Konarka Technologies, a Lowell, MA, developer of flexible, nanotechnology-based “Power Plastic” that converts light to energy, will receive $20 million from Konica Minolta in an R&D and investment agreement announced today. The companies will jointly develop and distribute organic thin-film photovoltaics.

Konarka brings to the table its simplified, roll-to-roll manufacturing process, which the firm says can be scaled up with significantly lower labor and capital costs than was possible with previous generations of solar-cell-manufacturing technology. Japan-based Konica Minolta is large, diversified company with its hand in office supplies, imaging, and medical equipment. In the company’s attempt to make inroads in environmental and energy applications, Konica Minolta is developing organic thin-film photovoltaic materials. The firm promises to be Konarka’s lead Asian business partner.

The companies will work together to improve their materials and optical coating technologies to achieve higher conversion efficiency, longer life, and lower manufacturing costs. If the companies are successful, they will establish a joint venture in Japan to produce organic, thin-film photovoltaic panels.

Konarka has revealed at least six new partners or customers over the past year or so who are integrating Power Plasticits photovoltaic material into products such as handbags that store solar energy to recharge electronic devices. Konarka’s other investors include 3i, Chevron, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, Mackenize Investments, the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, New Enterprise Associates, Partech International, and Vanguard Ventures.

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While venture investments in cleantech startups declined last year, technology advances in renewable energy remain a hot area of interest for both cleantech innovators and investors. In an effort to gain a better understanding of the solar energy market, especially in the photovoltaic segment of the industry, I sought insights from Mike Hall, the CEO of El Cajon, CA-based Borrego Solar Systems.

Borrego is a fast-growth company that finances, designs, and installs grid-connected photovoltaic solar systems. Much of Borrego Solar’s business is concentrated in New England and California. Before getting to our Q&A, however, a little background is in order.

Borrego Solar Systems was a dormant, 20-year-old business when Aaron Hall, a senior at Northwestern University, developed a venture business plan for the small solar company as part of an undergraduate entrepreneurship class. A Hall family friend, San Diego State University physics professor James Rickard, had started the company in 1980, in part to install a solar system on his off-the-grid home in Borrego Springs, a small desert town east of San Diego. Rickard liked Hall’s business plan so much that he sold half the business to Hall, who took over at Borrego shortly after his 2001 graduation. They each put in $20,000 to restart the company.

Since then, Hall says the company, which is based in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, CA, has grown into one of the nation’s top five contractors specializing in designing and installing grid-connected photovoltaic solar systems. With more than 165 employees in seven offices nationwide, Borrego Solar says it has installed more than 1,000 photovoltaic systems.

Last year, Inc. magazine named Borrego Solar to its list of “Fastest-Growing Private Companies” for the third year in a row. Inc. ranked Borrego Solar at No. 321 in the magazine’s 2009 list of 500 fastest-growing companies, based …Next Page »

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Solar cell manufacturer SpectraWatt, a spinoff from Intel formerly based in Hillsboro, OR, has raised $12 million in equity, debt, and options (out of a $41.4 million offering), according to a regulatory filing. The investors were not disclosed. Last spring, SpectraWatt announced it was moving its headquarters to upstate New York, citing “green business incentives.” The company has since set up offices and manufacturing facilities in Hopewell Junction, NY. Back in June 2008, Intel Capital led an initial $50 million investment in SpectraWatt, and was joined by Cogentrix Energy, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund, and Solon AG.

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Portland, OR-based Solar Nation, a developer of solar energy technologies for government agencies, businesses, and nonprofits, has raised $2 million in equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The financing appears to be part of a $5 million commitment from Luxembourg-based Lynx Industries to help expand Solar Nation’s North American operations, as the company announced yesterday. The strategic partnership means Lynx Industries will also provide a $3 million credit facility, and will become Solar Nation’s preferred supplier. Solar Nation was founded in 2008 and is led by founders Paul Anthony Hodge, Paul Hodge, Jr., Dan Drummond, and Ryan Lambert.

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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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Steve Ihnen knows to the minute when the clouds will arrive. From the Redmond, WA, office of his company, SolarCasters, he keeps an eye on weather conditions around the world with satellite data. Then, using complex mathematical modeling software, he collates cloud-cover, humidity, and other factors to calculate how much sunlight will reach the ground in a given spot in the next day, hour, or even minute.

SolarCasters is a “weatherman for the solar power industry,” among other roles, says Ihnen, the chief technology officer and only full-time employee of SolarCasters. Besides forecasting when the sun will come out, the company provides information and consulting to solar power companies about where best to build their plants, what kind of solar panels they should use, and how much electricity they can expect to produce. Based on criteria like how much the sun shines in a given area and what the relevant weather is like there, Ihnen can recommend the best options in placement and design to his clients.

Knowing how much solar energy is available minute-to-minute is vitally important because unlike nuclear, coal, or other types of power generators, solar power cannot be as easily controlled and managed. “The supply of electricity must precisely meet demand at every instant,” Ihnen said. Generally, large-scale power suppliers, whether public or private utilities or independent system operators like the California ISO (a power grid operator), share and move power about, buying and selling electricity as needed to keep supply and demand levels equalized. Solar power plants thus need to know in advance how much power they will generate in order to replace or buy power from another power plant as necessary. Ideally, Ihnen said, power systems together “operate almost as if they were one organism.”

Although not heavily used in America yet, solar power is a rapidly growing industry in places like Europe and Australia. SolarCaster’s clients are located all over the world, but non-disclosure agreements prevent Ihnen from revealing who his clients are, or even how many he has, since he began taking on clients last fall.

Ihnen founded the company in January 2008 after spending two years developing …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Washington Technology Center announced today it has been awarded $136,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to improve thin-film silicon solar cells. The project, done in partnership with Oregon State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, involves using nanotech methods to trap more light in the solar cell so as to produce more electricity. The money comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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SpectraWatt, a Hillsboro, OR-based maker of photovoltaic cells, received a $500,000 contract from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory yesterday.  Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the contract is for the company to develop ways of improving solar cells without changing current manufacturing processes.  SpectraWatt was one of 13 companies to receive money from NREL, the ultimate goal being to speed up the commercialization of solar energy technologies.

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Wakonda Technologies, a Woburn, MA-based startup developing highly efficient solar photovoltaic products, says that Peter Borden has joined the firm as executive chairman. Borden was previously an executive at Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT), a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of products and services for advanced materials manufacturing. Wakonda relocated from upstate New York to Massachusetts after closing a $9.5 million Series A round of venture financing last year.

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San Diego’s Sempra Energy, (NYSE: SRE) says its Sempra Generation subsidiary is expanding its 10-megawatt solar power-generation facility near Boulder City, NV, by adding a 48-megawatt photovoltaic system. Sempra hired First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) of Tempe, AZ, to engineer, procure, and install nearly 830,000 thin-film solar panels at the site, which is about 40 miles southeast of Las Vegas. The project could be operational in late 2010, and the combined solar facility, called Copper Mountain Solar, will supply enough electricity for 30,000 homes.

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(Update: this story was updated at 10:15 a.m. today with additional financial information on Sun Catalytix.)

Yes, that’s solar fuel. MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera has been widely lauded for developing a breakthrough technology that could harness the energy of the sun to provide a clean source of fuel. Xconomy has now learned that Polaris Venture Partners is backing a young startup called Sun Catalytix, which Nocera founded to commercialize his discovery.

Polaris general partner Amir Nashat is in charge of the venture firm’s interest in Sun Catalytix, which was quietly formed last year and is operating in the Boston area, according to sources close to the firm. Nashat declined to comment on the company, saying that its founders have decided not to talk to the press about the stealthy operation at this time. (Nashat himself got his doctorate in chemical engineering from MIT, though most of the Polaris investments he’s overseen in the past were in biotech startups.) Sun Catalytix has completed a $700,000 seed round of financing, according to the VentureExpert database, cited by news website PE Hub after Xconomy posted its story on Sun Catalytix this morning.

Nocera has gained notoriety for his technology that offers a novel way to utilize solar energy and could be used to make hydrogen gas with two plentiful and nonpolluting resources: sunlight and water. And it bodes well for the commercial prospects of Nocera’s technology that a top-tier venture firm like Waltham, MA-based Polaris has stepped in to back Sun Catalytix. But by all accounts, there are technical hurdles to clear before Nocera’s solar fuel technology is ready for commercial use. Also, market factors such as the economic meltdown have slowed growth in the solar energy market and created barriers for adopting new solar technologies, an industry expert says.

Nocera’s exciting discovery is a catalyst that, according to MIT, consists of an electrode placed in water containing cobalt and phosphate. MIT explains that when electricity from any source enters the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate create a film over the electrode, forming a catalyst that separates oxygen gas from the water and leaves behind hydrogen molecules. Then a platinum catalyst is used to convert the hydrogen molecules into hydrogen gas, which could power fuel cells and further efforts to lower global dependence on petroleum-based fuels. The vision is to use sunlight to enable these chemical reactions, creating a new way to tap solar power for energy.

As of last summer, commercializing the technology depended on overcoming at least a couple of technical challenges, one of which is …Next Page »

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SolarWorld Industries, whose parent company is based in Bonn, Germany, is cutting 63 positions from its Vancouver, WA facility, according to the Washington State Employment Security Department. SolarWorld says the move is not a reduction in total staff, but rather a transfer of operations to its new manufacturing plant in Hillsboro, OR (which Xconomy reported on here).

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Lowell, MA-based Konarka, which is developing a process for making solar photovoltaic cells on flexible plastic, said today that it has secured a $45 million investment from Total, a Paris-based international oil and gas conglomerate. Konarka also said it has signed a bilateral R&D agreement with Total, which will become its single largest shareholder (owning 20 percent of the startup). Coincidentally, $45 million is the same amount Konarka raised from a group of private investors for its “Power Plastic” product one year ago.

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GT Solar (NASDAQ: SOLR), a maker of equipment for manufacturing photovoltaic solar cells, said today that it will lay off 25 production workers at its Merrimack, NH, plant. The cuts, a reaction to requests from GT Solar’s customers for delayed shipment of solar furnaces, represent just over 8 percent of the company’s work force. We’ve added this information to the Boston Tech Layoff Tracker.

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Bedford, MA-based Spire Corp (NASDAQ: SPIR), a leading supplier of equipment for manufacturing solar photovoltaic power modules, announced today that it has won a $54.9 million contract to supply solar cells for a photovoltaic factory at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, NY. The contract was awarded by Federal Prison Industries.

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Today marks the opening of what will be North America’s largest solar-cell manufacturing plant. And it’s right here in the Northwest. SolarWorld, based in Bonn, Germany, is launching a new solar facility in Hillsboro, OR. On the docket this morning is a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a tour of the sprawling, 480,000 square-foot facility. Expected to be in attendance are some prominent Oregon officials, including Governor Ted Kulongoski, Congressman David Wu, and Senator Ron Wyden.

It’s a big deal for the local economy, and for solar energy. By 2011, SolarWorld’s Hillsboro plant is expected to employ 1,000 people and produce enough solar-cell material to generate 500 Megawatts of electricity per year—enough to power roughly 80,000 U.S. homes, in theory. SolarWorld acquired the Hillsboro facility from Japan’s Komatsu Group in March 2007 for $40 million. Komatsu had planned to use the site to manufacture silicon wafers, but it didn’t pan out, because of weak demand for chips. Now SolarWorld, which was founded in 1977 and had its IPO in Germany in 1999, says it is investing more than $400 million in the Oregon facility.

Solar power is a big piece of the renewable energy and cleantech puzzle. Annual revenues in the solar industry are predicted to triple in the next three years, from $13 billion to $40 billion, according to the investment banking firm Piper Jaffray. Yet the problem has always been that solar cells are very expensive to produce. If they have large enough scale and efficiency, manufacturing facilities like SolarWorld’s could play an important role in making solar energy more mainstream. “SolarWorld…is helping to bring real alternatives to market through a strategy focused on high-volume manufacturing. The new Hillsboro facility is our most shining example of this strategy in practice,” said SolarWorld CEO Frank Asbeck in a statement.

Why Oregon? SolarWorld is certainly not alone in setting up manufacturing facilities there. Companies like SpectraWatt (spun out of Intel), Solaicx, Peak Sun Silicon, XSunX, PVPowered, Mr. Sun Solar Enterprises, and Wacker, to name just a few, have all set up solar-cell factories in Oregon. The main reasons are probably the state’s business energy tax credit, and its large talent pool of tech workers, especially in the semiconductor industry. Also, there is plenty of cheap hydropower, and being close to California, the nation’s largest solar market, can’t hurt either.

“The Pacific Northwest possesses a hotbed of talent in both silicon manufacturing and clean-technologies. Oregon is the obvious choice for where to undertake this new level of solar cell manufacturing, said Boris Klebensberger, SolarWorld’s chief operating officer, in a statement. Klebensberger is coming off a panel appearance (entitled “The great crystalline silicon debate”) earlier this week at the Solar Power International conference in San Diego, CA.

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One measure of the burgeoning interest in solar energy and the cleantech industry is the record turnout this week for Solar Power International 2008, which is being held at the San Diego Convention Center.

Organizers say more than 20,000 people are expected to register for what’s billed as “the largest solar energy industry event in the Americas”—a 25 percent increase over last year’s attendance—and the “full-conference registration” sold out yesterday for all events, workshops, and plenary sessions.The exhibit hall is bustling, with people crowding around exhibits and overflowing from sessions with such titles as “CPV 101: Intro to Technology, Policy & Markets” and “The Great Thin Film Debate: Winning the Hearts and Minds of System Installers and Investors.”

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made a surprise appearance Monday evening, said the event has doubled in size since he last spoke at the 2006 conference in San Jose. The former actor proclaimed he is an enthusiastic supporter of solar power, saying, “It’s here. It’s now. There’s no stopping it!”

But the industry still has got a long way to go.

In the United States, solar power accounts for only about 1 percent of the energy supply, far less than the electricity generated for the national power grid by wind and geothermal power.

The solar industry nevertheless was re-energized just weeks ago when Congress included an estimated $18 billion in renewable-energy tax credits as part of its $700 billion economic stimulus package. The solar incentives in the legislation, which take effect over the next 90 days, provide a 30 percent tax credit for residential and commercial solar installations and cancel the existing $2,000 tax credit cap for residential projects.

Solar technologies also have gained enormous goodwill in terms of benefiting America’s energy independence and in reducing global warming.

As a result, a charged atmosphere of business prospecting—akin to Sutter’s Mill circa 1849—permeated many conference workshops and the exhibit hall, where more than 425 solar industry vendors are promoting their products and services.

Despite this year’s enormous sell-off on Wall Street, NASDAQ Executive Vice President John Jacobs told reporters that share prices for 12 publicly traded solar companies were up 157 percent so far this year. Shares of one company in the group, First Solar of Tempe, Ariz., have climbed 482 percent for the year, Jacobs said.

Perhaps as a result of such strong market performance, Jacobs says there is no lack of venture capital for startups focused in cleantech and renewable energy.

Investors also seemed to be plentiful at the conference, seemingly in defiance of the nation’s overall economic mood.

Green Core Capital, a San Diego investment firm, says it is “Greening the Global Economy” by providing financing and business support services for renewable energy and green technology startups.

Green Core’s flagship company appears to be Envision Solar, a full-service solar design and construction firm in San Diego that has been working with Kyocera to commercialize photovoltaic carport structures, including panels mounted atop “solar trees” for installation in large parking lots.

Kyocera, the Japanese manufacturing giant that maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Diego, also occupied a major exhibit at the conference, along with Applied Materials, Sharp, and other major solar products manufacturers.

“A lot of people are asking to be distributors for our solar panel modules,” said Kyocera marketing coordinator Julie Capeloto. “A lot of people here want to get into the industry.”

Traffic also was heavy at the exhibit booth for Enfinity, a Belgian firm that arranges project funding for large “utility-scale” solar power plants. Enfinity opened its first U.S. office in Sacramento less than eight months ago, says Mark Domine, an Enfinity project developer. Despite the global credit crisis, Domine says, “There still is very strong interest in the investment community in green projects.”

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Silicon is a wonderfully cooperative element. It takes relatively little energy to promote the electrons in a silicon crystal from their usual, docile orbits around the atomic nuclei into wild, free circulation. That’s what makes silicon a semiconductor—valuable for electronic switching devices such as transistors, sensing devices such as the CCDs in cameras and X-ray machines, and energy-generating devices such as photovoltaic cells.

But silicon would be more wondrous if it were even more responsive—if an incoming photon needed less energy to knock loose an electron, for example, or if a single photon could kick loose many electrons. In pursuit of this vision, chemists, physicists, and engineers have spent decades trying out various ways of modifying silicon crystals—for example, by doping them with atoms of arsenic or other elements that put more free electrons into the mix.

Almost ten years ago, graduate students in the laboratory of physics professor Eric Mazur at Harvard University stumbled across a new way of making silicon more responsive: they found that if they blasted the surface of a silicon wafer with an incredibly brief pulse of laser energy in the presence of gaseous sulfur and other dopants, the resulting material—which they called “black silicon”—was much better at absorbing photons and releasing electrons. And this week, after nearly three years in hyper-stealth mode, a spinoff company with an exclusive license from Harvard to commercialize the process has begun talking with reporters.

Executives for the company, called SiOnyx, believe that its technology will help semiconductor manufacturers build far more sensitive detectors and far more efficient photovoltaic cells, using essentially the same silicon-based processes they currently depend on—thereby revolutionizing areas such as medical imaging, digital photography, and solar energy generation.

The venture-funded startup has emerged with a bang, securing exclusive coverage by New York Times technology writer John Markoff in today’s edition. But SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor and principal scientist James Carey, a PhD graduate of Mazur’s lab, also showed me around their Beverly, MA, facility last week, on the condition that this post would appear after Markoff’s story.

“You’ve never been able to detect light the way this stuff detects light,” says Saylor, referring to black silicon’s remarkable sensitivity to incoming photons, especially photons at infrared energies, which pass through normal silicon as if it were transparent. That property could make it an ideal, and inexpensive, replacement for less-sensitive detectors in devices as varied as X-ray and CRT machines, surveillance satellites, night-vision goggles, and consumer digital cameras. “It means that you solve a clear and obvious pain point for a very large number of customers,” Saylor says.

And because black silicon is just silicon that’s been roughed up a bit by femtosecond laser pulses and chemical treatment, SiOnyx’s technology could theoretically be integrated into existing semiconductor fabrication lines without much disruption. “You can do everything we’re talking about without extraordinary, Herculean effort, and you can do it in a way that fits with high-volume manufacturing flows,” says Carey.

SiOnyx was incorporated in 2005, secured the Harvard license in early 2006, and obtained $11 million in venture financing from Harris & Harris, Polaris Venture Partners, and RedShift Ventures in 2007. The company is going public with its story because “we have enough momentum now both with strategic partners and with the technology that it makes sense at this point to share a little more about what we are up to,” say Saylor.

Harvard, for its part, is holding up SiOnyx as one early result of the ongoing overhaul of the university’s technology licensing efforts. The school gained a reputation early in this decade as being unresponsive, even hostile, toward faculty and students who wished to commercialize discoveries made in the university’s labs, especially in areas outside of biotechnology and drug development. For years after the discovery of black silicon in Mazur’s lab, the school’s technology transfer office “wasn’t very excited” about the work, according to Carey.

But in 2005 the university brought in university licensing veteran Isaac Kohlberg to rebuild its technology transfer operation from scratch. Saylor and Carey say it was Kohlberg and his staff who finally understood black silicon’s potential and ironed out the licensing deal that made SiOnyx possible.

“The exciting steps being taken to develop [black silicon] for commercial application serve as even more evidence of the entrepreneurial energy that continues to gel and accelerate at Harvard,” Kohlberg says in a press release set to be issued tomorrow by SiOnyx and Harvard’s Office of Technology Development.

Bob Metcalfe, a general partner at Polaris Ventures who sits on SiOnyx’s board, thinks Kohlberg is right: “Harvard seems to be getting its act together in patent licensing,” he says.

Exactly what makes black silicon such an effective absorber of photons is a question that even Mazur and Carey couldn’t answer at first. The material is one of many offshoots of work going on in Mazur’s lab in the late 1990s using femtosecond lasers—devices that can emit an intense pulse of light lasting only a millionth of a billionth of a second. Mazur lab researchers found that zapping a silicon wafer with such pulses in the presence of sulfur hexafluoride gas—an experiment initially carried out on a whim—left the wafer festooned with tiny cones. Silicon roughened in this way soaks up almost all of the light that strikes it in visible wavelengths, appearing black—hence the name.

“It took several years for us to begin thinking properly about what we had,” says Carey. “The original thought was that the surface roughening process was what created the advantage.” The researchers hypothesized that photons were bouncing from cone to cone—and that the more times they bounced, the higher the likelihood that they’d be absorbed, thus dislodging electrons. But then Carey and his coworkers realized that black silicon was also absorbing infrared light, “which you can’t explain just by …Next Page »

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The Pacific Northwest could potentially be the first region in the United States to achieve 75 percent of its electricity supply from carbon-free sources like hydropower and renewables. But that will require a dedicated new effort in cleantech policy and investment which, if successful, could create 41,000 to 63,000 new jobs in Washington and Oregon across five energy sectors by 2025.

That’s according to a study released today by Clean Edge, a cleantech research and publishing firm based in Portland, OR, and Climate Solutions, a Seattle-based non-profit organization focused on global warming. The report, entitled “Carbon-Free Prosperity 2025: How the Northwest Can Create Green Jobs, Deliver Energy Security, and Thrive in the Global Clean-Tech Marketplace,” makes the case (both economically and environmentally) for a serious cleantech push in Washington and Oregon. It points to five main technology areas in which the Northwest has a competitive advantage:

—Solar photovoltaics manufacturing. For instance, SolarWorld’s plant in Hillsboro, OR, will be the largest crystalline silicon solar-cell manufacturing facility in the U.S. by 2011.

—Green building design services. Seattle and Portland consistently rank in the top three U.S. cities with the largest number of certified green buildings.

—Wind power development. The Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm, slated for operation in 2012 in north-central Oregon, would be the largest wind farm in the U.S., and one of the largest in the world.

—Sustainable bioenergy. Pacific Ethanol in Boardman, OR, SeQuential Biofuels in Portland, and Seattle-based Imperium Renewables are part of an emerging group of companies in biofuels in the Northwest.

—Smart-grid technologies: Liberty Lake, WA-based Itron is the top global manufacturer of advanced meter readers. Ron Pernick, managing director of Clean Edge, calls these kinds of smart sensors and communication technologies “the linchpin” of the entire cleantech effort.

However, the Northwest also faces some significant barriers in cleantech, the report says. First, there has been less venture capital activity in cleantech in Oregon and Washington (they received about $65 million and $47 million in clean-energy investment in 2007), as compared with California and Massachusetts ($1.4 billion and $378 million, respectively). Second, the report cites the lack of a 21st-century electric grid, and the “lack of a coordinated regional strategy.” That fits with what energy expert Jesse Berst of GlobalSmartEnergy (an Xconomist) told me over the summer: that other parts of the U.S., like New Mexico and Hawaii, are “more progressive and aggressive about energy.”

To overcome these barriers, the study recommends a 10-point plan to get cleantech on track in the Northwest:

—Put a price on carbon
—Increase Washington’s renewable portfolio standards (required percentage of electricity from renewables) to 25 percent by 2025
—Implement low-carbon fuel standards
—Pass aggressive green building codes
—Foster regional cooperation
—Ensure public funding for cleantech via public employees retirement system investments and through targeted cleantech funds
—Implement effective tax credits for renewables development
—Deploy cleantech workforce development programs
—Establish government purchasing policies for cleantech products and services
—Build regional smart grids and a 21st-century transmission backbone

If these steps are taken by regional government and industry, the independent study says, then Washington and Oregon could lead the U.S. in clean-energy deployments. “The cleantech industry is really taking root in the Northwest,” says Rhys Roth, co-founder of Climate Solutions. “The opportunity is real, but we have to act now, with urgency.”

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In a call with journalists after the release of his company’s first-ever quarterly earnings report last Tuesday, Tom Zarella, CEO of GT Solar (NASDAQ: SOLR), the Merrimack, NH-based maker of equipment for manufacturing solar photovoltaic cells, said the company had just won a $177 million contract to supply 48 polysilicon reactors to DC Chemical of South Korea. Now the company has made that news official, though the actual amount is somewhat lower than what Zarella reported—$173 million, according to a news release circulated today. It’s DC Chemical’s third order from GT Solar, which went public on July 24.

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