The Connecticut Clean Energy Fund (CCEF), which was created by the state's General Assembly, said Wednesday it's open for business thanks partly to money from the federal stimulus package.

The state had to suspend the residential rebate program because of state budget shortfalls. Maryland also ran out of money last year. New Jersey retooled its program to replace rebates with energy credits as incentives after being surprised by how popular it was last year.

The CCEF has set aside $3.1 million for the Small Solar PV Program this time around. About $1.5 million of the fund came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, while the remaining came from the state's electric ratepayers.

The rebate program provides $1.75 per watt for solar energy systems are 5-kilowatt or smaller, and $1.25 per watt for larger systems that can't exceed 10 kilowatts.

The CCEF said the money should be able to fund 325 residential projects through June 2010. 

The money would enable SPG, whose businesses include SPG Solar and Thompson Technologies Industries, to expand its reach not just within the United States but internationally, the company said.

SPG Solar designs and installs solar energy systems while Thompson Technologies manufactures trackers and other equipment for mounting solar panels. One of its products, called "Floatovoltaics," enables solar panels to be installed over water.

SPG Solar serves the residential and commercial markets in California, Arizona and Oregon. One of its recent installations was a 132-kilowatt system using Solyndra's solar panels and racking systems. The system now sits atop of Livermore Cinema in northern California city of Livermore.

Solyndra's panels are made up of tubes rather than the flat solar cells that use copper, indium, gallium and selenium as the key materials for converting sunlight into electricity.

What makes Solyndra's solar panels attractive, however, are their designs and the simpler way to mount them, analysts said. The tubes, placed with space in between them, help to reduce the panels' wind resistance. As a result, Solyndra has designed its own mounting system that doesn't require the usual anchoring you see in supporting conventional, flat panels. 

Optimism prevailed amongst greentech venture capital investors in the second quarter of 2009.  Despite the eulogies delivered for the greentech sector because of a less than stellar first quarter, VC investment in greentech rebounded in the second quarter with more than $1.2 billion invested in 85 startups.  

Notable investment trends in the second quarter included:

• An increase in smart grid, automotive, and energy storage investments
• No giant $100 million+ solar or biofuel rounds as in 2008
• Early stage and late stage investments dominated, while mid-stage funding was harder to come by
• Slightly smaller average round sizes

Ira Ehrenpreis, General Parters at Cleantech VC, Technology Partners, commented on the numbers: “The recent quarter’s balanced distribution of sectors that attracted capital underscores cleantech’s breadth and diversity of opportunity, one of the key drivers behind why cleantech remains an enduring area.”
 
John Rockwell, founder and Managing Director of Element Partners added, "The growing belief that credit markets and the economy are on the road to recovery has investors back in the market.  Greentech markets are massive and diverse and investors are starting to pour additional money into the next wave of greentech opportunities."

Solar power was once again the leading investment segment at more than $330 million. But unlike previous quarters – the second quarter saw a much more balanced distribution across the various sectors with a marked increase in automotive (more than $202 million) and energy storage (more than $180 million).

One of the drivers for steady second quarter venture investment was the promise of stimulus monies offering start-up investors a non-dilutive funding source. To fully return to health, the cleantech sector needs a rebound in project financing levels, level-headed carbon legislation (good luck to us on that) and some hope in the IPO market.

Details on every greentech deal from this quarter are in this report.

Google announced its Yellostrom partnership on its official blog Tuesday. The two said they would work to bring energy data to the utility's customers through its Sparzähler smart meters, which it wants to deploy to its more than 1.4 million customers.

That adds a first European utility to the list of eight in North American that Google is already working with. It also adds a new meter to those of North American smart meter market leader Itron, which is working to integrate its meters with PowerMeter (see Google Names Itron, Utilities as PowerMeter Partners).

It may also be the first sign of a rivalry between Google and Microsoft when it comes to bringing energy awareness to the masses, given Microsoft's announcement last week that it had its own web-based energy portal, Hohm, in development  (see Microsoft Launches Home Energy Site, Sees Devices, Demand Management in Future).

Yellostrom's Sparzähler meters are using a communications module based on Microsoft CE, along with Microsoft technologies to manage the data those meters put out in 15-minute increments. The meters communicate with the utility over a TCP/IP network and bring data to customers' PCs through power line adapters.

Yellostrom has also discussed using Microsoft products as the basis of a customer web interface and software to display meter data on customers' PCs – though that was last year, before both Google and Microsoft launched new customer energy portals.

Microsoft also has its own list of partner utilities, including Puget Sound Energy, Seattle City Light, Xcel Energy and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

But Microsoft, unlike Google, also plans to open Hohm to consumers who don't have smart meters or other means to collect utility data, giving people the option of typing in estimates of their energy usage to help find ways to save power.

While Google has said it would look to devices beyond smart meters to provide data to PowerMeter, it hasn't said it would seek to deploy the platform without any source of digital data whatsoever (see Google Looks Beyond Smart Meters for Home Energy Data).

Rick Nicholson, vice president of research for IDC company Energy Insights, believes the Google-Microsoft energy monitoring rivalry – if it comes down to that – is likely to be one of the more closely watched battles in the crowded field of giving utility customers insight into their energy use.

Given the number of venture capital-funded startups – Tendril, Greenbox, EnergyHub, 4Home, Control4, and many others – hoping to offer the same services to utility customers, he likely won't be the only one keeping an eye on the two giants (see eMeter Intros Home Energy Platform).

I wrote a perspectives piece last week (see Algae Fantasists Predict 1B Gallons Per Year by 2014) on the viability of commercial algal biofuels and received a slew of comments, on and off-line, endorsing my claim that we are a longer way off from commercialization than claimed by breathless algae start-up press releases.

But according to Jim Lane of Biofuels Digest: Paul Woods, the chief executive of algae farmer Algenol is adamant he will produce 250 million gallons per year by 2013.   

And according to Lane in email correspondence – when it comes to biofuels from algae, "It really comes down to how one thinks about Algenol. That's the elephant in the room when it comes to photobioreactors."  

Today Algenol told the New York times that it is building a photobioreactor-based algae-to-ethanol demonstration plant at a Dow Chemical site in Freeport, Texas with plastic material supplied by Dow.  Photobioreactors or PBRs, in Algenol's case, are simply plastic covered troughs housing a mixture of saltwater, algae, nutrients, and CO2. 



Note that algae expert Dr. John Benemann flatly states that photobioreactors "do not work” and are useful only in supplying inoculum.

Algenol's proposed fuel harvesting method does differ from traditional algae oil extraction methods.  Rather than grow, flocculate, filter, de-water, and extract oil from the algae – Algenol uses a very different approach. Algenol's "Direct-to-Ethanol" process gathers ethanol produced by algae without destroying the algae and without the necessity of refining oil into biodiesel.  This method, if viable and scalable, has huge potential cost and embedded-energy advantages.

But according to Algenol's website:

• Initial proof of science was generated by Dr. John Coleman at the University of Toronto between 1989 and 1999. Since then, the process has been refined to allow algae to tolerate high heat, high salinity, and the alcohol levels present in ethanol production.
• The algae are metabolically enhanced to produce ethanol while being resistant to high temperature, high salinity, and high ethanol levels, which were previous barriers to ramping to commercial scale volumes.
• Algenol’s prototype production strains can produce ethanol at a rate of 6,000 gallons/acre/year, and are expected to improve to 10,000 gallons/acre/year by the end of 2009. With further refinement, the algae cells have the potential to increase production rates to 20,000 gallons/acre/year in the future.
• Algenol only uses algae strains that do not produce human toxins. In addition, the specific algae cells used cannot live in the environment found outside their Capture Technology contained sealed bioreactor.

Although this wording doesn't use the specific terms – these algae strains are clearly genetically modified – and that might be a hard sell in the U.S.  The food vs. fuel debate was bad press for biofuels and the frankenalgae debate would be even worse.

Algenol was reportedly underwritten with $70 million invested by the CEO and a few partners. Algenol claims to have plans to build a billion gallon per year facility in Mexico with a subsidiary of Mexican-owned BioFields at a cost of $850 million.  Mexico might be a bit more lax about genetically modified algae.
 
The company has applied for DOE stimulus bill funding.  More details from Lane at Biofuels Digest here.

I'll close with a comment from another renowned aquaculture and algae expert with more than 30 years of real-world experience:
 
"Few of the current slew of algae promoters seem to understand the immense energy/financial hurdles that algae fuel production need to overcome to be financially viable alternative fuels and as such their R&D priorities reflect this. As soon as I see an article touting algae's production of oil per unit area over terrestrial plants – I know the author(s) are clueless about the financial economics of algae fuel processing. As soon as I read about some special process that increases algae production per unit area – PBR's (that often use more energy than they produce), aphotic production, etc. I know the promoters don't understand the energy budgets involved in producing and processing algae to fuel.

"Bottom line – in our opinion the reality of economically viable algae fuel production is still quite a few years in the future – unless someone finds a truly novel short cut through the Laws of Thermodynamics and basic economics."

GTM Research has a brief report on algae players and technical challenges available here

Thanks to all the commenters for their input.

The 81 million or so buildings in the United States use about two-fifths of the country's energy, more than manufacturing or transportation, the DOE says. About three-quarters were built before 1979, making them ripe for efficiency retrofits.

In the future, the DOE would like to see buildings built and operated as an "integrated system" with energy efficiency at the forefront, from design to day-to-day maintenance.

To that end, it set aside $100 million for "advanced building systems research," aimed at the goal of "net-zero" buildings that generate as much or more energy than they actually use.

That's something Chu has said could be accomplished, in part, through smarter software for controlling building HVAC, lighting and other energy-using systems. A host of energy services companies, or ESCOs, provide such services, and startups are coming up with both new technologies and new business models to improve on their offerings (see Making Building Automation Brainier and A PPA Model For Building Energy Efficiency?).

The DOE will also put $53.5 million into its "Commercial Buildings Initiative" launched last year. The money is to help expand the number of companies involved from 25 to about 73, starting in September.

To make homes and apartments more energy-efficient, the DOE is putting $70 million into job training for energy efficiency retrofits. And it will also direct $72.5 million toward "building and appliance market transformation," or that is, the technical and bureaucratic effort to do things like expand Energy Star rating systems and prepare builders and regulators for more stringent building codes.

Finally, the DOE will put $50 million into research into solid-state lighting at the technology and advanced manufacturing levels – in other words, more money for light-emitting diodes (LEDs). That announcement follows Friday's news of new federal lighting efficiency guidelines to take effect in 2012 for fluorescent and incandescent lights.

"We'll start to see things that will be guaranteed that we've never seen before, such as efficiencies," Efird said. "For utility-grade applications, you'll have to give more details than to say you'll get this much after 10 years and this much after 20 years. Maybe a year-over-year roadmap."

Efird, of course, wasn't just making a general prediction. He told me after his talk that Suntech plans to launch utility-grade solar panels. The company is working on what he called "an advanced leap" in solar cell manufacturing that would make it possible to promise better and longer output for its panels.

He declined to say when the company would start selling these new products with beefier warranties. He did say that Suntech plans to continue to work on the tech improvement for this initiative in the next six months.

Solar panels these days generally come with a 20 to 25-year warranty regardless of whether they are meant to go on the rooftop of a home or on the ground of a solar farm.

There are, of course, various power ratings that indicate the range of power output for each panel. There also are solar panels with cells that are made of different semiconductors, which could make a difference in how well they perform. So solar project developers already have many options to choose from.

I imagine utilities would like to have robust solar panels with warranties longer than 25 years though. Banks also could be more willing to finance projects that use equipment with longer warranties.  After all, a coal-fired power plant can stay alive for much longer than that. 

Deutsch’s main point is that the researchers and entrepreneurs who are rushing to tackle the energy problem are following the traditional model of technology innovation: identify a problem, come up with an idea to solve it, engineer the solution for specific applications, and bring the solution to market.

This linear, technology-push approach is running up against the hard economic and regulatory realities of the energy market as currently embodied by Congress and exemplified by the Waxman-Markey Bill.

Innovation needs to be more of a team sport, Deutch said. You have to start the science, engineering and business aspects at the same time. “So this traditional distinction we have… between discovery and application is blurred because discovery here depends upon the character of the application,” he said.

On top of the systemic challenges, the Waxman-Markey Bill poses a particular challenge for energy innovation, Deutch said. On one hand you have Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that dictate specific amounts of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. And on the other you have cap-and-trade, which attempts to place a price on carbon emissions.

The two methods clash, Deutch said. “You have an inconsistent set of measures that are supposed to guide our energy future. The problem is RPS hides the cost of the generation technologies that are going to replace CO2, and the CO2 cap-and-trade system recognizes the costs,” he said. “It makes an uneconomic basis for technology choices.

Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

PrimeStar Solar is no exception. Brian Murphy, CEO of PrimeStar in Golden, Colo., said at a recent conference that "cadmium-telluride is the only technology proven to move below $1 per watt in manufacturing cost."

The company is moving toward the launch of its commercial product, set to take place by the end of this year, Murphy said. Murphy was rather mum about his company's product specs and production plans, however.

He said the commercial factory would have a production capacity in the "tens of megawatts." PrimeStar produced its first thin-film panel in April 2007 and began pilot production last October, he added.

Murphy declined to disclose the manufacturing cost of PrimeStar. And neither would he say how well PrimeStar's solar panels could convert sunlight into electricity.

Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar's panels could convert nearly 11 percent of sunlight into power.

PrimeStar has licensed its technology from nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Back in 2007, the company was awarded $3 million from the Solar American Initiative, administered by the U.S. Department of Energy, for commercializing its technology.

Founded in 2006, the company raised $6.2 million for a first-round fundraising that year. GE Energy invested an undisclosed amount in 2007 and poured in more money to become a majority shareholder last year.

PrimeStar hopes to see its panels in power plants serving utilities or on top of large commercial buildings. They're the same markets that First Solar and other thin-film solar companies are after.

Thin-film panels on the market today aren't as efficient at generating electricity as the more prevalent crystalline silicon solar panels. So a thin-film energy system would need more solar panels to achieve the same generation capacity as the crystalline silicon variety.

PrimeStar has about 100 employees.

The company will have to contend with other startups that are developing cadmium-telluride solar panels, such as Abound Solar in Fort Collins, Colo. Abound only recently began commercial production. 

In that case, Kruse alleges that DMAX’s Duramax engines infringe three related Kruse patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 5,265,562 (”‘562 patent”), 6,058,904 (”‘904 patent”) and 6,405,704 (”‘704 patent”).

Last month Kruse filed a second lawsuit, this time targeting Isuzu. The complaint (kruse-isuzu-complaint.pdf), filed in federal court in Santa Ana, California, asserts the same patents and alleges that Isuzu’s diesel engines infringe the patents.

The asserted patents are directed to Kruse’s “Limited Temperature Cycle” technology, which reduces combustion temperature, boosts thermal efficiency and reduces certain chemical emissions by diesel engines by injecting fuel in multiple increments.   

The patents describe an engine (10) comprising a block (12), a cylinder head (14) and a cylinder (16) having a piston (18).  Fuel is supplied to the engine (10) by a fuel injection system (36).  The engine (10) also includes an air induction system (26) having an air intake valve (28) in the cylinder head (14).

The process maintains a proper fuel/air mix in the engine to reduce the temperature and the work of compression.  According to the ‘904 patent, the fuel injection system (36) precisely regulates this fuel/air mixture for combustion and exhaust emission control.

The complaint requests that the court issue a permanent injunction against Isuzu and award Kruse compensatory damages for the alleged infringement.

Eric Lane is a patent attorney and intellectual property lawyer at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego, where he is in the Intellectual Property and Climate Change & Clean Technology practices. Eric is the founder and author of Green Patent Blog, which provides discussion and analysis of intellectual property law issues in clean technology.

The agreement, signed with NRG's subsidiary Alpine SunTower, calls for Alpine to build and operate a 92-megawatt project close to the southern California city of Lancaster. NRG plans to complete the project by 2012.

NRG took over eSolar's power project development business in the United States after it announced in February this year that it would invest $10 million in eSolar.

Earlier this month, NRG said it would build a 92-megawatt solar farm in New Mexico and deliver the electricity to El Paso Electric.

NRG and eSolar have said they would work together on building up to 500 megawatts of solar farms in California and southwestern states. One of the projects is the 245-megawatt solar farm that eSolar agreed in 2008 to build in order to sell electricity to the Southern California Edison.

Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar has developed the equipment for building solar thermal power projects that make use of mirrors to concentrate the sunlight to heat up water atop a central tower for steam generation. The steam is then piped to run a turbine to produce electricity.

ESolar's mirrors, or heliostats, are smaller than what some of other solar thermal power developers are using. The lower profile and size of the heliostats make them easier and less costly to install, eSolar said.

The company's power plant design also calls installing 46-megawatts of generation capacity at a time. Esolar said the design would enable it to scale up to meet a customer's needs.

Without knowing the project cost, however, it's difficult to gauge the benefits of eSolar's technology or power plant design. The company declined to disclose the project cost, a practice that is normal for developers that have signed contracts with PG&E and other investor-owned utilities in California.

By signing power purchase agreements, PG&E assumes no financial risks. The utility doesn't have to pay until power project developers start to deliver.

PG&E has signed many, many power purchase agreements with developers of all types of solar power technologies in order to meet a state mandate that 20 percent of its power mix be made up of renewable energy by 2010.

NRG has been in the wholesale power generation business since it was founded in 1989.

Noronha plans to become the chairman of the company's board of directors by the end of this year. He'll remain as the chief executive until Abound finds his successor, the company said.

John Hill, who has been the chairman, will remain on the board.

The Fort Collins, Colo.-based company was founded by researchers from the State University of Colorado in January 2007, though Noronha began working with the founders to bring the lab-based technology to commercial production in late 2006.

It built a commercial factory in Longmont, Colo., that has an initial production capacity of 65 megawatts per year. The factory could accommodate equipment for 200 megawatts per year.

In an interview in April this year, Noronha claimed that the company would be able to produce solar panels at under $1 per watt, just as First Solar has achieved over four years. Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar is the world's largest solar thin-film maker, and it produces cadmium-telluride solar panels as well. He said Abound worked hard from the start to develop a manufacturing process that would churn out thin-films efficiently.

"It's a completely automated manufacturing process that from the time a piece of glass starts at the beginning of the line to the time that it exits as a finished product," Noronha said at the time. "The time it takes for that piece of glass to start to the time the piece of glass exits as a PV module is 120 minutes."

That's what Suedeen Kelly, commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said Thursday morning.

"A lot of us are waiting to see what the DOE is doing — and some of the scuttlebutt is that we’ll find out today," Kelly told an audience at the Edison Electric Institute's annual convention in San Francisco. 

It isn't the first time that the DOE has been predicted to come out with the rules, only to disappoint the utilities and smart grid companies waiting for a piece of the pie — a similar expectation that the DOE was just about to release its rules last week passed without a peep from the department (see Green Light post). 

Still, several sources at the convention this week seem pretty positive that DOE may be ready to move this time around. 

There are lots of questions about how the DOE will manage the 50-50 grants for smart grid projects established by the stimulus package signed into law in February.

Most recently, utilities and companies that want to use the grants to do more expensive projects were cheered when the DOE lifted the caps it had previously proposed for investment-scale projects from $20 million apiece to $200 million (see DOE Lifts Smart Grid Stimulus Cap to $200M). 

But many questions — including much confusion about how the issue of standards for the smart grid will be dealt with in the department's rules for what it wants to see out of applying projects — remain to be worked out. 

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is set to address the conference some time this afternoon. That may be a speech to pay attention to... stay tuned.

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Microinverters offer improved energy harvest and improved monitoring capabilities for residential and commercial PV deployments.

Jim Lane of Biofuels Digest recently authored a forecast projecting that algal biofuels capacity will reach 1 billion gallons by 2014. That would be up from what is essentially, let me check, yes, zero algal biofuels capacity today. Biofuels Digest based its analysis on price and capacity projections for 2009 to 2014 from "leading companies in the field."  I am assuming that these price and capacity projections are based on little more than press releases and interviews from the likes of PetroAlgae, Solazyme, PetroSun, Solix, Sapphire and Algenol.  Some truth in those press releases and more than a little embellishment.

Here are the details of the forecast:

Algal Fuel/Capacity projections, 2009 to 2014

Look at this chart a bit more carefully. From 2009 to 2010, capacity goes from 1Mgy to 41Mgy.  That's a pretty irresponsible number to forecast if you can't supply the disruptive force that makes capacity grow by more than 4,000 per cent.

Capacity then triples and slows down to a mere 100 percent growth for a few years. That reasoning would be based on believing the forecasted capacity increases of less-than-transparent OTC bulletin board firms and start-ups with no volume experience or sufficient cash to make that happen.

Further magic from the chart slashes the price by 25 percent for a few years and then the price drop accelerates in 2012 to about 60 percent.  In what alternative universe do markets behave like this?

More questionable forecasting methodology from Lane in this sentence:  "Costs are based on the lowest cost provider – not an average for all providers."  Does that make any kind of sense to base your forecast on the lowest fantasy price forecast?

More twisted logic follows. I can barely understand these non-sequitors: “The $9–$30 cost ranges cited in the latest research reflect today’s prices,” said Biofuels Digest editor Jim Lane.  “That’s already competitive in some nutraceutical and food markets – for example, a pound of olive oil retails for around $17 at my store, or about $120 per gallon. But like the computer market – costs are expected to come down quickly.”  I think this means that I will soon be able to buy olive oil at $1.20 per gallon.

More disinformation and misinformation follow: "33 percent of 2014 capacity is projected to use a closed system, photobioreactor (PBR) process, with 67 percent using open pond “raceway” systems." In 2012, 22 percent of projected capacity would utilize the closed PBR process, and 78 percent would utilize open ponds." These wildly innaccurate forecasts fly in the face of any research from smart algae people at NREL or our favorite algae realist – Dr. John Benemann. The abject failure and shuttering of GreenFuels also does not support any hope for PBRs as a cost-effective solution. PBRs are not cost effective, yet Lane predicts more than 300 million gallons of biofuel derived for PBRs. No way. Dr. Benemann flatly states that PBRs "do not work” and are useful only in supplying inoculum. 

Jim – I'm in the forecasting business myself. If I was going to make claims for 1,000X growth in production and a 10X cost reduction in five years I would have to back it up with good reasoning.  And I'm not seeing a lot of that in your claims.

Jim Lane's online bio here.

Greentech Media has a brief report on algae players and challenges available here. We tried to stick to a reality-based style of analysis. I've asked Mr. Lane for a comment on my critique and will publish his reponse if it comes.

Researchers at the University of Delaware say yes.

The rather unorthodox technology comes from Erman Şenöz and Richard P. Wool at the university's chemical engineering department. They've described a process of heating chicken feathers via controlled pyrolisis – heating without oxygen – so that the proteins within them form hollow carbon microtubes with nanoporous walls.

Various other nanomaterials are being investigated as hydrogen storage media. But Wool say their carbonized chicken feathers (CCFF) could form a 20-gallon car hydrogen storage tank for about $200, compared to about$30,000 for one using metal hydrides or $5.5 million for one using carbon nanotubes, Green Car Congress reports.

The research was presented Tuesday at the ACS Green Chemistry Institute's annual conference in College Park, Md.

Besides hydrogen storage, the researchers are working on making roofing, car parts and circuit boards out of chicken feathers. The United States produces about six billion pounds of waste chicken feathers per year, so we might as well do something with them.

The Department of Energy wants researchers to get to hydrogen storage that costs less than $4 per kilowatt-hour of energy stores. Şenöz and Wool are trying to reach that goal.

Of course, the DOE also recently cut its vehicle fuel cell research funding, which could put a crimp on efforts to develop vehicle-scale storage. The department does intend to spend $68 million next year for research into stationary fuel cells for purposes such as electricity grid backup power, however (see Green Light post).

This week, the two announced a test venue for the car – a car-share and rental program in Baltimore known as Altcar. The relatively small pilot project will give visitors to Baltimore's Maryland Science Center a chance to test-drive a handful of the vehicles, which are set to hit the market in 2011.

Toronto-based Electrovaya has been talking about the car for the past year or so (see Electrovaya Gears Up for Maya-300). For $20,000 to $25,000, the Maya 300 will charge in about eight to 10 hours, run for 60 miles and plug into regular 110-volt outlets. An extended-range battery option will run for 120 miles on a charge and cost $30,000 to $35,000.

It will also have a top speed of 35 miles per hour – a fact that places it in the category of so-called "city" or "neighborhood" cars meant mainly for urban commutes or for use on campuses or in corporate fleets. Other low-speed vehicle makers include Miles Electric Vehicles and Zenn Motor Co.

But Maya is planning to introduce a car that can go at highway-legal speeds in the future, Sankar Das Gupta, president of Electrovaya, said in a Wednesday conference call with reporters, though he wouldn't set a date for that to happen.

How these might compete against mid-priced, highway-speed electric vehicles being introduced by the likes of Japan's Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru, China's BYD, India's Reva and others remains to be seen.

At first, the low-speed Maya is aimed at private and public fleet markets, not the broader consumer market.

Miles also wants to bring a highway-legal version of its vehicle to market by early next year, with a target price of $45,000 (see Miles Electric to Show Off Its All-Electric Sedan June 3).

ExxonMobil's contribution to the Maya is its "SuperPolymer" separator film for Electrovaya's battery. The oil giant has put about $500,000 into the car-sharing program.

ExxonMobil is working on providing the separator film for other customers, ExxonMobil Chemical Co. chief polymer scientist Pat Brant said Wednesday, though he wouldn't provide further details.

Electrovaya's main business is batteries. It has worked on a number of electric vehicle projects with partners including Statoil Hydro in the United Kingdom, the Tata Group in India, Miljobil Grenland in Norway and Purolator Courier in Canada.

It's also put its batteries in a prototype electric Hummer developed by FEV along with help from Raser Technologies, which is primarily a geothermal power developer.

Interesting battery news about A123, Saft, and good comments from a VC at Rockport

Entitled: Innovation and the Fundraising and Investment Landscape this is a breakfast event at the law offices of Orrick in Menlo Park.

This was expertly moderated by Mitch Zuklie, Partner at Orrick (he heads up Orrick's cleantech practice).

Here are some interesting comments from some of the panelists:

Victor Westerlind, General Partner at venture capital firm Rockport Capital

• "Fundamentally VCs are risk adverse – they want no risk in the deal, if we could handle risk we'd be entrepreneurs."
• "It's both good times and bad times in cleantech investing."
• "This is a good time to start companies if you have a breakthrough investment."
• "Deal flow in the last six months has been great but valuations are absolutely down."
• "In 2009 it looks there is a tendency towards early rounds as you hope the world will be a lot better in two years as well as late stage rounds – the problem area is B and C rounds."
• "I'm an engineer and I've fallen into the trap of being wowed by cool technology – I've learned to take team over killer technology every time – I'll take a killer team every time."
• "The best ideas occur when the pressure is greatest. I've seen a lot interesting things get born out of that financial pressure."

Regarding lobbyists, Westerlind gave us a war story: One of Rockport's portfolio company, Solyndra, received $535 million in loan guarantees because it spent two years and an alleged $6 million on lobbying. It was an effort that started a long time ago. Victor would not verify the $6 million dollar figure.

Jeff Depew, CEO and Co-Founder of lithium-ion battery firm Imara

Jeff founded the firm in 2004, took VC in May 2006 and is now slugging through that awkward stage of doing a Round C.  His comments:

• "There are liars, damn liars and battery guys. Although fuel cells are a different class altogether."
• "We're looking at short cycle stuff like power tools."
• "The sexy stuff is transportation and grid – but it's not how you get across the gap and get the business built."
• "We have the best product entering the market place."
• "We have 20 percent more power and 60 percent more energy density and range."
• "A123's lead customer has approached us about replacing them."
• "SAFT had a team of McKinsey guys spending $175,000 per week on filing grant and loan requests."

The peripatetic Melody Jones McDowell, currently a director at investment bank Robert W. Baird & Co.:

• "We're seeing an uptick in M&A interest (as opposed to activity)."
• "If you're not hitting $5 million – a large industrial firm won't know what to do with you – the large industrials know how to kill technology."
• "Early stage is not where we're seeing M&A activity."

Joseph Muscat of Ernst & Young was also on the panel and gave some encouraging news on the state of VC and project financing in the second quarter as compared to the first quarter of 2009. "Innovation is very much continuing. I really do believe that corporate America can't do innovation like this community."

The Redwood City, Calif.-based smart grid networking startup will be installing its technology in meters from Landis+Gyr that SMUD intends to start installing next month and have in place for all of its roughly 600,000 customers by early 2011, it reported Tuesday.

That's on top of the millions of meters that Silver Spring is installing its Internet protocol-based, RF mesh-enabled systems in for such customers as Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Florida Power & Light and American Electric Power, Commonwealth Edison Co. and Australian utilities Jemena Electricity Networks and United Energy Distribution (see GE, Silver Spring Land ComEd Smart Meter Pilot and Silver Spring Heads Down Under).

But the Sacramento project is unique among them in that it's a municipal utility, rather than an investor-owned utility, noted Eric Dresselhuys, Silver Spring vice president of markets.

While investor owned utilities have been making the largest smart meter and other smart grid investments to date, "I think we're going to see more stuff happening with muni's" in the future, Dresselhuys said.

At least one other municipal utility – Austin Energy in Austin, Texas – has taken a leading role, with 410,000 smart meters, 86,000 smart thermostats and about 2,500 distribution grid sensors already deployed. It is also planning a large-scale smart grid project, the Pecan Street Project, which includes such IT giants as Dell, GE Energy, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco Systems and Microsoft (see Top Ten Smart Grid: Utilities).

The Sacramento deployment is part of SMUD's "Smart Capital Initiative," and is meant to include other smart grid systems like distribution automation and home area networks at a future date.

Dresselhuys said that it's too early to talk about how Silver Spring may be involved in those next-step projects, as SMUD has yet to announce its plans.

"We're going to start doing some smaller-scale stuff around home area networking and distribution automation – it will be very much in the test mode initially," he said.

It's a growing trend, as hires by Greenbox Technology, GridPoint and Trilliant in recent months have shown (see Trend Watch: Greenbox Lands Energy Industry Insider as CEO).

First off – Brad Whitcomb, former vice president of marketing and customer innovation at PG&E, who has taken an executive vice president position with Silver Spring.

PG&E is one of Silver Spring's biggest customers. The California utility is deploying about 5.3 million smart meters, many of them containing technology from the Redwood City, Calif.-based smart grid networking and communications startup, in a $1.7 billion project expected to be complete in 2011.

Whitcomb previously led PG&E's demand management programs, which sign up customers to curtail power use during peak demand times. Whether or not that could be a precursor to Silver Spring-equipped networks playing a role in that task remains to be seen.

While the utility promises it will eventually link its smart meters to customer energy monitoring and control systems, just how they plan to do that is an open question, though the utility has suggested it might start with linking smart thermostats to smart meters via ZigBee (see Q&A: PG&E's Andrew Tang).

By the way, Silver Spring also hired Judy Lin, former senior vice president of Cisco Systems' Ethernet Switching Technology Group, earlier this month (see Green Light post).

Given that Cisco has made a big push into networking smart grid systems itself, it's possible that the networking giant and the well-funded startup may start to compete in the future, although they're also cooperating on a one-million smart meter project in Miami (see Cisco Wants to Be Everywhere in the Smart Grid and A Million Smart Meters for Miami).

Next up – Ray Gogel, a former Xcel Energy executive who has joined Current Group as president and chief operating officer.

Current Group makes software and sensors for smart grid distribution automation and end-user applications, and is involved in Xcel's $100 million SmartGridCity pilot project, which Gogel has played an important role in assembling (see Current Group, Qwest Look to DSL for Smart Grid Communications).

Gogel, who has been chief administrative officer, CIO and vice president of customer and enterprise solutions at Xcel, will take responsibility for Current's work in the U.S. smart grid markets, as well as a new push into Europe and Asia, the Germantown, Md.-based company announced.

He's the second Xcel executive involved in SmartGridCity to leap to a startup involved in the project. Last month it was Michael Carlson, Xcel's CIO, who took an executive position with smart grid software maker GridPoint (see Green Light post and GridPoint Beefs Up Smart Grid Software, Lands New Marketing Deal).

Two other big energy executives not directly involved with utilities have also made the leap to smart grid startups this year.

Greenbox, which makes software for monitoring and managing home energy use, hired Ivo Steklac, a 20-year veteran of such metering giants as Elster and Schlumberger, as its new CEO earlier this month.

And Trilliant, the Redwood City, Calif.-based maker of smart meter communications networking systems, hired General Electric veteran Andrew White as CEO in March.