[Editors note: Architect Robert Noble wrote this article with Glenn Croston]

The San Diego area is the home of numerous cleantech businesses that are developing innovative green cars (Aptera, V-Vehicle Co.), developing alternative fuels (GreenHouse International, Synthetic Genomics Inc., Sapphire Energy), finding alternatives to petrochemicals (Genomatica, Verdezyne), and providing renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions (KEMA, Kyocera, Envision Solar).

Assisting our growing cluster is a network of non-profits, trade groups, government agencies, universities, and investors who share a common interest in cultivating a green economy. These groups collaborate on many projects, strengthening our vision for more green businesses, jobs, and investments in cleantech innovation. But while they share common goals, local green groups are also distinct in many ways and often compete for money, members, and media; their varying perspective, focus, message, membership, and goals can be confusing. If you’re an entrepreneur, how can you find support for the green innovations you hope to commercialize? Where do investors look for opportunities and advice? Where can founders find the resources they need to move their ventures forward?

We’ve compiled a listing of these groups to help San Diego entrepreneurs and others find the resources they need to grow green, and to help San Diego’s green economy grow.

—The California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) is the cornerstone in developing San Diego’s green business cluster. As a non-profit, the CCSE works to advance the adoption of renewable energy, green building design, clean transportation options, and energy efficiency by providing workshops, information, and training.

—Cleantech San Diego is a membership-based non-profit industry association that sponsors events for businesses, investors, and others working in the cleantech cluster. They summarize their mission on their website, saying, “Cleantech San Diego advocates for new sources of investment capital, workforce development, international trade, federal and state research funding, targeted regulation, and sustainable land use planning and development.”

—San Diego Clean Enterprise Program, which is administered by Cleantech San Diego through a partnership with the City of San Diego and the mayor, which provides interest-free financing for energy efficiency improvements for small businesses. Cleantech San Diego also is working with the rest of the green community to support funding and grant applications, such as the effort to win $260 million in Clean Renewable Energy Bonds (CREBs) for local solar projects.

—San Diego Gas & Electric committed to develop a distributed solar power generation system in the San Diego region in 2008. So it’s no surprise that …Next Page »

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After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an …Next Page »

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Dealmakers appear to be getting their business done before the week of Thanksgiving—because we’ve seen a decent stream of deal closings involving Boston-area life sciences and tech companies over the past week or so.

—Framingham, MA-based Punchbowl Software, which operates the party planning website MyPunchbowl.com, said it acquired technology assets of a group vacation website called I’m In. Punchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas provided details on why the transaction made sense for his startup.

—After months of operating quietly, seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective officially debuted last week. Eric Paley, a managing partner and co-founder of the firm, told us why he and other software entrepreneurs came together to form the new venture outfit, which has offices in Cambridge, MA and New York City. Here’s a hint: They were a bit frustrated with the status quo in the venture industry.

—Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego-based biotech startup focused on developing techniques that make stem cell research practical for the pharmaceutical industry, reeled in $30 million in a Series B round of venture financing. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the new round of investment in Fate, which was founded by top academics at Harvard University, Stanford University, The Scripps Research Institute, and the University of Washington.

—ImmunoGen (NASDAQ:IMGN), a Waltham, MA-based biotech firm, reported this week that the firm sold a second license to its technology—which is for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing molecules—to industry giant Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) for $1 million upfront, plus potential milestone payments.

—Corindus, a Natick, MA-based startup developing a robotic system for implanting vascular stents, collected $5.3 million of a planned $10 million in venture dollars, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—Cambridge -based Ligon Discovery found $1 million in a seed round of financing from incTANK Ventures, with plans to validate its small molecule microarray system for drug discovery that was developed at Harvard. The company was founded by folks from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

—We spotted Angus Davis, a co-founder of Microsoft’s voice-based Internet search subsidiary Tellme Networks, at Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs recently and wondered what he was up to. It looks like he’s been working on a new Providence, RI-based startup called Swipely, which quietly swept up a cool $1 million from First Round Capital.

—Jealous? Highland Capital Partners, the Lexington, MA-based venture powerhouse, closed its eighth fund, worth a whopping …Next Page »

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Aptera, the sleek carmaker backed by Google and Idealabs, didn’t respond to my inquiry earlier this week about reports of an internal split in which founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony had left the company. But in an online report published today by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Aptera officials rejected accounts that Fambro and Anthony were ousted in a boardroom showdown.

The company’s status is a keen issue to some 4,000 people, including celebrities Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Shaquille O’Neal, who have put down $500 deposits to be the first to buy one of the three-wheel, two-seater vehicles. The Aptera 2e, the company’s first production vehicle, resembles a wingless plane and is expected to cost between $25,000 and $40,000. Aptera is based in Vista, CA, about 30 miles north of San Diego.

Citing a statement issued by Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur, the Union-Tribune says the carmaker had to adjust its production schedule “to align with financing realities.” Instead of producing its first fuel-efficient model in the fall of 2009, as Aptera announced at the beginning of this year, Wilbur says the company will complete its first vehicles in 2010. About 10 of Aptera’s 40 employees have been laid off.

The company, which has raised at least $27.5 million from Google, Idealabs, and other venture investors, is seeking additional funding, according to Popular Mechanics. Aptera says it also intends to resubmit its application for a $75 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentives Program.

Aptera says co-founders Fambro and Anthony were not asked to leave. Fambro remains on the board, but has taken a leave of absence from the company until next year. Anthony is now the CEO of Flux Power, a startup in the San Diego area that is developing battery-management systems. In another online account published by Popular Mechanics magazine, Fambro also voiced his continuing support for CEO Wilbur.

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Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture firm focused on investments in the cleantech sector, has named Jiong Ma a partner of the firm, according to a Mass High Tech report. She was previously a principal at the firm, which has offices in Boston and New York City, according to its website. Braemar’s portfolio includes such Boston-area cleantech companies as A123 Systems (NASDAQ:AONE), EnerNOC (Nasdaq:ENOC), and Verenium (NASDAQ:VRNM).

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As startups developing next-generation biofuels emerge in San Diego, Boston, and elsewhere, a business model for rapidly expanding to commercial-scale operations already can be found in the biotech industry, experts said yesterday. The premise of presentations organized by Biocom, San Diego’s life sciences industry group, is that collaborations being formed between biofuel startups and big energy are comparable to the partnerships formed between biotech startups and big pharmaceutical companies.

Biofuels development partnerships will be crucial to meeting renewable fuel standards that the federal government set in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Wain Fishburn, a founding partner of the Cooley Godward law firm’s San Diego office, said the standards require the U.S. biofuels industry to increase its production fourfold—from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons in 2022. Fishburn, who introduced the speakers at the Biocom event, said the ability to meet the federal goal depends on a variety of factors, including the ability to lower the cost of biofuels to be competitive with petroleum-based crude, and the scalability of feedstock, production facilities, distribution, and related infrastructure.

But what it really comes down to, as Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM) executive William Baum told the audience, is capital.

Baum, who became Cambridge, MA-based Verenium’s executive vice president of business development in 2007 (following the 2006 merger of San Diego’s Diversa and Cambridge’s Celunol) said the need for capital was the theme he heard “over and over again” during a recent meeting that focused on the biofuels industry. “We’ve got hundreds of biofuel companies that are trying to get to the next stage. If you don’t have a big brother with deep pockets, like a BP, Exxon, Shell, or a Chevron, it’s going to be very difficult.”

A number of partnerships already have been established between biofuels startups and major energy conglomerates, Fishburn noted. He listed the following collaborations:

—BP, the London-based global energy conglomerate, has formed two strategic partnerships with Verenium, which has been developing technology to produce cellulosic ethanol using proprietary microbes to accelerate the breakdown of non-edible, high-cellulose plant material into ethanol. Baum described the first collaboration, announced in August 2008, as a technology joint venture for IP. (BP agreed to put up $90 million to develop “low-cost, environmentally sound cellulosic ethanol production facilities in the United States.”) Through a second deal announced nine months ago, BP agreed to provide an additional $45 million and to form a …Next Page »

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GenVault wants to bring biological samples in from the cold. For decades, the biological samples used to diagnose or study disease have been stored in freezers, which use a lot of electricity. GenVault markets dry-storage technologies that allow scientists to store samples—such as DNA from a blood test—at room temperature.

GenVault CEO David Wellis argues the company’s technologies free up lab space and are better for the environment. He says that one of GenVault’s desktop storage units can hold as many samples as an average-size lab freezer, which has the same carbon footprint as five automobiles. Freezers have another major drawback: a single power failure can destroy years of work.

Wellis says the time is right for his company. The use of genomic analysis for disease diagnosis, scientific research, and forensic criminal investigations is exploding, thanks in part to technical advances that enable the swift decoding of genes. All these genetic tests start with biological samples, such as blood, urine, or spit. The RAND Corp. recently estimated that more than 307 million tissue specimens are stored in the United States, with more than 20 million specimens added each year. That means more and more freezers are taking up lab space, and running up electricity bills.

GenVault, which is based about 26 miles north of San Diego, in Carlsbad, CA, estimates that sample transport and storage represents a $4.5 billion business opportunity. It is also an area in which innovation has been lacking. “All the technical development has occurred in sequencing and informatics,” says Wellis. “The management of samples has seen no innovation. It is a gaping hole.”

GenVault got started in late 2001 to fill that perceived hole. The venture-backed company has raised more than $32 million to date, and has numerous customers, including the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Genome Québec, and Amgen. The company expects to soon announce a new diagnostic lab customer that expects to store 750,000 samples using GenVault’s technology. Wellis says GenVault, which has 40 employees, could breakeven by the end of next year.

The company markets two products. One is a chemically treated paper that preserves bits of whole samples, such as blood or spit; the other a salt-like mineral matrix that preserves purified DNA. Here is how GenVault says …Next Page »

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Paul Wilbur, a Detroit auto industry veteran who was named CEO of Carlsbad, CA-based Aptera 14 months ago, gave no indication of internal turmoil at the futuristic car’s headquarters when he appeared last week at an event sponsored by Cleantech San Diego.

But as Darryl Siry reports today on Wired’s Autotopia blog, a prolonged power struggle that pitted Aptera founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony against Wilbur and Aptera board members apparently came to a head in recent weeks. Wired says rumors about the founders’ departure, as well as layoffs amid financial difficulties, began appearing last week on the Aptera Forum, an online message board for Aptera car enthusiasts. Aptera did not immediately respond to an e-mail query seeking the company’s response to the reports. According to Wired, the company says it’s slowing down its burn rate while waiting for the Department of Energy to review its loan application, and maintains that its relationship with Fambro and Anthony remains positive.

Fambro, who founded Aptera about six years ago, has previously said his aim with the company was to build a safe and comfortable passenger vehicle that was more fuel-efficient than anything else on the road. The company says the prototype of its aerodynamic pod-shaped, three-wheel vehicle gets 230 miles to the gallon.

Aptera raised about $24 million roughly 18 months ago from investors that include Google and Idealab. CEO Wilbur told me last year that the company was having no trouble attracting additional funding, but the Wired blog reports that additional funding has in fact been difficult to secure during a drawn-out battle over which course the company should be steering.

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San Diego serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is going to have to find something else to do now that Gizmo5, the VoIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) company he founded in 2003, has become part of a certain search giant to the north. We have that news and more.

—Google confirmed that it’s buying San Diego-based Gizmo5, a six-year-old company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. The service will become part of the Google Voice number-unification service. Google did not disclose the purchase price, which media reports put at about $30 million. Gizmo5’s 6 million users will still be able to use the service, according to a statement. But Google is suspending new Gizmo5 signups, and existing users can no longer sign up for a call-in number.

—Platformic, a Web-based startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites, said it is adding social media capabilities. The two-year-old San Diego-based company, which has targeted broadcast companies, says its expanded software-as-a-service product will help a broadcaster’s audience share photos, create their own user profiles, and create personal blogs on the broadcaster’s Platformic-powered website.

—Qualcomm’s No. 2 executive opened a regional mobile technology conference in San Diego by providing an overview of steps the chipmaking giant is taking to help ease the pressure on wireless network bottlenecks as mobile data traffic soars. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer told the 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference that in the year 2014, worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

—Technology innovations that help companies optimize their profitability will likely lead to the next wave of analytics-based software startups, according to Stephen Coggeshall of San Diego-based ID Analytics. Another hot area will be analytics that can help forecast consumer behavior, said Coggeshall, who was participating in a discussion about new opportunities in analytics during the San Diego Software Industry Council’s annual forum on analytics.

—Israel’s Panoramic Power won $250,000 and became the first winner of the top QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power is developing energy-monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy so-called “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities.

—The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group said is getting $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a giant wind farm in eastern Washington state, about 110 miles east of Portland, OR. The $1 billion Windy Point/Windy Flats project is expected to generate enough electricity for 250,000 homes.

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The Renewable Energy Business Network (REBN), a networking group for cleantech professionals with 10,000 members across 17 local chapters and a strong presence in the Boston area, has merged with the Clean Economy Network Foundation (CENF), a young cleantech policy research and education organization based in Washington, DC.

The news came today in an e-mail to all REBN members from founder Rob Day, currently a partner at Boston-based Black Coral Capital.

“REBN has been growing by leaps and bounds and frankly it outgrew our ability to support it with the really thin organization that we had,” Day tells Xconomy. “We started talked with CENF because they were already thinking about how they were going to tackle community building at the national level. They are a great organization, and they are full-time on this, and now we are going to be able to bring that support to REBN. And for them, it means they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

“There is so much synergy these days between the policy part that CENF has been working on and the networking stuff that business people care about that it just made a lot of sense” to merge the two organizations, Day continues.

The REBN name will be gradually phased out and replaced by the Clean Economy Network label, Day says. “The ‘renewable energy’ part of REBN was a bit of an anachronism anyway,” he says. “We’ve been getting into efficiency and even things like water and materials. It’s all one community, really.”

REBN co-executive directors Laura Bartsch and Helen Fairman have become network co-directors at CENF. The group’s executive director, Jeff Anderson, was formerly campaign manager at Cleantech and Green Business for Obama, a grassroots group that lobbied for the election of Barack Obama as president.

But while Day acknowledges that “these guys have shown themselves to be pretty effective community organizers,” he sayd CENF itself “is a non-partisan organization that is not involved in policy advocacy. That means REBN will continue to be non-partisan, not supporting one politician or blue or red or anything like that, but simply in favor of supporting the development of a clean economy.”

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When utility customers can see exactly how much energy they’re consuming, and how, they can be far smarter about using it. That’s the argument made by Powerhouse Dynamics, a Newton, MA, startup developing energy-management software that lets users observe and control the flow of power through their homes.

To fund the effort, the company is raising $2 milion in venture funding, according to a report this morning from Dow Jones VentureWire. Powerhouse CEO Martin Flusberg told the publication, in an interview at the Greenbuild International conference in Phoenix, that the round will close in November or December; he wouldn’t name the investors.

Flusberg is the co-founder and former president of Nexus Energy Software, which was sold to ESCO Technologies in 2005. Co-founder and chief technology office Carsten Steenberg formerly led U.S. operators for Danish firms I-Data and Phase One. (Powerhouse’s website also says that Steenberg “is an expert on Cold Fusion technology.”) The third co-founder, Dan Kaplan, the company’s chairman and chief marketing officer, was co-founder of LowerMyBills.com, now owned by Experian.

Powerhouse disclosed in a regulatory filing in April that it had raised $225,000 out of a planned $750,000 debt financing round. The documents show that the company was formed in 2007 and was originally based in Blue Hill, ME.

According to the Powerhouse website, the company’s PC-based software, called eMonitor, keeps tabs on “every circuit in the home,” including solar photovoltaic panels (assuming the home has them), lets homeowners control their thermostat, issues trouble alerts and energy-saving suggestions, and provides a picture of a home’s overall carbon footprint. In a blog post, Flusberg says the software works because it provides feedback that “allows consumers to see the impact of their behavior and take steps to change.”

The Powerhouse site says the eMonitor software will be “widely available in late 2009,” but Flusberg told Venture Wire that the company will ship only about 100 units this quarter, with a wider release coming next year. Flusberg said the eMonitor product will cost $600 plus a $12 monthly subscription.

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It must be Clean Energy Week in Boston, judging from all of the trophies, plaques, and award checks being handed out to the region’s energy and cleantech innovation leaders. We wanted to tell you about the winners in two of this week’s biggest events: the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Ignite Clean Energy Prize business plan competition finals, held at the State House on November 10, and the New England Clean Energy Council’s Green Tie Gala, held at the John F. Kennedy Library last night.

The big winners in the Ignite Clean Energy Prize competition—the fifth annual iteration of the event, sponsored this year by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center—were the following:

Grand Prize: IntAct Labs of Cambridge, MA, which is developing microbial fuel cells and protein-based biosensors and photovoltaic devices. IntAct walked away with $150,000 in cash and in-kind prizes from Mintz Levin, CHT Group, the UMass Dartmouth Applied Technology and Manufacturing Center, and T3 Advisors.

Second Place: InnoSepra Coal, which is developing lower-cost ways to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by coal combustion at power plants, and using the captured CO2 in oil and gas exploration.

Third Place: EGG Energy, which is building rental “solar stations” for recharging batteries in poor, rural regions of Africa.

“Each year, we see a variety of technologies and people participate in ICE – each team beginning the competition with brilliant ideas and completing the process with real market impact,” said Clark Waterfall, chair of the competition and managing director at Boston Based BSG Team Ventures, in a press statement about the awards. “This year is no different and I congratulate the IntAct team on their victory and I congratulate all of the teams for playing a role in strengthening the clean tech industry.”

I was all dressed up last night and ready to go to NECEC’s Green Tie Gala, but was stopped in my tracks by car trouble, of all things. Guess it’s time to get a Prius! Here’s a rundown of the awards that I didn’t get to see handed out:

Breakout Company of the Year: EnerNOC, for “achieving an inflection point in revenue growth and establishing itself as both an industry leader and a market-maker.” (2008 winner: A123Systems)

Emerging Company of the Year: QD Vision, for “exiting its development phase with tremendous momentum.” (2008 winner: Aspen Aerogels)

Employer of the Year: American Superconductor, for “growing its workforce by a substantial margin, and providing good, high-paying jobs to its community.” (2008 winner: GT Solar)

Corporate Citizen of the Year: Millipore, for “its adoption of clean energy technology and energy efficiency measures in order to reduce its carbon footprint.” (2008 winner: Staples)

Clean Energy Hall of Fame Inductee: Steve Cowell, CEO of Conservation Services Group, for “his dedication to clean energy, and truly setting an example for others to follow.” (2008 winner: Mark Farber)

Council Leadership Awards: Kevin Doyle from GreenEconomy and Wanda Reindorf from Conservation Services Group—the co-chairs of NECEC’s Workforce Development Group—for “their outstanding leadership in the support of Council activities.”

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San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says Panoramic Power, a wireless sensor startup based in Kidron, Israel, is the winner of the first QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power has developed energy monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy Smart Grid technologies within their existing facilities. Panoramic Power, which previously won $100,000 as a QPrize regional winner, was awarded another $150,000 and the opportunity to compete in a global business plan competition held at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

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The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group says it has received $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a 400-megawatt wind farm in Klickitat County, WA, about 110 miles East of Portland, OR. Total investment in the project will be more than $1 billion. When completed, the Windy Point/Windy Flats project will be one of the largest wind farms in the nation, producing enough electricity for more than 250,000 homes per year. The project power has been designated for use by California municipalities.

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We’ve noticed a slowing of venture investment in cleantech and other aspects of energy here in New England. But put any green investment pessimism on hold this week—as today marks the start off what’s being touted as the third annual Clean Energy Week here in Massachusetts. In a week of charged-up presentations from Springfield to Boston, we’ve got networking, investor pitches, a “green tie” gala, and LOTS of startups. In fact, I’ve counted 52 startup pitches across the week, and that’s not counting the 10 finalists in the Ignite Clean Energy Competition, who will be at the State House in Boston on Tuesday, and any others I have missed.

It would be hard for anyone to make all these events. But below are some highlights, and you can find a more complete overview here.

Monday (today)

—A short walk from Xconomy’s offices at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge, MA, is the sole event of the day, the Clean Energy Applied Research Discovery Workshop put on by SETsquared’s Clean Energy Mission to Boston. SETsquared is a research collaboration between four British universities: Bath, Bristol, Southampton, and Surrey. (I can’t figure out from the website if the event is open to the public, so I’m guessing it isn’t. But Xconomy staffers and friends can often be seen after work in the Bambara restaurant bar in the Marlowe.)

Tuesday

The pace of events really picks up on Tuesday.

—Clean Energy Connections, an all-day career and business development conference in Springfield, MA.

—Boston Cleantech Venture Day. This event, which takes place at the Boston offices of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, is put on by a coalition of various international chambers of commerce and business groups “to assist European Cleantech companies in exploring and taking advantage of opportunities in the US.” All told, some 17 European companies have come over to present at the conference, and the closing keynote speaker is Howard Berke, founder of Konarka Technologies.

—The highlight of the day will likely be the finals of the Ignite Clean Energy business plan competition put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge at the Massachusetts State House. You can find the business plan summaries of the 10 finalists who are vying for the $35,000 grand prize here. This event looks great, but it is sold out. Here’s what the website says about walk-ins: “If you choose to Walk-In we do not guarantee entrance into the event, will be based upon capacity of the room. Pre-Registered seats will be released at 12:50pm (20 minutes after presentations begin)…”

Wednesday

—University Research Briefing Day. This Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center event, held at MIT’s Tang Center, will feature faculty from Massachusetts institutions who will present their clean energy research. This is always a great event—and I hope to be able to make it.

—Green Tie Gala. This is the second year the New England Clean Energy Council has organized this event at the JFK Library & Museum. I don’t have a tux, but Wade does—and plans to be there. The keynoter is Congressman Ed Markey. The event is sold out, according to the registration page, even the $3,250 tables.

Thursday and Friday

—The week’s piece de resistance is the two-day Conference on Clean Energy organized by the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center and the Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition at the Hynes Convention Center. Keynoters include Steve Koonin, under secretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy, Governor Deval Patrick, and Ian Bowles, the state’s energy czar. MTTC director Abi Barrow says 35 companies from a variety of energy sectors will present at the conference, including four foreign firms—one from Norway and four from Britain.  The Sunday Times of London was very excited about the four from Britain and wrote this piece. And you can find the speaker list and bios here.

Wade hosted a podcast in advance of this conference—as he puts it, “previewing some of the themes that will be featured prominently at the event, ranging from the state of energy investing to the role of stimulus funding for energy startups.” You can find the podcast here.

—Also starting on Thursday and concluding Friday is the 17th Annual U.S.-Canada Energy Conference at the Seaport Hotel in Boston. The theme of this year’s event is “North American Energy: Forging ahead in the current economic and environmental climate.”

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It was a busy week for local technology news.

—Two teams from San Diego and a third from Northern California demonstrated their development of advanced chemical sensor prototypes that are tiny enough to be found inside ordinary cell phones. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding the Cell-All program, with a goal of basically creating an anti-terrorism app for cell phones that would enable authorities to crowd-source chemical detection.

—MaxLinear has filed for its initial public stock offering. The Carlsbad, CA-based fabless chipmaker, which specializes in designing semiconductor-based television receivers, intends to raise about $100 million through its IPO. The market may be de-frosting a bit, with 47 IPOs so far in 2009, compared with 45 last year, and 272 in 2007.

—ProQuo, a San Diego-based Web 2.0 company that was founded in 2007, was quietly shut down after taking in a total of $15 million in venture capital from Menlo Park, CA-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson and San Diego-based Mission Ventures. ProQuo was never able to validate its business model; its website offered consumers a way to remove their names from mass-mailing lists for free, and the company planned to sell its optimized lists back to mass marketing companies.

—San Diego’s wireless industry group, CommNexus, celebrated the opening of EvoNexus, its free high-tech incubator, by announcing the selection of three more startup companies: EcoATM, MicroPower Technologies, and TetraVue. CommNexus CEO Rory Moore says EvoNexus is believed to be the first incubator that is completely free for startups—that is, it doesn’t even require an equity stake in participating companies, as most incubuators do.

—Jitterbug, the San Diego wireless provider that puts an emphasis on simplicity, has acquired MobiWatch, a Waltham, MA-based startup developing mobile personal emergency response services. A regulatory filing shows that Jitterbug’s parent, GreatCall, provided 630,000 shares of common stock to MobiWatch and its shareholders in a deal valued at $107,100.

—San Diego-based Networkfleet is using its technology to help companies that operate fleets of vehicles go green by monitoring engine emissions and ensuring that vehicles are operating efficiently. Co-founder Diego Borrego told me the company also expects to be a player as consolidations sweep through the fleet tracking industry.

—EcoDog, a Vista, CA, cleantech startup that has developed a device that helps homeowners sniff out savings in their electric utility bill, was named best of show at GadgetFest, the annual fall competition sponsored by CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group. EcoDog founding CEO Ron Pitt won over the crowd when he declared, “My product is the only product up here tonight that saves you more money than it costs.”

—San Diego-based cleantech startup EESG is looking to raise $1.2 million to expand the 10-employee company’s sales staff, purchase inventory, and ramp up public relations and marketing. The company’s founders told me they have raised about half so far, including $300,000 from Longboard Capital Advisors, a green investment firm based in Santa Monica, CA.

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Any company that owns or manages a data center, even a small one, knows how power-hungry they can be. It’s not unusual for operators of large data centers—say, 50,000 square feet—to pay $10 million a year or more for electricity. Under those circumstances, companies have every incentive to look to virtualization and other technologies that help them be more efficient. But data center energy management, it turns out, isn’t exactly a science: there’s no precise way to predict how much consolidating a few servers, for example, will reduce a company’s energy bills.

That’s the problem Viridity Software, a Burlington, MA, startup coming out of stealth mode today, hopes to solve. “We want to be able to tell a customer exactly what to do to optimize the life of their data center and decrease their energy footprint, or increase the amount of work they can do on the same energy and capital footprint,” says Mike Rowan, the company’s founder and chief technology officer.

To pursue that vision, Viridity has raised $7 million in Series A funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Battery Ventures, and has 22 employees working to ship a series of software products starting in the first quarter of 2010. The first product, Rowan says, will be a planning aid that helps data center managers see how adding or moving servers will change overall electrical load. Next will come a control module that provides a real-time picture of power utilization, not just by IT equipment, but by a data center’s heating and cooling systems. Finally, building on the data provided by the control module will be an optimization tool that studies a data center’s historical power use patterns and recommends the changes system administrators and facilities engineers should make to reduce power consumption.

“The cost of power in data centers is approaching the cost of the capital equipment,” says Rowan. Reducing power consumption, he says, is mainly a matter of understanding how power needs change under various computing workloads, and balancing those workloads more intelligently.

While Viridity is striking a mildly green pose—the company logo features a little green leaf sprouting from the “V”—Rowan thinks it’s the high cost of electricity, rather than concern about carbon emissions or climate change, that will ultimately send customers his way.

“You can put a business case around everyone of these decisions,” he says. “Why overtly talk about how it’s the right thing for the planet, when there’s a business case around it? You will get more done with less cost and less power.”

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Dave Paton and Dave Moody tell me they founded EESG, a San Diego cleantech startup also known as Energy Efficiency Systems Group, last year in anticipation that soaring energy prices would unleash strong demand for practical alternatives. But they didn’t focus on new technologies for alternative energy sources. They focused on energy efficiencies.

They also wanted to take advantage of their extensive experience with the hotel industry. Paton had spent 30 years working as an executive at the Hilton, Radisson, and Doubletree hotel companies. And the company the pair had previously founded, Vista, CA-based Paramount International Telecom, provided a voice-activated automated attendant and message system for the hospitality industry. So they knew hotels. As Paton and Moody put it, they understood that for a hotel to keep its four-star rating, it was going to have to keep the air-conditioning running through the summer.

As a result, Paton and Moody concluded that developing technologies to help hotels and other facilities improve their energy efficiency was a likely growth business ideally suited to their expertise and industry contacts. And it was a business that wouldn’t require huge amounts of external capital. The business partners say they set out to create a system that incorporated the best technologies for sensing and measuring energy use, for monitoring and communicating such information in meaningful ways, and for remotely managing everything—from the 15-ton air-conditioning chiller on the roof to the boiler in the basement.

“Every piece of equipment has a sweet spot that it operates at with optimum efficiency,” Moody says. The energy conservation and management systems that EESG has developed are designed to identify equipment throughout a facility, and to optimize the performance of each unit. “We know every model, every unit, every product type, and we know how to control it,” Moody says. “Our system is specifically programmed for that equipment, say a Trane 360, and to keep it operating at that sweet spot.”

To tie it all together, they hired software engineers to develop proprietary software analytics that provide a comprehensive and real-time energy audit of customer facilities. EESG also developed a Web-based interface that can be accessed online or by a smart phone. Paton says their system, once installed, reduces customers’ energy consumption by 8 percent to 15 percent annually. The partners say EESG has implemented its technology so far at four hotels in the U.S. and Canada, including the luxury Fairmont Hotel in Washington D.C.

Fairmont Hotel

“The building engineer can be anywhere in the world,” Moody says. “You just go to a secure portal, and see how the system is operating. Or maybe the vice president of asset management wants to drill down to one chiller at one property, but he also wants it aggregated to show all the chillers at all the buildings that he manages.”

So far, the founders have funded EESG’s technology development themselves, along with friends and family. But they are now looking to raise about $1.2 million to expand the 10-employee company’s sales staff, purchase inventory, and for public relations and marketing.

Moody and Paton say they have raised about half from wealthy individual investors and cleantech investment funds, such as Longboard Capital Advisors of Santa Monica, CA, which has invested $300,000 from its Blue Earth Fund in EESG’s current round.

“Although we typically do not invest in early stage companies, it was an easy choice to invest in the management at rapidly growing EESG,” Longboard managing partner Brett Conrad wrote in an e-mail to me last night. “We felt like our investment risk was further reduced by management’s deep experience and relationships in hotel and resort management around the world. Because Longboard Capital Advisors focuses on clean tech investing, we are particularly excited by EESG reducing their customer’s carbon output while at the same time while achieving extraordinary ROI’s by significantly reducing energy costs from power hungry air conditioners, elevators and escalators.”

Moody sums it up a little more succinctly. “It is a good green thing for sure,” he says, “but the bottom line is that it helps you save money.”

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[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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The moderators of San Diego’s 9th Annual GadgetFest kept saying during Tuesday night’s showcase for new technology products that past winners have gone on to even greater glory and success. That may or may not be good news for the Motorola Droid that goes on sale tomorrow at Verizon stores nationwide. After making a cursory appearance at CTIA and perhaps elsewhere, the Droid debuted its impressive features and ended the evening as runner-up.

GadgetFest moderators Ken Rutkowski and Andy Abramson reminded the audience that Grand Central, a GadgetFest winner three years ago, was acquired shortly after the 2006 event by Google (and has since been transformed into Google Voice). They also pointed to Motorola’s Q Phone, Sling Media’s Slingbox, and the Truphone as paragons of GadgetFest virtue. All three devices were introduced at GadgetFest instead of the CTIA or other major trade shows, according to CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group that sponsors the event.

So expectations were high. But the Droid, with all its iPhone-slaying hoopla, finished the GadgetFest competition in a dead-heat with EcoDog, a local cleantech startup that trotted out Fido—a device that helps homeowners sniff out savings in their electric utility bill. The GadgetFest judges ultimately proclaimed EcoDog this year’s best in show after the Vista, CA-based company received perceptibly more-boisterous applause from the audience in the Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall at Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters.

At the end of the show, while the judges were deciding how to resolve the tie, one of the moderators asked EcoDog founder and CEO Ron Pitt if he had anything more to say. He replied, “My product is the only product up here tonight that saves you more money than it costs.”

So what are the up and coming gadgets that got previewed at GadgetFest? Here’s a rundown, just in time for the Christmas shopping season:

—TelCentris, the San Diego-based provider of unified communications services, presented an update to its VoxOx system, which aggregates voice over Internet technology, text messaging, instant messaging, serial conferencing, file sharing, and e-mail onto one user interface. As TelCentris executives explained to me in July, the company makes most …Next Page »

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