[Corrected 7/1/09]

The atmosphere at last Wednesday’s XSITE energy breakout session was electric—clean electric, that is. The topic of the hour was the future and feasibility of wind, solar, and other alternative energy industries in New England. Rob Day, president of the Renewable Energy Business Network, moderated the panel, which included Jay Fiske (a VP at solar firm Wakonda Technologies), Daniel Goldman (EVP and CFO of GreatPoint Energy, a developer of coal gasification technology), Gerry Haines (EVP and chief legal officer at biofuel firm Verenium), and Roger Freeman (president of wind power firm Solventerra Energy).

The energy industry is staring down the barrel of heavy government involvement in its affairs. The Waxman-Markey bill, which at the time of the panel was still being debated in the House of Representatives, poses both potential opportunities and potential headaches for the clean energy industry. The new emissions regulations aimed at the largest polluters, intended to force large energy companies to develop cleaner fuels, may provide a huge boost to smaller cleantech firms. “The problem with Big Oil is, even with incentives given to work on alternative fuels, they’re not really in the tech development business, so we work with them,” said Haines.

Waxman-Markey’s detractors, however, say that the stricter federal standards for controlling carbon emissions leaves less room for companies, especially smaller ones, to adjust to local conditions. The costs that are more easily absorbed by large oil or coal interests may prove more challenging to a small cleantech company.

When asked how startup energy firms could cope with more stringent government regulation, GreatPoint Energy’s Goldman noted that utilities, for the most part, have always been regulated, and that “we have to accept that we work in a regulated industry, and that government policy plays a very significant role.” On the other hand, he said, most companies “can’t afford time to sit in Washington influencing members of Congress.” He advised that smaller cleantech companies not try to lobby for policy changes on their own, but to piggyback onto the efforts of larger companies. “Figure out how your company’s interests align with, say, GE, and leverage off their focus.”

When asked to comment on the difficulties that energy startups face in acquiring venture funding, Solventerra’s Freeman, the former managing director of the nonprofit Citizens Energy Corporation, said that the lack of potential for a big—or bigger than expected—payoff was the problem. “Energy is a tangible business. You put x amount in and get x amount of energy out. You can measure the risk pretty successfully, so it doesn’t attract as much venture investment.”

“It’s not Web 2.0,” said Day.  “You have to actually make something.”

Fiske noted that in the current economic climate, investors might be cautious, but alternative sources of funding for cleantech have never been more abundant.  Cleantech can always look to “SBIR grants, competition winnings, and of course, the three Fs—friends, family, and fools.” [Editor's note: this quote was originally misattributed to Daniel Goldman. We regret the error.]

Day asked the panel to describe some of the barriers in New England to the success of cleantech. Freeman said that Boston’s deeply engrained parochialism means navigating a maze of regulation for even the simplest matters. Major additions and infrastructure changes can only be that much more of a headache. “It took my friend two years to get a permit to build a deck. How long do you think it takes to get one for a wind turbine?”

“The good thing is, we have a forward-thinking administration here in Massachusetts,” said Goldman. The Patrick administration, he says, is a staunch supporter of cleantech innovation.

Wakonda’s Fiske said that Massachusetts could be doing more to capitalize on its intellectual resources, and that universities in particular could better support spin–offs and the commercialization of their research. The panelists all concurred that the concentration of both high-level research institutions and scientists was New England’s greatest advantage.

“Intellectual capital,” said Haines, “is our best resource.”

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Noble Environmental Power, an Essex, CT-based wind energy company, has withdrawn its planned for an IPO. The offering, initially filed in May 2008, was to include some 23.4 million shares worth up to $375 million. In its filing today, Noble said withdrawing the offering “is consistent with the public interest and protection of investors.” The company operates six wind farms in New York state, one in Texas, and has 8 more under development in New York, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

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The Zino Society announced yesterday it has awarded its $50,000 Zino Green Fund to Seattle-based Hydrovolts, the maker of a novel underwater turbine for producing electricity in canals and waterways. Hydrovolts is led by Burt Hamner, who pitched the company at last month’s Zino Society Green Investment Forum.

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Seattle-based Clear Water Compliance Services, a water-treatment company, announced it has acquired KI Environmental Services, a consulting firm based in Richmond, BC. Though the terms of the deal were not disclosed, the acquisition should help Clear Water gain customers in British Columbia.

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GreenFuel Technologies seems to be continuing its rebound under interim CEO Bob Metcalfe. The Cambridge, MA, alternative energy company has reached an agreement—worth up to some $92 million—to build an algae-based fuel plant in Europe, according to sources close to the firm. What makes the deal even more interesting is that it was reportedly negotiated largely by former GreenFuel CEO Cary Bullock, who stepped down from the top slot when Metcalfe took the reins last June on an emergency basis, but stayed on at the company in a business-development capacity.

GreenFuel is developing algae bioreactor systems to convert carbon dioxide emissions into renewable, clean-burning biofuels. The company declined to confirm or deny the report of its European deal. But Xconomy’s sources indicate that achieving the full value of the deal is likely contingent on GreenFuel building a small-scale pilot plant and meeting cost and productivity goals along the way.

The deal seems to mark a major step on the comeback trail for the battered firm. As we reported late last June, GreenFuel had to shut down its third-generation algae greenhouse in Arizona, which had produced too much algae for the system to handle properly. Around the same time, the firm had also learned that its algae-harvesting system would cost twice as much as planned. The twin pieces of bad news forced the layoffs of roughly half the company’s 50-person staff and the appointment of Metcalfe, a general partner at lead investor Polaris Venture Partners, as interim CEO (the other lead investor in GreenFuel is Draper Fisher Jurvetson).

Metcalfe quickly outlined a seven-step recovery plan for the firm: you can find a copy of his letter to investors and employees here. And in late January, he reported that the company “completed, and in cases blew away” the first five steps of that plan. The firm’s success in growing revenues while simultaneously cutting expenses had resulted in it pushing the deadline for its so-called interim period, the time by which the company needs to complete a new round of funding, “from December to March to now June,” Metcalfe reported. The two, still-uncompleted steps are finding a permanent chief executive to replace Metcalfe and closing a new, Series C financing round.

We’re working to learn more about this deal. But one of the most intriguing pieces of news involved former CEO Bullock’s instrumental role in bringing it about. Bullock, a respected energy industry veteran, had led the company since the spring of 2005. In the vast majority of management overhaul cases we know about, the departing CEO is encouraged or forced to leave the company altogether. But Bullock, who reportedly felt passionately about the company, stayed on as vice president of business development. Could this be a new type of case study in finding ways to retain talent—and making a management change work for everyone?

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On Wednesday we published a profile of EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), the Boston-based company whose rip-roaring 2007 IPO got investors excited about the idea of using new Internet-based control capabilities to reduce electricity consumption at key commercial and industrial sites during times of peak demand. (In effect, companies that join EnerNOC’s “demand reduction” pool get paid for agreeing to dim the lights or shut down assembly lines on short notice when utilities need to divert the power elsewhere.)

The first few weeks of 2008 haven’t been as kind to EnerNOC’s share price as 2007 was. But president and co-founder David Brewster, 36, says that the company is making rapid headway convincing utilities that demand reduction is just as reliable a “resource” as new generating plants, and he says observers can expect to see the company add plenty of new customers and expand into new geographies this year.

In our full hour-long interview, transcribed below (and edited just a bit for length), Brewster and I talked about the challenges EnerNOC has faced getting utilities and electrical consumers to take its approach to demand reduction seriously; how the company came up with “value-added” services such as energy procurement; and how it’s dealing with questions from public utility commissions in places like California, where officials still seem uncertain about how to regulate demand-reduction contracts.

Xconomy: You guys have been through some big events over the last year—the IPO and the acquisition of MDEnergy, just to name a couple. That’s all fun stuff to talk about. But I could really use your account of what it’s been like here since the beginning—in particular, what challenges you’ve run into taking the basic idea and implementing it. What obstacles have you had to overcome, and what kinds of friction points are still out there?

David Brewster: It’s hard to speak to what the challenges are since the inception, since we’ve been on an incredible trajectory of growth, and so the challenges have constantly changed and they continue to change. There have been hundreds if not thousands of them that we’ve run through over the years and they continue to change on a regular basis. But I’d say that some of the consistent challenges we have, have to do with being a market maker, being a category maker for a new idea—a new way to think about the electric power industry. And in that sense there’s been sort of a constant responsibility to prove that what we do is comparable to the traditional mode of meeting peak power demands.

Traditional utilities or grid operators would work with supply side resources—peaking power plants—and continually build up supply ahead of demand for electricity. Obviously the electric power industry is the life’s blood of our economy and electric power managers are not risk-takers, and are not allowed to be risk-takers because their job is to keep the lights on for all of us. So getting these folks to adopt change has been a challenge.

We have always looked at ourselves as a city on a hill—all eyes are on us, and we need to make sure we are delivering an incredibly reliable, cost effective, environmentally responsible solution because we know the burden is on us to prove this is as good or better than the traditional modes of meeting peak power demands. But as we’ve grown and as we’ve had hundreds of demand response events in our history we now have a body of work that we can point to that really makes knocking down that barrier so much easier. Now, instead of having a concept in a PowerPoint presentation, we have reams of actual data to demonstrate how quickly we are able to respond to grid emergencies, how reliably we are able to respond. That’s been huge, in terms of building that body of work to defend and justify the value of the resource that we provide.

I’ve been talking about our customers, the grid operators and utilities, but what we then need to do is then go aggregate commercial and industrial customers into our network to provide this resource. And we have a similar thing on that side of the equation. The first commercial and industrial (C&I) customers we talked to thought it sounded too good to be true that they would get paid to participate in electricity markets. But now we have over 2,000 customer sites in our network. It’s much easier to sell, for example, to a supermarket chain or a data center when they can look and see that 12 of their competitors are already participating in the program. It almost becomes a competitive necessity for them to participate, as opposed to them taking a leap of faith.

But by no means are we through those challenges. We still have a very serious responsibility and challenge to convince public utility commissions and utilities that this is something that they need, that we’re going to be there to help keep the lights on.

X: What were the things that people were most skeptical about? Before you actually had a set of customer sites, and before you had a record to show people, were people skeptical that there was actually capacity that could be extracted in terms of demand reduction? Or were people skeptical that you could actually pull off a change in demand at the right moment, when it was needed?

DB: It was certainly the latter. Everybody recognizes that there is humongous capacity potential in terms of the ability for customers to respond to crisis signals or emergency events on the electric power grid. I think the challenge for us stems from the fact that what we are doing was not …Next Page »

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Apparently, our economy is still so wedded to fossil fuels—and we are so firmly on a path toward turning the atmosphere into an oven—that even a small drop in the price of oil is enough to dampen investors’ enthusiasm about green technology.

That’s one of the trends that seems to be hammering share prices lately at Boston’s EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), which is focused on using information technology to increase energy efficiency. The company went public last year and became an instant Wall Street darling, gaining 88 percent in 2007. But as an excellent Reuters feature pointed out last week, retreating oil prices (which have dropped from historic highs near $100 a barrel around the new year to under $90 this week) have been bad news, not just for EnerNOC, which is down 32 percent this year, but for New Jersey’s Comverge, another so-called “demand response” firm that went public last year.

The irony in all this, of course, is that EnerNOC, which installs Internet-connected control devices that dial back electricity consumption at commercial and industrial sites during times of peak demand, is advancing exactly the kind of technology that could decrease U.S. dependence on foreign oil and other fossil fuels and make our economy less sensitive, in the long run, to fluctuations in oil prices.

But the folks at EnerNOC, at least, aren’t letting the market’s ups and downs bother them too much. When I visited the company’s downtown Boston headquarters in late January, I saw many enthusiastic (and surprisingly young) faces, all clearly focused on the company’s mission of helping more companies participate in the demand-response market—in effect, monetizing their ability and willingness to ratchet down their energy consumption at critical times when electric power utilities are running short on capacity.

At 36, David Brewster, EnerNOC’s president, still has one of the young faces, though the seven years since he co-founded the company with CEO Timothy Healy in 2001 have been full of challenges just as nerve-wracking as the recent stock slide. Perhaps the biggest, as Brewster related to me during an hour-long interview, has been the difficulty of convincing utilities—the companies that pay EnerNOC for its ability to dial down electrical usage on short notice at hundreds of customer sites—that EnerNOC’s original concept of building a demand-reduction network would be different from, and more effective than, the utilities’ old system of “interruptible rate” plans.

In the not-so-distant past, the only ways for a utility to deal with a power shortage—say, on a hot summer day—were either to bring on more capacity in the form of so-called “peaking plants” that are kept idling until needed, or to ask major power consumers such as factories to shut down until the crisis passed. “The largest industrial customers in a utility’s service area would be signed up for these ‘interruptible’ programs, and in return for the ability to shut them off during emergencies, the utilities would give them cheaper power all year long,” explains Brewster. “But the way these programs were used, a lot of the time it was just a political chip—a way for the utilities to give favorable rates to their largest customers. And then they’d go five years without actually interrupting the power, and when they did call, maybe the person who signed the agreement didn’t even work there anymore.”

Furthermore, says Brewster, “this was all prior to the advent of the Internet, so it would literally be the utility picking up the phone and trying to track down Steve the facilities manager to ask if he could manually take action. And Steve might or might not be at his desk. He might be at the golf course. Or if he’s there, he might say ‘Absolutely not, we’re in the middle of a production run and there’s no way …Next Page »

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Marlboro, MA’s Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) has registered for an underwritten public offering of up to 20 million shares of its common stock. The maker of solar-power products, a greentech success story that went public in 2000, expects to net $231.9 million in the deal, and up to $266.8 million if underwriters exercise a 3-million share over-allotment option.

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The wind in New England blows mainly against big green-energy projects. At least that’s the assessment of Matt Kearns, an audibly frazzled project manager for Newton, MA-based UPC Wind.

Despite winning final approval last week for the creation of New England’s largest wind-energy installation, now under construction on a ridge in northern Maine, Kearns says the regulatory and political barriers to placing major cleantech facilities in the region are high enough to scare off all but the most persistent and well-funded entrepreneurs.

“The uncertainty and the costs associated with that uncertainty are pretty overwhelming, frankly, in many cases,” says Kearns, who has spent the last several years shepherding UPC’s Stetson Mountain wind farm project past the cautious scrutiny of state, county, and federal agencies, not to mention local residents and environmental groups.

“Regardless of the fact that we have had a success here, we find that the hurdles are so high, and New England is such a complicated place to do business, that it takes a full-time, highly skilled and coordinated group to make it to the finish line,” Kearns says.

UPC Wind first eyed Stetson Mountain as a potentially viable wind-farm site almost five years ago, according to Kearns. As the proposed 38-turbine project drew closer to final approval, it faced growing questions from environmental groups such as Maine Audubon, which worried that the 392-feet-tall turbines would harm birds and bats migrating over the ridge (which is about seven miles southwest of Danforth, ME). Audubon threatened to testify against the project before Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission, which is in charge of zoning for unincorporated wilderness areas in the state.

But after UPC agreed to make design changes and conduct post-construction studies of bird and bat mortality, the group withdrew its objections, and in fact recommended approval. “It took a constant conversation between all the parties, including key groups like the Natural Resources Council of Maine and Maine Audubon, to help us figure out where to be and why,” says Kearns. “I don’t think anybody would describe the process as easy.” The land use commission approved the company’s petition to rezone the land for industrial use in November and voted unanimously to give the project the final go-ahead on January 2.

When completed later this year, the facility is expected to produce 57 megawatts of peak electricity, eclipsing UPC’s 28-turbine, 42-megawatt wind farm in Mars Hill, ME, as New England’s largest. But if every wind project required five years between conception and permitting, few wind developers would bother, Kearns suggests. “We’re really pleased that we’ve gotten this far, and we think it’s in large part due to the support we saw from the commissioners,” he says. “But in comparison to the …Next Page »

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Shares of biofuel and specialty enzyme firm Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM) rose slightly this morning on the news that the Cambridge, MA-based firm has inked a deal with St. Louis’s Bunge Oils. Under the agreement, Bunge will fund Verenium’s development of enzymes to improve the production of edible oils, and will become the Cambridge firm’s process implementation partner for Purifine, its first commercial product for seed oil refining.

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It’s not every day a digital media news site opens in Kendall Square. But lately it seems like it’s every month or two. In yet another sign of the explosion of activity in the clean-energy sector, Greentech Media—a Cambridge-based market research, news, and events company devoted to alternative energy investment and technology information—announced its launch today. Greentech has settled in just down the street from Xconomy, which itself opened at the end of June. We welcome our new neighbor and kindred spirit.

Greentech’s founders, Scott Clavenna and Rick Thompson, worked at Light Reading, a telecom industry media venture that was founded in early 2000 and sold five years later to CMP Media. “A lot of this is what we learned at Light Reading,” says Clavenna, whom I first met back in July over lunch at Similans, our neighborhood Thai restaurant. Specifically, that means a business model focused on what he calls three legs of a stool: market research, events such as webinars, and breaking news and feature stories. He sees such information as vital as the field of clean energy grows. The company’s press materials note that more than $2 billion was invested in energy technology startups last year—and that clean energy is already a $55 billion industry expected to quadruple in the next decade.

In light of such growth, one of Greentech’s main goals is to bring more cohesion and analysis to what the founders see as a segmented arena, where ventures in solar, wind, biofuels, and so on are compartmentalized. “I think a lot of the people in this market are focused on their own sector,” says Clavenna. Not only will Greentech seek to provide a more comprehensive view of the field, he adds, “It’s really important now to have independent analysis delivered to the market.”

Greentech is partnering with the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a Cambridge firm specializing in photovoltaics and alternative energy analysis, for some of the webinar and market-research components of its business. The Greentech site also features a cleantech investing blog hosted by local venture capitalist Rob Day, a principal of @Ventures.

Through Prometheus, Greentech produced its first market research report— on thin-film solar energy—in July. Last month it also conducted webinars on solid-state lighting and solar power investment. Today’s launch marks the debut of the web site, with a slew of articles and feature stories, including daily coverage of the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition in Milan. Power on, neighbor.

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