of companies have come to San Francisco because of our tax incentives," he said.

San Francisco has also become a big market for demand because of city-wide solar incentives that come in addition to federal and state incentives. Some installers have told me that a San Francisco resident last year could put solar on his or her roof for around $2,500. Because of the incentives, San Francisco is the third largest solar city in California and the largest per capita city in the state.

Synthetic Genomics announced a $300 million agreement with Exxon to research and develop next generation biofuels using photosynthetic algae. And according to the New York Times, Exxon is going to invest another $300 million in in-house research.

That investment will occur over a number of years – but that's still a lot of cash.  It's more than the total amount of venture capital invested in algae startups since 2005.  A drop in the bucket for Exxon but still, big money. Synthetic also has a deal with BP to genetically engineer microbes for green chemistry.

I've written extensively and skeptically about the hype in this very nascent industry and the breathless claims of algae biofuel firms scaling up at a "pump-parity" price. But Exxon believes and has put its money where its mouth is. (Actually the money came from Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering). And it's going to take an investment of this scale to get algae to market in any significant way. 

Here are some recent algae blog entries:

• Algenol: the Elephant in the Room

• Algae Fantasists

• Open Ponds vs. Closed Bioreactors

The Times quoted Synthetic Genomics dynamic founder, J. Craig Venter, as saying, “I came up with a notion to trick algae into pumping more lipids out."

But here's a telling line from the story: "Both companies said they still had a range of problems to solve that include determining what types of algae to use and whether it is more efficient to grow them in open ponds or in closed containers called bioreactors."

If these are still questions at SGI and Exxon – how to grow the algae and which species or strain – then these firms have betrayed that we are still very early in the Research portion of the program, we are not yet at the Development part of R&D. 

Venter is a man of action and it's not a good bet to wager against him. But the problem with algae – is that it's not just tricking the algae to pump more lipids out.  There's an entire process chain in algae farming that needs to be optimized – algae growth, algae harvest, drying and more. And again, if they are still talking about closed photobioreactors for mass algal fuel deployment, then Exxon and SGI have a lot to learn.

Still – great news for algaepreneurs and an investment at the necessary scale in dollars and time to get algae out of the test tube and into the tank. More on this story soon.

Synthetic Genomics announced a $300 million agreement with Exxon to research and develop next generation biofuels using photosynthetic algae. And according to the New York Times, Exxon is going to invest another $300 million in in-house research.

That investment will occur over a number of years – but that's still a lot of cash.  It's more than the total amount of venture capital invested in algae startups since 2005.  A drop in the bucket for Exxon but still, big money. Synthetic also has a deal with BP to genetically engineer microbes for green chemistry.

I've written extensively and skeptically about the hype in this very nascent industry and the breathless claims of algae biofuel firms scaling up at a "pump-parity" price. But Exxon believes and has put its money where its mouth is. (Actually the money came from Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering). And it's going to take an investment of this scale to get algae to market in any significant way. 

Here are some recent algae blog entries:

• Algenol: the Elephant in the Room

• Algae Fantasists

• Open Ponds vs. Closed Bioreactors

The Times quoted Synthetic Genomics dynamic founder, J. Craig Venter, as saying, “I came up with a notion to trick algae into pumping more lipids out."

But here's a telling line from the story: "Both companies said they still had a range of problems to solve that include determining what types of algae to use and whether it is more efficient to grow them in open ponds or in closed containers called bioreactors."

If these are still questions at SGI and Exxon – how to grow the algae and which species or strain – then these firms have betrayed that we are still very early in the Research portion of the program, we are not yet at the Development part of R&D. 

Venter is a man of action and it's not a good bet to wager against him. But the problem with algae – is that it's not just tricking the algae to pump more lipids out.  There's an entire process chain in algae farming that needs to be optimized – algae growth, algae harvest, drying and more. And again, if they are still talking about closed photobioreactors for mass algal fuel deployment, then Exxon and SGI have a lot to learn.

Still – great news for algaepreneurs and an investment at the necessary scale in dollars and time to get algae out of the test tube and into the tank. More on this story soon.

The U.S. uses billions of barrels of gasoline each day.

In a "Secondary" transaction, a new investor buys the existing equity of a current investor in a startup.  It can be done in conjunction with a new funding, but often doesn't bring any new capital into the company at all.  It can be a specific acquisition of a company's equity from an existing investor to a new investor, or it also can happen more indirectly as an entire venture portfolio gets sold from a VC firm to a new institutional investor. Typically the seller of the equity or portfolio is facing a liquidity crunch and needs to sell off some of their holdings, even if at a discount, in order to raise some cash.  But it also can happen at the tail end of a VC's fund, in order to give their LPs some near-term finality and close out a fund even if some of the investments haven't exited.

And we'll never know just how much of this is happening in cleantech venture capital.  Because it doesn't get talked about very much, for obvious reasons.

But from all reports, it's happening quite a bit right now, especially as VCs continue to have trouble raising new funds.  There are some hints of the secondaries taking place, in such news as Daimler has already sold off 40% of the stake they recently bought in Tesla Motors.  But we're not hearing about the vast majority of secondary transactions that are taking place.  Nor will we.

Just something to keep in mind as we discuss the talked-about deals:

• SolFocus has added yet more to their Series C, with the final close at $77.6mm.  

• Water membrane developer inge watertechnologies has raised EUR5mm in venture financing, from new investor BayTech Venture Capital and existing investors Taprogge Watertech, Emerald Cleantech Fund I, Sustainable Performance Group, Siemens Venture Capital, StoneFund and Entrepreneurs Fund.

• Turbine Air Systems has raised at least $15mm of a targeted $50mm round of financing, with Element Partners participating.

• Algae biofuels continue to get a lot of buzz, and now Solix Biofuels has announced a $16.8mm Series A.  Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. (SAIL, but not to be confused with SAIL Venture Partners, another cleantech venture investor) led the round.

• Speaking of Sail Venture Partners, I missed reporting last month that they invested in Xtreme Power, as part of a $5mm round that the CEO of Xtreme describes as "not that big of an event for us".

• Pyron Solar has been acquired / rescued by Ellis Energy Investments.

• Finite Carbon has raised a Series A including $2mm from TL Ventures.

Other news and notes:  WHEB Ventures has held a 3rd closing on their second clean tech venture fund... Overall, however, fundraising by VC firms is way down, which is bad news for many startups since that means fewer checkwriters...  Finally, can a VC-backed startup cause earthquakes???

Small systems can be financed on a credit card, said Mark Goldman, co-founder of Armageddon Energy, which wants to make modular solar systems for homes, during a presentation at a panel on residential solar sponsored by Greentech Media at Intersolar, which takes place in San Francisco this week.

Danny Kennedy, president of Sungevity, concurred. A substantial portion of the orders Sungevity receives, he added, are under 3 kilowatts. (Sungevity has software for estimating the cost of a solar installation but the company also conducts installations.)

Ideally, these kind of systems could be installed by homeowners themselves or installed by trained technicians at Best Buy or Home Depot, said Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar, which has developed at modular rack called Andalay that contains the solar panels, racking and most of the required electronics in a single package.Ultimately, you could see a bifurcation in the market: semi-custom systems providing 3 or more kilowatts of power installed by professionals and smaller ones installed by semi-pros.

Interestingly, Cinnamon said that Andalaypanels actually sells for a slight premium, when measured on a per-kilowatt basis. Consumers are willing to pay for the convenience of having easier-to-install modular racks. So not everything in solar is based on price.

One last note: Jeff Wolfe, CEO of GroSolar, added, that prices continue to come down. In California, you can get solar on your house for $6 a watt in some situations.