[Updated and corrected---8:30 pm ET on 11/05/09]Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ:ESLR) said it will move its solar panel production from Massachusetts to China—dealing a blow to the clean technology economy in the commonwealth.

Evergreen plans to begin migrating the manufacturing of solar panels out of its Devens, MA, plant to a facility under construction in Wuhan, China, in mid-2010, the company announced in an earnings statement on Wednesday. A lull in demand for solar cells globally and other factors have caused the price of solar panels like the ones that Evergreen makes to plunge by more than 30 percent since mid-2008, when its Devens production facility opened, the firm said. However, the company said it does plan to continue producing its silicon wafers and cells in Devens. It will also produce the silicon wafers in China beginning next year.

An Evergreen spokesman was not immediately available for comment this afternoon, and it was unclear how relocating panel production would impact its work force in Massachusetts.

Manufacturing in China is intended to reduce overall production costs, and Evergreen said it is receiving a $33 million loan from Chinese government to help cover the expenses of moving into a new plant that the company will lease from a contract manufacturing firm called Jiawei Solar. Evergreen’s move may sting some Massachusetts politicians and taxpayers; the state committed $23 million in grants to the firm, behind considerable support from Gov. Deval Patrick and his administration, to support its manufacturing in Devens. And Ian Bowles, the state’s secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in a statement about two years ago when construction of the Devens plant began that “we are breaking ground not only on a factory, but on the commonwealth’s clean energy future.”

Evergreen said it will manufacture its “String Ribbon” wafers at the facility it is building and will own in China, and that the wafers will then be sent to the the plant that its partner Jiawei Solar is building to convert the wafers into solar cells, which are used to make solar panels. The worldwide solar panel market has taken a beating over the past year or so due to reduced government spending or subsidies for the products in Spain and Germany, both of which are big solar panel users, as well as lower-than-projected demand in other countries such as the U.S., according to a recent report by Lux Research, which has an office in Boston. [Editor's note: the above paragraph was corrected to say that Evergreen, not its Chinese manufacturing partner, will build and own the facility where its silicon wafers will be produced in China. There are also added details from the company about the overall production process.]

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Konarka Technologies, the Lowell, MA-based developer of flexible materials that convert light into electricity, is showing how everyday items like handbags and umbrellas can be turned into power generators. But the eight-year-old firm will need to collect a lot more juice before it can become a commercial success.

The company—which has raised $150 million from private investors—has revealed at least five new partners or customers over the past year who are integrating the firm’s so-called “Power Plastic” into such products as handbags that store solar energy to recharge electronic devices and patio umbrellas that provide electricity for laptops and the like. The latest deal was an agreement revealed last week in which Enviromena Power Solutions, of the United Arab Emirates, is evaluating the materials for use in shade structures used in deserts. And last month the firm hit the one-year anniversary of the opening of its 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in New Bedford, MA. Yet many of the products into which its solar materials are being integrated remain in development, and actual production activities haven’t gone into full swing in New Bedford.

Konarka makes photovoltaic modules from organic polymers rather than silicon or other traditional semiconductors, putting it on the cutting edge of solar cell development. Its materials are unusual in the solar business because they’re not marketed for use in standard solar panels on roofs, which typically are made from cheaper, more efficient substances, such as polycrystalline silicon. The firm’s products, however, are lightweight and flexible enough to be used on the outer surfaces of products such as bags and canopies and umbrellas.

Still, the jury is out about whether the appeal of such products will be powerful enough to convert privately held Konarka into a profitable business. There’s a continuous effort at the company to make its organic photovoltaics more efficient at converting light into electricity and to make them last longer than the current shelf life of three to five years. Meantime, the company’s West Coast rival, El Monte, CA-based startup Solarmer Energy, says that it has developed the most efficient organic solar cells in the world. And industry reports indicate that multi-national corporations with deeper pockets than Konarka and Solarmer have entered the fray in developing organic photovoltaics.

“Long-shot is a very good word for” companies like Konarka and Solarmer, said Johanna Schmidtke, an analyst for Lux Research, which recently completed a report that described all the leading developers of organic photovoltaics (sometimes called OPVs) as long-shots for success. “Whether or not they succeed in the long term is still …Next Page »

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It was a big week for big companies. Amazon’s stock soared, and the e-commerce giant made a deal with Microsoft that should make Kindle e-books even more popular. There was also interesting deals news from Bing and a few Northwest venture firms and startups.

—Kennewick, WA-based Infinia has raised $3.25 million in debt and options out of a total financing round worth as much as $10.5 million, as Luke reported. The investors were not disclosed. Infinia, which (before this latest round) has raised $84 million from a syndicate that includes Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Vinod Khosla, is developing novel solar power systems.

—Seattle-based Bezos Expeditions, the venture firm run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, re-upped with an investment in Aviary, a design software startup based in Long Island, NY. The $7 million Series B round was led by Boston-based Spark Capital. Aviary makes cloud-based software for graphic design, audio editing, and other creative digital services.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is teaming up with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to release Kindle for PC, a software application that will let people read Kindle electronic books on Windows personal computers. No financial terms were announced. The free application will be released next month.

—Revolution Computing, which has offices in Seattle and New Haven, CT, raised $9 million from North Bridge Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, and Intel Capital, based in Santa Clara, CA, as Wade reported. The startup, which provides software and support for the statistical programming language known as “R,” also announced that Norman Nie, a veteran of the data mining software firm SPSS, is its new CEO.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $12 million investment in RedSeal Systems, a security software firm in San Mateo, CA. Existing investors Venrock Associates, Jafco Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures also participated in the deal, which brings RedSeal’s total funding to more than $43 million. OVP managing director Mark Ashida has joined the company’s board.

—Bellevue, WA-based AudienceScience confirmed it has raised $20 million from Silicon Valley investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Meritech Capital Partners, and Integral Capital Partners. The online advertising firm said it will use the funding to hire new staff, do R&D in targeted advertising, and expand internationally. Luke previously reported that AudienceScience (formerly called Revenue Science) had closed a $15.1 million funding round involving equity, debt, and preferred stock, which had the potential to go up to $20 million, based on an SEC filing.

—Microsoft is integrating real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook into its Bing search engine, as Thea Chard reported in her first freelance story for Xconomy. The Redmond, WA, software company has formed non-exclusive partnerships with the two social media networks, as part of Microsoft’s plan to fuse the “real-time Web” with its search engine to create a new kind of social-media focused reader. Bing’s access to tweets is now in beta form, while the Facebook deal, which will grant the search engine access to all publicly shared information from the social network’s users, will be effective at a later date, according to Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi.

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Infinia, the Kennewick, WA-based company developing solar-powered engines that generate electricity, has raised $3.25 million in new debt financing as it pushes through the final year before it starts selling its product on the market.

The company raised $3.25 million in debt and options out of a total financing round worth as much as $10.5 million, according to a regulatory filing today. The document doesn’t say who was behind the latest financing, but Infinia has raised $84 million in capital before this latest round, from a syndicate that includes billionaire Paul Allen and famed venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

Infinia, as I described in this profile back in August, is using satellite dishes that capture rays of sunlight and channel them to a focal point that contains a Stirling engine. This is a device that converts concentrated heat from the sun, converting it into mechanical work that powers a piston to generate electricity. This device is more efficient at converting solar energy into electricity than other solar technologies, and can be made to last 25 years without any maintenance, or oil, or water. Infinia CEO J.D. Sitton told me back in August that his company had $2 billion worth of orders, and that it hoped to start bringing its first product to the market by the end of September 2010.

While the regulatory document doesn’t say who provided the latest round of debt financing, it lists five members of Infinia’s board. The directors, besides Infinia’s Sitton, include Sharon Clayton of MCC Global in Malibu, CA; Bill Gross of Idealab in Pasadena, CA; John Small of GLG Partners in New York; and Richard Shorten of Silver Mine Capital in New Canaan, CT.

Sitton couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

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STR Holdings, an Enfield, CT-based maker of sheets and film that encapsulate solar cells, said today that the company and its shareholders propose to sell 12.3 million shares of common stock for $13 to $15 in its planned initial public offering, according to an SEC filing. There are a total of 14.1 million shares registered in the offering, meaning the sale of shares could total up to about $212.3 million. The company, which was founded in 1944, has requested that its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “STRI.”

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You know how Hollywood always goes overboard with gizmos and hijinks when it’s trying to represent young people doing science? (I’m thinking especially of 1980s movies like WarGames, Real Genius, and Weird Science.) Well, the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, looked exactly like that last Friday as the annual “MIT Energy Night” event showcased dozens of energy-related research projects and entrepreneurial ventures, from photon-trapping dyes for solar concentrators to a Matrix-like project for extracting electrical energy from human body heat.

Organized by the MIT Energy Club and sponsored in part by local venture firms General Catalyst Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners, the packed-to-capacity event was a celebration of the amazing variety of energy-related labs, projects, initiatives, clubs, and prizes at MIT. I wandered in around 6:00 p.m., got my green drink-ticket wristband, and spent the next couple of hours checking out the demos on solar, wind, and geothermal energy; building technology; electric vehicles; nuclear power; and even the out-of-favor but far-from-outmoded coal, oil, and gas industries.

Student-led poster presentations were the main dish at the event, but I was even more interested in the local energy companies who sent employee-ambassadors to the event. A quick rundown:

A123Systems—This Watertown MIT spinoff (NASDAQ: AONE), which makes advanced lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles, power tools, and the like, has garnered plenty of news lately for its wildly successful IPO. Like most of the other companies present, it seemed to have recruited its youngest employees to run its table—most of them looked like undergrads.

DyPol—I first ran into this membrane technology startup, a spinoff of Paula Hammond’s chemical engineering lab at MIT, at a venture-sponsored university research symposium last April. They’re working on a green, layer-by-layer method for building polymer membranes that, the company hopes, will be used in the next generation of methanol fuel cells to make the devices more efficient. But Juliet Duffy, an MIT Sloan MBA student who’s working for the company, told me that in order to generate revenue while methanol fuel cell technology matures, DyPol is also investigating nearer-term applications for its membranes, such as water filtration. Duffy says the company is seeking a seed investment so that it can rent and equip local lab space.

EnerNOC-–This Boston-based public company (NASDAQ: ENOC) has pioneered the area of “demand response”—Internet-mediated management of electrical demand, which helps utilities forestall construction of new energy generation plants to meet peak demand. It isn’t an MIT spinoff, and oddly enough, there isn’t a single MIT degree among its senior management team. But it’s involved in MIT’s energy entrepreneurship culture as a sponsor of the 2009 MIT Clean Energy Prize competition.

FloDesign Wind Turbine—Based in Wilbraham, MA, FloDesign won the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize in 2008 and continues to test prototypes of its new jet-engine-like designs for wind turbines that sidestep the “Betz Limit.” (That’s the physical law that prevents open-fan wind turbines from extracting more than about 59 percent of the available energy from wind.) A staffer told me the turbine designs portrayed on the company’s posters, videos, and web materials are actually quite outdated, and that it isn’t showing off its latest designs in deference to …Next Page »

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Portland, OR-based research and publishing firm Clean Edge released a report today on job trends in the cleantech and energy industry. The highlights include a survey of salaries across a range of cleantech positions worldwide, performed in partnership with Seattle-based PayScale, the salary comparison firm. For example, the survey tracked median salaries for solar energy installers ($40,000), entry-level wind turbine technicians ($52,600), mid-level LEED-certified green architects ($58,700), and smart-grid hardware design engineers ($87,700). The survey also found that business analysts in green industries earned $61,500—13 percent more than non-green analysts—and senior accountants in green industries earned $67,300, or 16 percent more than their non-green counterparts.

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Seattle-based 3Tier Group, the company that raised $10 million in venture capital last December to help developers find ideal locations for renewable energy facilities, had a staff layoff today, according to a company spokesman.

Xconomy received a tip today that 19 employees were let go. The company had 85 people on the payroll the last time we counted in December, meaning today’s layoff would represent a 22 percent staff cut from that position. Todd Stone, a spokesman for 3Tier, confirmed the company laid off employees today but wouldn’t say how many.

“While this does reflect some temporary uncertainty in the renewable energy market, the reduction also aligns our headcount with the strategic transition that we’ve been making over the last 12 months toward a more scalable and efficient information services business model,” Stone said in an e-mail.

The 10-year-old 3Tier, which I profiled back in November, is based at the Westin Building in downtown Seattle. At the time I wrote that story, about one-third of its employees had expertise in atmospheric science, one-third were software programmers, and the rest were in business, said CEO Kenneth Westrick. The company uses supercomputers to forecast the ebbs and flows of wind, solar, and hydropower at different times of day and in different seasons, for example. This is supposed to give investors more confidence in the reliability of the source of renewable power, over decades, that is needed before they will plunk down hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility, Westrick said at the time.

3Tier’s $10 million venture investment round last December was led by Good Energies.

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Four companies from Washington state have been selected to a list of the world’s 100 most promising private cleantech firms. That’s according to a report released yesterday, in a joint effort by The Guardian (the UK-based newspaper) and the Cleantech Group, a global company that provides research, data, and advisory services for the clean technology industry.

The Washington results are not too shabby—especially for a state that has been perceived as trailing other parts of the country in terms of cleantech venture investment, alternative energy policy, and expertise. We’ve been hearing a lot about those issues from experts like Jesse Berst of Redmond, WA-based Global Smart Energy and Michael Butler of Seattle’s Cascadia Capital. While the latest news won’t do much to stem any criticism (nor should it necessarily), it does provide some recognition for the local cleantech scene.

The Global Cleantech 100 list “recognizes companies at the forefront of cleantech innovation offering solutions to some of the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges,” according to the Cleantech Group’s website. The companies were selected by a process involving hundreds of international experts on cleantech innovation, venture capital, and entrepreneurship (check out the methodology here). Cleantech, by their broad definition, spans the fields of energy generation, storage, infrastructure, and efficiency, as well as transportation, water and wastewater, air and environment, materials, manufacturing, agriculture, and recycling and waste.

The four Washington companies span energy generation (solar and geothermal), energy efficiency, and software. We’ve covered all of these companies this year at Xconomy, and here’s a bit about each one:

—AltaRock Energy, based in Sausalito, CA, and Seattle. This geothermal company was founded in Seattle in 2007, and plans to artificially engineer reservoirs of hot water deep underground and extract steam energy as it rises to the surface, as we reported last summer. AltaRock hit a snag in recent weeks when it had to suspend drilling of a well in Northern California due to geological problems, but says it is continuing to develop its technology and look for alternate drilling sites. The company is backed by Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Google.org, and others.

—Infinia, based in Kennewick, WA. This solar power company makes devices that capture and focus sunlight, and then harness the concentrated heat (using a Stirling engine) to generate electricity, as Luke reported in a recent company profile. The strategy is complementary to traditional solar cells and photovoltaics. Infinia has been around since the 1960s, but has focused on solar since 2005. It is backed by Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, Idealab, and other prominent investors.

—Powerit Solutions, based in Seattle. This energy-efficiency company, originally from Sweden, has been in Seattle since 2002. It makes hardware and software to reduce energy consumption and costs in industrial facilities like steel mills and manufacturing plants, as Rachel reported this summer. In May, Powerit raised $6 million led by Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal’s Clean Technology Fund, with @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners also participating. Some of its customers include Ikea, Benton Foundry, Stockholm Airport, and the San Jose Mercury News.

—Verdiem, based in Seattle. This cleantech software firm, founded in 2001 and backed by Kleiner Perkins and other investors, focuses on energy efficiency and management in the corporate IT world. Its personal computer power-management software has been installed on more than one million desktops, and its customer base has doubled in the past year to include more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities. We’ve reported on Verdiem’s progress in demonstrating energy and cost savings to companies, as well as its broader strategy in cleantech-meets-IT from CEO Jeremy Jaech.

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Back in February, Lexington, MA-based solar energy startup 1366 Technologies won an award from the U.S. Department of Energy worth as much as $3 million. The catch: it had to show that its techniques for making more efficient photovoltaic cells, born in the laboratory of MIT mechanical engineer Emanuel “Ely” Sachs, would actually work on an industrial scale.

Today the venture-backed company revealed that it has hit one of the biggest milestones toward collecting the full DOE award—producing high-efficiency photovoltaic cells in 6-by-6-inch wafers, the standard size used in solar panels—ahead of schedule. The company also took the wraps off the two methods it’s using to make the cells more efficient, information that had been closely guarded until now.

Unlike many of the other solar technology companies in the Boston area, 1366 isn’t trying to reinvent the material used in photovoltaic panels: plain silicon that comes in either an expensive “monocrystalline” variety (a single big crystal) or a cheaper “multicrystalline” form (the type chosen by 1366). The two techniques pioneered by the company, according to Craig Lund, the startup’s director of business development, are purely mechanical, involving texturing the surface of cells to trap more light and reducing the width of the metal wires that manufacturers lay across the cells’ surfaces to collect free electrons.

The company’s first technology—texturing—etches silicon wafers with a honeycomb pattern that refracts more light into the base of the cell. The pattern is geometrically optimized to capture light without creating too many pits, walls, or discontinuities where electrons would wind up pooling and dissipating, Lund says.

1366’s second innovation is a new way of laying down the fingers or “metallization lines” that stretch across the surfaces of solar cells, creating a path to siphon off electrons. Fingers created using traditional screen-printing processes are about 120 microns wide, which means they end up shading about 9 percent of a cell’s surface, so only 91 percent of the surface is available to generate electricity. Sachs developed an electroplating process in which a seed layer of bulk metal (usually silver or copper) is glued to the silicon, then the rest of the wire is built up in layers. The resulting fingers are only 30 microns across, meaning they shade only 2 percent of the surface.

The honeycomb texturing technique by itself, increases overall solar cell efficiency by 1 percent, while making the metallization lines thinner boosts efficiency by another 1 percent or more, according to an announcement released today by 1366.

The company’s ultimate business will be to make and sell texturing and metallization machines that solar cell manufacturers can incorporate into their existing assembly lines. “The big news for us is that we’re going into commercial production with equipment that [when used together] delivers an 18-percent multicrystalline cell,” Lund says. In other words, …Next Page »

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Last month sure seemed like a busy one for Seattle-area startup financings, especially for summer. But the hard data paints a much more modest picture. Venture capitalists invested $25 million into four companies headquartered in Washington state last month, according to data provided to Xconomy by ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company that develops tools for investors, startups, and entrepreneurs. There was also one debt financing for a Washington company, worth $10 million. Two other firms with Seattle offices, but whose headquarters are elsewhere, raised $16.4 in venture funding.

The deals were spread evenly across software, mobile, gaming, and energy. The biggest one was Bellevue, WA-based Apptio’s $14 million Series B financing from Madrona Venture Group, Greylock Partners, and new investors Shasta Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz Fund. Apptio makes software to help businesses manage their IT costs.

A couple of notes about the companies that did not make the table below. Bellevue, WA-based Smith & Tinker’s most recent venture round, which we and others reported in August, didn’t make the list, as it closed in July. (The company has raised $29 million in funding to date.) Jambool, a virtual currency startup founded in Seattle and now headquartered in San Francisco, raised $5 million led by Madrona. And Profibrix, a Netherlands-based healthcare company focused on stopping surgical bleeding, which has a Seattle subsidiary, raised $11.4 million led by Gilde Healthcare Partners.

Four of the six venture financings in firms with ties to Washington state were Series B rounds, versus one Series A round—Madrona’s $3 million investment in mobile social gaming startup Z2Live—and one unspecified round, Portland, OR-based Pivotal Investments’ $2 million backing of Seattle solar developer Tuusso Energy (an early-stage deal). Madrona was the most active Seattle-area VC firm in August, being involved in three of the Washington deals.

In addition to the venture deals, Seattle-based NewPath Networks, a wireless infrastructure company, raised $10 million in debt financing from Square 1 Bank, to help expand its distributed antenna systems in the U.S.

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Spire Corp. of Bedford, MA, said today it is divesting its hemodialysis catheter business in order to focus exclusively on making equipment for solar photovoltaic module manufacturing. Bard Access Systems is buying the catheter division for $15 million. “The divestiture of the hemodialysis catheter business at this time is clearly in Spire’s best strategic interest,” said Spire CEO Roger Little in a statement. “We continue to see tremendous opportunity in the solar market and can better capitalize on these opportunities with a more focused approach.”

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It was a fairly quiet week for deals in the Northwest, with just a trickle of activity in software, computing, cleantech, and life sciences. But there was a hint that the IPO window may be about to open.

—Seattle-based Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), the supercomputing company, acquired some assets from SiCortex, a Maynard, MA-based computing firm that shut down in May. Financial terms weren’t given, but Cray purchased compiler technology that could help it improve its own products and gain new customers.

—Luke reported that Seattle’s Infectious Disease Research Institute, a global health nonprofit, licensed technology from Israel-based NanoPass to use “microneedles” to stimulate immune system cells just below the skin surface, which might make new vaccines more protective. Financial terms were not released.

—Hillsboro, OR-based ClearEdge Power raised $15 million in equity financing, according to media reports, which cited a regulatory filing. The investors were not disclosed, but ClearEdge Power has been backed by the Kohlberg family, Big Basin Partners, and Applied Ventures. ClearEdge develops fuel cell systems for homes.

—Seattle-based Trubion Pharmaceuticals signed a global partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Facet Biotech to co-develop and market an experimental treatment for leukemia, as Luke reported. As part of the deal, Trubion (NASDAQ: TRBN) will receive a $20 million upfront payment, and Facet (NASDAQ: FACT) has agreed to buy another $10 million worth of Trubion stock. The news sent Trubion shares up more than 40 percent, to $5.45, about six minutes after the opening bell on Friday morning.

—Seattle-based Tuusso Energy, a solar power plant developer, has raised a $2 million financing round from Pivotal Investments, a Portland, OR-based venture capital fund focused on cleantech and sustainability. Tuusso’s first solar plant is scheduled to be completed in the California desert in 2011. The deal represents the first investment from Pivotal’s new fund.

—Omeros, a Seattle-based biotech firm, is preparing a renewed push for an IPO this fall, as Luke reported in an Xconomy exclusive. The offering, which could happen as soon as this month, would be the first IPO from a Washington company in more than two years (since Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire went public in March 2007). Omeros, which is developing a treatment to help people recover faster from knee surgery (among other products), previously tried to go public in January 2008.

—Xconomy broke the news that Seattle-based Marketfish, an online marketing startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from private investors led by the Alliance of Angels. Marketfish, which was founded in July 2008, has developed a Web interface for connecting marketing agencies with list owners.

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The early afternoon sun was bearing down on us, and it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit the other day when J.D. Sitton walked behind his office, squinted, and pointed to the future of his company.

Sitton, the CEO of Kennewick, WA-based Infinia, showed me a device resembling a satellite dish that has attracted some deep-pocketed investors, including Paul Allen and Vinod Khosla. Their hope is that Infinia’s dishes will finally turn solar energy into a workhorse for meeting more of the world’s electricity demand. If Sitton and his backers are right, he’ll be running a multi-billion dollar company five years from now. If he’s wrong, Infinia will be written off as just another costly pipe dream.

“We didn’t want to just launch a company in a cute little industry,” Sitton says. “We want to launch a company that can build a major global industry.”

Solar power has been talked up since the 1970s as one of the main ways the U.S. can wean itself off foreign oil. The field has picked up renewed momentum lately as a way to meet growing demand for electricity while reducing carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. But the current breed of photovoltaic systems, or solar cells, are notoriously heavy, expensive, and inefficient at converting the sun’s energy into electricity, so solar still amounts to a drop in the bucket, generating less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, Sitton says. If Infinia can help spark a new market for converting solar heat (instead of light) into electricity, then it will have a chance to reach some of the projections of enthusiasts, like Greenpeace, who want to see 15 percent or more of the world’s electricity coming from solar, Sitton says.

Infinia says it already has $2 billion worth of orders for its solar power generation product in hand, which it expects to start rolling out commercially before the end of September 2010. So we shouldn’t have to wait 20 years to find out if this is for real.

“Solar has got to step up in a much bigger way,” Sitton says. “We have to prove it can be done.”

Here’s how this is supposed to work. That satellite dish I mentioned earlier? It has a little motor attached to it that keeps it in the right position to capture as many direct rays of sun as possible during daylight hours. Like any dish, it uses mirrors to reflect something, in this case, sunlight, back up to a focal point. That’s where Infinia has the business end of its device.

It’s a Stirling engine, made to convert that concentrated heat from the sun into mechanical work. It’s like a steam engine, except it doesn’t need water—it powers its internal piston through the expansion and contraction of helium. The heat moves the piston, which generates electricity. These engines are thought to be attractive for this kind of work, partly because they are highly efficient at converting heat into electricity, and they don’t require water, or oil. They are supposed to be able to last 25 years with zero maintenance, Sitton says.

Infinia has been around as a company longer than that since the 1960s, mostly working on Stirling engines to make them reliable, long-lasting, and efficient, Sitton says. Before 2005, when it settled on its solar strategy, Infinia worked mostly on Stirling engines for a number of different applications, including artificial hearts and exploration vehicles for outer space.

The most important question any investor today asks is how much power gets generated by one of these Infinia units, and at what cost. The short answer is …Next Page »

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On Tuesday, we reported that Pivotal Investments has led a $2 million financing round for Tuusso Energy, a solar power developer based in Seattle. Tuusso is an intriguing startup focused on developing and operating solar plants to supply renewable energy to utility companies; its first plant is slated to be built in the California desert by 2011. But the deal is worth a closer look through the lens of what Pivotal is doing.

Pivotal Investments is a venture capital firm that started investing in cleantech and sustainability companies out of its first fund in January. The firm, based in Portland, OR, is led by managing directors Gregg Semler, Brad Zenger, and John Miner. (Semler and Zenger previously were co-founders, along with Reference Capital, of the Sustainability Investment Fund 2007, which backed Northwest firms EnerG2, SeQuential Biofuels, Plas2Fuel, and RNA Networks.) Pivotal’s investment focus is primarily early-stage startups in the Pacific Northwest, often with first-time entrepreneurs. The firm’s areas of expertise include clean energy, water, air, green materials, and sustainable agriculture.

Semler confirmed via e-mail that Tuusso Energy is the first investment from Pivotal’s new fund. He says his team is excited about the solar company because of its strong team; it’s in a big market; it is capital efficient; it provides strategic insight into multiple facets of the renewable energy market; and it represents a “strong opportunity for investor returns with or without an IPO or acquisition.”

The Pivotal team says it has evaluated more than 250 companies since January. “This deal flow in quantity, breadth, and quality is a proof point that the Northwest is a great place for investing in sustainability,” Semler says. “It also validates the premise behind Pivotal Investments as the only venture fund in the Northwest completely dedicated to these opportunities.”

Earlier this summer, Semler and Zenger told me a little more about their investment themes. And what they said rings true with Tuusso Energy. “We get excited about investments that have systemic disruption in large markets that can be proven in the Northwest, and then scale to other markets like California and Asia,” said Semler, a cleantech entrepreneur himself who has led firms such as ClearEdge Power and PolyFuel over his career as an executive.

Yet if you ask Seattle entrepreneurs and investors alike, they’ll say alternative energy and sustainability are not in most local venture capitalists’ comfort zone. “We talked to most of the VCs in Portland and Seattle, and this is a new space for them—new markets, new technologies, and many times new teams,” Semler said. (A notable exception would be Rick LeFaivre of Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, who notes that cleantech VCs should invest in the sweet spot between mom-and-pop companies and $100-million-upfront deals, like wind farms, that call for private equity or other means.)

Which is also why cleantech and sustainability can be such an attractive field—for the right firm. “This is bigger than the original Industrial Revolution,” said Zenger, a co-founder of Portland-based Pixelworks (NASDAQ: PXLW) and an expert in global technology markets. “The scale of these opportunities is just huge.”

Huge investments, however, are not what the Pivotal VCs have in mind. Their typical deal structure will be to contribute around $3 million, investing over multiple rounds—often with other investors—to ensure the company has the resources it needs to achieve its plan. I wondered how much you can really do with $3 million in a capital-intensive space like energy. Quite a bit, they said. “Entrepreneurs need to be creative and find ways to use less capital to make the same progress,” Semler explained, “especially in the current market environment.”

“While we’re a little concerned about the amount of capital pouring into the cleantech sector, we believe it’s a great time to be a cleantech investor in the Northwest,” Semler said. “Valuations are low, innovation is high. If you’re willing to do early-stage work, there is a great opportunity for reward.”

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It was a bit of a quiet week for Northwest deals, with some local venture dollars going to other parts of the country. Nevertheless, there was activity in gaming, music, robotics, biotech, and cleantech.

—Seattle-based Tuusso Energy completed a $2 million financing round led by Pivotal Investments, based in Portland, OR. The deal was made in partnership with Akula Energy Ventures, which will co-invest in Tuusso’s development of utility-scale solar power plants in the western U.S.

—Bellevue, WA-based Smith & Tinker said it has raised a total of $29 million in venture funding from DCM, Vulcan Capital, Foundry Group, Alsop Louie Partners, and Leo Capital Holdings. The gaming company was founded in 2007 and closed its most recent funding round last month. It is now promoting its new hybrid online/offline game, called Nanovor.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners participated in a $45 million financing round for Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, CA, as Luke reported. Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Prospect Venture Partners, Highland Capital Management, Essex Woodlands Health Ventures, and OrbiMed Advisors also contributed. It’s the fourth round of funding for Complete Genomics (for a total of $90 million-plus), which is building a commercial human genome sequencing center in Silicon Valley.

—ProFibrix, a Netherlands-based medical company with a Seattle subsidiary, raised $11 million in a Series B financing from new investor Gilde Healthcare Partners and existing investor Index Ventures. The company makes a dry powder topical tissue sealant that stops bleeding during or after surgery.

—Seattle-based Bezos Expeditions, the venture investing operation of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, has invested in Heartland Robotics, a Cambridge, MA-based startup led by MIT computer scientist Rod Brooks. Wade reported that the industrial robotics company has raised just over $7 million in an equity offering in which Bezos Expeditions participated. Other investors were not disclosed.

—Bothell, WA-based AVI Biopharma raised another $30 million through a stock offering underwritten by Jefferies & Company, as Luke reported. AVI (NASDAQ: AVII), which recently moved headquarters from Portland to Bothell, is developing experimental RNA therapies for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and Ebola virus.

—MySpace confirmed its acquisition of Seattle-based iLike, as Eric reported. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the widely rumored price was $20 million. iLike will remain in Seattle, with its 26 employees joining the MySpace team, according to Owen Van Natta, the CEO of MySpace.

—Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CTIC), the cancer drug developer, raised $30 million by selling preferred stock and warrants to purchase shares of its common stock to a single institutional investor, as Eric reported. Cell Therapeutics will use the money as operating capital.

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Seattle-based Tuusso Energy, a developer of solar power plants, announced today it has completed a $2 million financing round led by Pivotal Investments, based in Portland, OR. The investment was made in partnership with Akula Energy Ventures, which will be co-investing in Tuusso’s utility-scale projects. The company’s first project is a solar plant, slated for completion in 2011, that will supply 20 megawatts to California utilities.

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If solar panels are ever going to generate electricity for the mass market of U.S. consumers, they will need to be embedded in a place that captures serious rays, like the roof of the average American home. Lots of scientists are trying to make solar panels thinner, lighter, flexible, and more efficient, so they can be embedded in shingles. But if this is really going to work, they’ll also need serious protection from the elements.

I got an overview of how these two technologies are coming together last week during a tour at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland,WA. Two scientists there at the lab, Mark Gross and Gordon Graff, walked me through their research to create polymer films that are lean and mean enough to protect thin solar panels from the pounding of wind, rain, hail, and the occasional heavy footsteps that a roof must endure for 25 years.

This “barrier film” technology—think sandwich wrap on steroids—was spun out of the national lab a decade ago with a seed investment by Battelle, which operates the lab, and a $15 million investment from Japan-based Mitsubishi, to form a company in San Jose, CA called Vitex Systems. The first business plan could have gone in any number of directions. It identified 15 different applications for polymer material that was micron-thin, rugged, and far more impervious to oxygen and moisture than plastic. The company decided to focus on using barrier film as a coating for the next wave in lighter, thinner, more efficient flat-panel screens on TVs, laptops, and handhelds like the iPhone or BlackBerry.

But that market—for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays—has never really emerged because prices kept falling for the standard LCD displays, even though they are thicker and heavier, Graff says. So now Vitex and its collaborators at the national lab are investigating a new market for the barrier film—as an enabler for thin solar power panels.

“We make the sandwich bag that goes around the flat panel,” Graff says. “We make what keeps it from going to pot.”

Sounds simple, but this has required a 20-year effort …Next Page »

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There were deals to report in San Diego last week. Not necessarily big deals, but even little deals are a big deal these days. Read all about it in this week’s BizTech roundup.

—The V-Vehicle Co. operated in stealth mode in San Diego for three years before it surprised many in June, when the startup automaker announced plans to build a new line of fuel-efficient cars in northeastern Louisiana. Now the story is unfolding a bit more. A regulatory filing that reveals V-Vehicle has raised nearly $63 million in venture capital also shows that Google Ventures is an investor in the company, along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the prominent Silicon Valley VC firm.

—San Diego’s Senomyx (NASDAQ: SNMX) said last week it could get as much as $34.5 million through a new collaboration with Switzerland’s Firmenich, the largest private flavor and fragrance company in the world. The deal gives Firmenich rights to compounds that Senomyx has developed to enhance the taste of table sugar and two other sweeteners. The money will come in handy for Senomyx, which expects total 2009 revenue to fall between $18 million and $22 million, while total expenses are projected to range from $46 million to $49 million.

—San Diego Internet startup KidZui, a San Diego Internet startup for children that has raised almost $12 million in startup venture capital since 2006, launched ZuiTube—an online video site with almost 60,000 kid-friendly videos. ZuiTube uses 200 part-time editors, who are mostly parents and teachers, to pre-screen the videos—just as KidZui prescreens websites to make sure they’re age-appropriate. KidZui is aimed at children from 3 to 13 years old.

—The San Diego-based IPS Group, which previously specialized in providing cellular networking equipment, has raised more than $1.3 million from individual investors to turn itself into a specialized maker of high-tech parking meters. The privately held company’s parking meters are solar-powered, wireless, and Internet-enabled. The technology enables motorists to use a credit card to feed the meter, and it enables municipalities and other customers to use the Internet to monitor their meters.

—The San Diego News Network, which operates a website that provides news and information about the San Diego community, has raised more than $707,000 from its individual investors, and plans to raise about $2 million in the current round. SDNN CEO Neil Senturia told me the online news operation, which was launched five months ago, is growing rapidly and is expected to hit breakeven by the end of this year.

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Rarely in Seattle is the power of the sun as remarked upon as in the past week, as temperatures soared into the triple digits. That’s some serious heat, especially for an area proverbial for its rainy, gray skies. Perhaps this makes it a good time to reflect on the fact that Seattle, despite what would seem to be discouraging weather most of the year (like today), hosts a surprising number of solar power startups. LivinGreen Materials is one of these—and one of the youngest—but its solar cell technology, using a variation on dye-sensitized solar cells, has already caught the attention of cleantech investors.

LivinGreen recently reached the semi-finals of the Pacific Northwest division of the Clean Tech Open, competing for a prize of up to a quarter million dollars in the national cleantech business plan contest, although the final results won’t be announced until November. Currently, the company is self-supported but hopes to raise money from angel investors and venture capitalists.

The dye-sensitized crystals (DSC) of LivinGreen are so-called third-generation technology—as opposed to the first-generation solar technology of silicon wafers and second-generation tech like earlier thin-film solar cells. LivinGreen’s solar cells are more efficient and cost-effective than previous technologies, according to LivinGreen CEO Chris Tagge. The dyed crystals are composed of a light-sensitive anode and an electrolyte, which generates electricity from light energy that hits the anode. Originally invented in Europe in the early 90s, there are now several different versions of the technology, which is usually made from very cheap materials like tin and titanium. While conventional silicon-based cells often require their own complex manufacturing process, DSCs can be produced in large amounts for comparatively little. “It’s by far the lowest cost solar technology out there,” Tagge said.

And the sheets of dye-sensitized photovoltaic material are considerably more durable than silicon crystals. So instead of needing to be protected from dust, rain, and other natural hazards, DSCs could actually be incorporated into building materials, and even used in low-light areas like the inside of an office, because the electrochemical reaction is so easily stimulated. It’s theoretically possible to make whole buildings into solar power generators someday, Tagge said.

The genesis of LivinGreen dates back to late 2008, when Tagge read a press release from the University of Washington about the work of professor Guozhong Cao and his research into …Next Page »

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