Even though our local economy is far from strong, I am pleased to report that at the Northwest Energy Angels, we continue to see and invest in interesting deals across the spectrum of clean technologies.

In the past year, we’ve seen and closed deals in virtually every segment of the cleantech industry, including more efficient lighting, purer water technologies, and more productive renewable energy. Contrary to the popular press, our shrewd entrepreneurs are doing it with little reliance on special subsidies or government funding.

For 2012, there are several trends that I expect to see emerge and develop in these segments (borrowing the category definitions from the Cleantech Open):

Air, Water, and Waste
For the last few decades we have been wrestling with the need to develop alternatives to fossil fuel reliance and are now clearly on a path to consider water and its shortages in a similar vein. In many respects, the clean water segment is where the energy industry was a couple of decades ago. We will continue to see companies looking to develop ways to use water more efficiently, measure water and its cleanliness more precisely and cost-effectively, and recoup water that was previously thought unusable.

Domestically, vigilance in air quality makes opportunities for dramatic improvement difficult. Obviously, carbon dioxide emissions are a huge exception to this, but uncertainty over government mandates and/or incentives will make CO2 control a market that startups will have a hard time making a dent in.

The area of waste will continue to offer a wide variety of disparate, but valuable opportunities as cost of disposal and potential value of the refuse continues to be recognized.

Energy Efficiency
The Pacific Northwest has been blessed and cursed in this segment. The ethic of the region is very pro-conservation but our energy costs are among the lowest of any region, which gives priority to other faster-paying investments in this economy. As we look at efficiency technologies, the key questions are, first, will it sell in California (and elsewhere) and second, is there any way for a local company to deploy, test and further develop its technology for commercial roll out?

Given recent predictions for climbing energy costs, the second question is most often the decider for investor involvement. As I’ll explain below, I see a very positive trend here and am bullish on this sector for our local companies for the first time in a long while.

Green Building
As in the case of efficiency, our region enjoys quick consideration for new green building products here and enthusiasm for early winners. Status quo materials and practices are, unlike our energy, on par cost-wise with the nation, giving local solution providers an excellent chance to gain early market traction.

Renewable Energy
This segment of the cleantech world is seeing the biggest changes. The sunsetting of many U.S. government incentives is causing entrepreneurs to rethink their prospects. Opportunities will continue for those companies that have a “mine the miners” strategy to help established renewable energy equipment manufacturers to improve their product offerings—especially when products are aimed at the world market, which is expected to see much less retrenchment in 2012.

One area of exception to the slowdown is renewable transportation fuels, aviation fuels in particular. Our region has a leg up with Boeing and military interest in the subject as well as the nation’s largest operating biodiesel producer, Imperium Renewables. While it won’t be built overnight, I do see more and more opportunities for companies that can contribute to the success of this industry.

Smart Power, Green Grid, and Energy Storage
The Smart Power, Green Grid, and Energy Storage category encourages links between information technologies and electricity delivery that give customers greater control over when and how their energy is delivered and used.

In many regards, startups in this space have a chicken-and-egg problem: Utilities and regulators want to see products before using these new technologies at scale, while startup companies (and their investors) want to see buyers ready to write checks before gearing up for production.

Our region is rich in the technologies needed to implement the smart grid and its cousins—we have a tradition of progressive utilities that have implemented its precursors. But I remain skeptical of a fast market uptake in 2012.

Our Secret Weapon
Military installations. The local cleantech community has been sought out by representatives of the Navy (Naval Base Everett) and the Army/Air Force (Joint Base Lewis-McChord) to help them achieve some truly remarkable sustainability goals for waste, water, and energy.

Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t to say that the procurement floodgates have opened. They haven’t. The military is on a downward budget trend and they know it. But what they do have is a long view and a willingness to invest in projects that will pay off over a longer term than most homeowners or businesses would.

These military installations capture a complete subset of our local economy: industrial operations, commercial/office buildings, residences, and more. In some cases there are also financial partners who will step in alongside military sustainability initiatives, to provide funding where others wouldn’t.

Perhaps most importantly for our entrepreneurs, these bases are looking for good, early commercial products to test, demonstrate and embrace to achieve their goals.

The Road Ahead
While I don’t think that cleantech is in for any 1990′s-style boom, I do think we will continue to see a wide variety of clever entrepreneurs with great market insights and technological breakthroughs in 2012. And the Northwest Energy Angels will continue to be ready, willing, and able to fund them.

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Here’s another data point for New England cleantech investors. Coskata, a Warrenville, IL-based developer of cellulosic ethanol, has filed paperwork for an initial public offering. The proposed maximum offering is $100 million, but as usual, that doesn’t mean much at this point.

Coskata is backed by a couple of Boston-area venture firms—Advanced Technology Ventures and Greatpoint Ventures. ATV (owning 17.7 percent) and Greatpoint (15.6 percent) are the third and fourth largest stakeholders in the company, behind Khosla Ventures and Blackstone Group. General Motors is also an investor in the company. Coskata has raised more than $80 million in VC funding since 2008 but isn’t making money yet.

It’s a difficult climate for biofuels companies. Nevertheless, Coskata isn’t the only one testing the IPO market. Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma filed to go public in September. Mascoma, which is building a cellulosic ethanol refinery in Michigan, is backed by another pair of Boston-area VC firms, Flagship Ventures and General Catalyst, as well as Khosla Ventures.

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Some of San Diego’s biggest tech news last week came out of the mHealth Summit near Washington, D.C. But we’ve rounded up all the other tech news too.

—San Diego-based Mingle, an Internet holding company operating Climber.com and several affiliated businesses, said it acquired Sunnyvale, CA-based Affinity Circles to expand its job hunting and recruiting capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed, although VentureWire pegged the deal at about $1 million. Mingle CEO Michael O’Brien told me he plans to hire another 20 to 30 employees in 2012.

—Did you notice anything different about Xconomy last week? Just in time for the holidays, we completed an extreme home-page makeover, the first in a series of changes that are intended to make Xconomy more convenient and usable. We also moved our Xconomy headquarters in Cambridge, MA. We’re interested in your feedback, so please send us a note via editors@xconomy.com. If any of this suggests that Xconomy is growing and extending its reach into the innovation community, we are!

—After launching its ViaSat-1 satellite in October, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) has begun a different sort of countdown. ViaSat said last week that its satellite-based Internet service is expected to begin through Wildblue Communications before December ends. ViaSat-1 is the highest capacity communications satellite ever launched into space, and download speeds for households in Wildblue’s sparsely populated service areas are expected to range from 2 megabits per second to more than 10 megabits per second.

—During the mHealth Summit near Washington D.C. last week, San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, established a $100 million wireless health investment fund, and launched 2net Platform, a platform for distributing data from the potpourri of wireless health sources. As part of its new platform, Qualcomm also introduced the 2net Hub, a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet and serves as a gateway to the technology-agnostic, cloud-based 2net Platform.

—Other news from the mHealth Summit: Aventyn, a private health IT company based in Carlsbad, CA, said it has partnered with Annapolis, MD-based Zephyr Technology in an international, multi-center clinical study testing mobile technologies for remotely monitoring heart failure. Aventyn said the companies are working together to use Zephyr’s heart monitoring technology, which uses an Android smartphone to transmit data, with Aventyn’s remote patient monitoring and chronic disease management system.

—Independa also had news from the 2011 mHealth Summit this week. The San Diego startup unveiled Artemis, a wireless technology platform used to connect to a variety of in-home sensors for the elderly. Independa said the technology is intended to help relatives and caregivers monitor the vital signs of independent seniors, as well as room temperature, smoke, flooding, and other safety factors.

—The San Diego-based Endeka Group, a wireless Internet services provider and managed services operator, said recently it arranged $4.2 million in venture debt financing through the Agility Lease Fund of Prescott, AZ, and Trinity Capital Investment of Los Angeles. The two privately held firms specialize in financing and consulting for the broadband industry. Founded in 2004, Endeka provides wireless broadband services to campuses, military bases, hotels, convention centers, ships, and other locations.

—As part of an industry challenge to reduce the planning and installation costs of solar energy projects, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $700,000 to the San Diego-based California Center for Sustainable Energy. The team will use the funding to develop standardized rules for permitting and interconnection processes to streamline rooftop solar projects, with the idea of fostering the adoption of solar projects throughout Southern California. Considerable barriers remain to scaling up solar, according to Andrew McAllister, director of planning and strategy at the nonprofit center.

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As we turn the page on the year 2011, there is no shortage of topics about which the entire world seems to be debating. One that interests me the most is the renewed debate on the role of government in the energy sector, specifically in the United States. Budget shortages, deficit increases, front-page analysis of public-backed private enterprises, and a particularly bitter political climate have combined to push this topic to the forefront more so in 2011 than in recent years. It’s as though we are back in the smoky classrooms of the University of Chicago in the ‘50s and ‘60s where economists engaged in frequent Keynes Vs. Friedman (Milton not Thomas, mind you!) debates.

Energy is always a popular topic in the U.S., given its strategic importance to national security. All this recent debating has been interesting to follow but a bit confusing. Economists, reporters, business folk, and politicians do not seem to agree on what constitutes a government subsidy, let alone which sub-sector is the recipient of how much. While I do not want to take any sides, I thought it would be worthwhile to examine what constitutes a government subsidy, and what subsidies and how much were provided by the U.S. government historically.

As I began to think about what sectors to focus on, it made sense to examine those that have been of significant strategic importance to U.S. economic growth in the past. The rise of the U.S. to be the largest economy in the world was driven to a large extent by what some refer to as the second industrial revolution constituting the rise of the railroad, steel making, telecommunications, petroleum, and the automobile industries. This article attempts to capture the subsidies provided by the U.S. government to some of these industries at different stages of their growth cycle.

What is an energy subsidy?

I am no economist, but it seems to me that we can all agree on what constitutes a government subsidy without too much debate. Table 1 (below) attempts to summarize the different forms that energy subsidies can take. Most of these subsidy types are immediately recognizable. The “type” that has generated much debate so far is the “Failure to include Externality Costs.” No matter where you stand on the climate change debate, it is not that hard to see that pollution has at the very least caused smog and acid rain—ask the residents of the Los Angeles from the ‘80s and, more recently, those from Beijing. There has not been a worldwide accepted externality cost measure yet, but as we move forward the chances of that happening are higher.

Regardless, it is safe to say preferential tax treatments and price controls are as much a government subsidy as a cash grant or a low-interest loan. The U.S. government wallet is a bit lighter in both cases.

Historical U.S. government subsidies

The growth of the U.S. economy after the Civil War to become the world’s largest economy was driven by increasing commercialization of technologies including the railroad, iron and steel making, petroleum, and the internal combustion engine. Besides private capital and resources, an important catalyst behind the development and growth of these industries were U.S. government subsidies at different stages. Table 2 summarizes the amounts, types, time period, and stage at which government subsidies were provided to these industries.

Railroad and transportation

U.S. railroad companies laid more than 35,000 miles of track between 1867 and 1873—more than three times that laid in the previous 30 years. Congress gave the railroad companies more than $64 million ($8 billion in 2011 US$ at 3.5 percent inflation) in loans and tax breaks and more than … Next Page »

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November was a big month for news in the algae-based biofuels sector.

On November 7, roughly four months after renewable fuels were approved for use in commercial aviation, United Airlines flew passengers from Houston to Chicago aboard a Boeing 737-800 powered by a mixture of algae-based jet fuel and conventional, petroleum-based fuel. Two days later, Alaska Airlines started 75 passenger flights (with its sister airline, Horizon Air) using a biofuel blend made from recycled cooking oil.

Ten days later, a decommissioned Navy destroyer arrived at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Port Hueneme, CA, following a 17-hour cruise from San Diego, powered by a 50-50 blend of algal biofuel and a standard, petroleum-based military fuel.

A day later, Microsoft founder Bill Gates called for a massive boost in federal R&D funding for biofuels and other emerging energy technologies. In a guest editorial published in the May 18 issue of Science magazine, Gates urged the government to more than triple its funding for new energy technologies—from about $5 billion a year to $16 billion annually. Even during a time of economic crisis, Gates says it’s imperative to protect America’s interests.

Gates has moved to reshape the energy industry personally, by investing in several cleantech companies, including Sapphire Energy, a San Diego-based startup developing algal biofuels (although it wasn’t behind any of last month’s news).

Amid this fusillade of alternative energy news, I was eager to put a few questions to Jason Pyle, Sapphire Energy’s CEO and a San Diego Xconomist.

Xconomy: What is the next big milestone for the algal biofuels industry?

Jason Pyle: As an industry and at Sapphire, we’ve spent the last few years on R&D and proving that crude oil replacements like green crude from algae are possible and will scale with proper investment and government support. Although we’re still a few years away from reaching full commercial readiness, as an industry we’re scaling up at a pace that would be considered inconceivable by traditional oil and gas companies. Reaching commercial scale is critical. The next big milestone for Sapphire Energy is to complete construction and begin operating our commercial demonstration plant in Columbus, NM.

X: Do you see algal biofuels moving into aviation first, or does another sector make more sense to you?

JP: The great part about where Sapphire Energy finds itself as a producer of crude oil replacements is that demand for crude oil continues to rise significantly. Over the next 25 years as developing nations use more and more crude oil and we stretch the limits of the crude oil resource, all of the leading experts are projecting a 35-million-barrel-per-day gap between supply and demand. The U.S. military recognizes this gap as a major destabilizing issue—and as a serious strategic military issue in the years ahead—and is preparing our nation to not have to confront its consequences.

The U.S. military is making investments in the development of these technologies for strategic reasons because they understand a simple fact: that those nations who control energy resources maintain strategic advantage over those who do not. So soon, we will see the U.S. military as the leading customer for crude oil replacements. As pressure rises on … Next Page »

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When Verdezyne said last year it had made adipic acid in the laboratory, the Carlsbad, CA, industrial biotech said its eco-friendly fermentation process could make the valuable chemical for 20 percent less than it would cost a conventional petrochemical plant.

Today, Verdezyne says it is now operating a pilot plant in Carlsbad that can make adipic acid at an estimated cost savings of 30 to 35 percent. Using genetically engineered yeast and raw material from palm oil and other renewable sources, the facility is making “multiple kilogram” batches of adipic acid in production runs that take roughly 100 hours, according to Verdezyne CEO E. William Radany.

“We’ve done some significant metabolic engineering to come up with [yeast strains] that give us a significant cost advantage” in making petroleum-based chemicals, Radany said.

In a statement issued by the company today, Radany says Verdezyne’s pilot plant represents a key milestone in the development of a sustainable replacement for adipic acid, an important petrochemical product. “This is the first demonstration of the production of bio-based adipic acid at scale from a non-petroleum source,” he says.

Verdezyne Fermentation Tank

After raising an undisclosed amount of capital in May, Radany says Verdezyne built the pilot plant to optimize the processes needed to move to large-scale commercial production of adipic acid, a so-called “intermediate chemical” needed to make nylon 6,6. As I’ve reported previously, Verdezyne has taken a circuitous route to reach this stage. The company, which now has 46 employees, currently has enough cash for its operations, but will need to raise another round in 2012, Radany said. Verdezyne’s current investors include BP Alternative Energy Ventures, DSM Venturing B.V., OVP Venture Partners, and Monitor Ventures.

Verdezyne says its “green” adipic acid is identical to the petroleum-based polymer, and can be used to manufacture the nylon used to make clothing, carpets and other textiles, as well as polyurethane resins and engineered plastics. The company estimates the global market for adipic acid at more than $6 billion a year.

“The main goal of the pilot plant is to continue to validate your economics and your processes,” Radany told me recently. He described the facility as a fully integrated operation that will be used to optimize a variety of processes, including the ideal mix of ingredients and production cycle, as well as the filtration and separation of adipic acid from the fermentation broth.

Verdezyne says its proprietary yeast constitutes about 10 percent of the broth in a fermentation tank. The yeast consumes inexpensive “fatty acid distillates” and produces nearly 100-percent pure adipic acid, Radany said. He described the raw material as “non-food vegetable oils” that are typically sold at a low cost to soap manufacturers. The company says its production methods also generate less carbon dioxide and other pollutants compared with conventional petroleum-based production.

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It seems doubtful that the U.S. Navy has ever gotten as much media attention for offshore cruising between San Diego and Port Hueneme as the decommissioned destroyer Paul H. Foster received last week.

The Spruance-class destroyer, which has been refitted to serve in various ways as an ocean-going test platform, arrived at the naval base near Oxnard, CA, about 185 miles north of San Diego, Thursday morning after a 17-hour transit powered by a fuel blend that included algae-derived biofuel. It was the Navy’s largest alternative fuel trial.

The overnight sojourn was intended as a demonstration of the Navy’s plan to expand the use of “drop-in” biofuels that would require no changes to Navy engines, ships, supply infrastructure, or fueling piers. The only difference is that the biofuel was derived from algae, or “green crude,” instead of conventional fuels made from petroleum-based crude. (A pretty good account of the demonstration is here.)

San Francisco-based Solazyme provided the algae-based biofuel, which can be produced in its U.S.-based facility in a few days, according to Stephanie Tabor, a spokeswoman for the company. “We use standard industrial fermentation equipment to efficiently scale and accelerate microalgae’s natural oil production time to a few days,” Tabor says in an e-mail this afternoon. Solazyme’s technology is flexible, she says, “and can utilize a wide variety of renewable plant-based sugars, such as sugarcane-based sucrose, dextrose, and sugars from other sustainable biomass sources including cellulosics.”

As we reported last year, the Navy has decided for reasons of energy security, naval strategy, and environmental stewardship to develop and certify alternative fuels that can be used instead of standard-issue ship and aircraft fuels.  Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has announced a goal of conducting a test exercise next year with a “Great Green Fleet”—a 13-ship carrier battle group powered either by nuclear energy or 50-50 blends of biofuels, based on press reports.

The Foster took on about 20,000 gallons of diesel biofuel that Solazyme delivered to the Defense Fuel Supply Point at Naval Base Point Loma. It was blended 50-50 with a standard naval marine diesel known as F-76 (a NATO specification), and used in gas-turbine engines aboard the Foster that are equivalent to engines in U.S. destroyers and cruisers around the world.

“For our program with the Defense Logistics Agency,” Tabor says, “we are supplying the U.S. Navy with renewable F-76 diesel fuel and renewable JP-5 jet fuel for testing and certification.”

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Venture capital firms invested $6.95 billion in 876 deals throughout the United States during the three months that ended Sept. 30, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

The numbers marked a slowdown from the preceding quarter, when venture capitalists put $7.9 billion in 1,015 deals.

But look at what’s happened since June: Fresh worries about Europe’s debt crisis, U.S. market volatility, and waning economic confidence all followed a protracted political stalemate over raising the federal debt ceiling and adopting a new federal budget. Are we better off than we were six months ago?

Still, VC activity during the third quarter was significantly better than a year ago. The MoneyTree Report, based on data from Thomson Reuters, shows that the $6.95 billion VCs invested during the third quarter of 2011 was nearly a third more (31 percent) than the $5.3 billion invested during the same quarter last year. The 876 deals also was higher, albeit only slightly, than the 850 deals counted during the third quarter of 2010.

The slowdown charted in the MoneyTree Report contrasts with the VC report released last week by CB Insights, which shows continuing momentum, with VC activity strengthening this year from $7.5 billion invested in 738 deals during the first quarter through the $7.9 billion invested in 790 deals during the third quarter.

The MoneyTree Report also highlighted a fairly dramatic shift in VC activity, with funding flooding into the software and Internet sector and pulling back in the life sciences and cleantech sectors.

Venture investments in 263 software and IT-related deals totaled $2 billion during the third quarter—the biggest slug of money to go into IT since the fourth quarter of 2001, according to the MoneyTree Report.

Meanwhile, venture funding for biotech startups fell. The $1.1 billion invested in 96 biotech deals nationwide during the third quarter represented an 18 percent drop in dollars and a 20 percent decline in deals from the preceding quarter, according to Tracy Lefteroff, a global managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ U.S. venture capital practice. Funding for medical devices and equipment showed a similar decline. The $728 million that was invested in 74 deals during the quarter marked an 18 percent decline in capital and a 21 percent fall in deals compared with the preceding quarter.

“For life sciences investors, 2011 started with quite a bit of optimism, with six IPOs in Q1 and a nice bump in Q2 investment,” said Nina Kjellson, a general partner in the Menlo Park, CA office of InterWest Partners. “But we’re now returning to … Next Page »

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It’s not often that soil and mulch makes the front page of Xconomy. But this is Harvest Power we’re talking about.

The Waltham, MA-based cleantech company, which has operations in Seattle and Vancouver, BC, said today it has acquired Coastal Supply, a Delaware-based soil and mulch manufacturer. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But Harvest CEO Paul Sellew said in a statement that the acquisition will “have an immediate positive impact on our business.”

Harvest Power started in 2008 and specializes in converting organic waste into soil products and renewable fuel. The company is backed by a number of big investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Waste Management, DAG Ventures, and Generation Investment Management (which was co-founded by Al Gore). It has raised more than $75 million to date.

Coastal Supply’s big customers include Lowe’s and Home Depot. Joe Kollock and Steve Liffers will stay on as co-presidents of Coastal Supply, which is being renamed Harvest Garden Pro.

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Lebanon, NH-based biofuels company Mascoma Corporation has tapped a new $50 million convertible debt financing for $6.9 million, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 18. Thirty investors participated in the financing, including Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst Partners and Jim Matheson from Flagship Ventures.

Mascoma announced in January that it had inked a non-binding agreement with oil firm Valero Energy Corporation to invest up to $50 million in its cellulosic ethanol plant in Kinross Township, MI. Frontier Renewable Resources, the joint venture of Mascoma and its Michigan-based partner J.M. Longyear created to operate the biorefinery, announced in July that it had obtained a permit from the state of Michigan to build the cellulosic ethanol plant with a biomass boiler with the capacity of producing up to 40 million gallons per year.

Frontier’s CEO Steve Hicks says the company expects to break ground on the plant this year and to be fully operational by 2013.

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Even before global markets reacted to the U.S. credit downgrade, IPOs for cleantech companies have been relatively few and far between. Still, the IPO data for the first half of 2011 reveals the kinds of alternative energy and green technology companies are going public—a good indication of which sectors are more likely to attract more venture funding in the future.

Altogether, 11 cleantech companies around the world made their public debuts during the second quarter that ended in June, raising $1.99 billion, according to data from the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group. (Six of those were Chinese IPOs in Asian markets that raised a total of $1.37 billion.)

Several IPO watchers characterized it as a strong quarter that’s more comparable to the first quarter of this year, when the Cleantech Group found that nine IPOs raised more than $2 billion, than to the previous year, which was distorted by several huge IPOs in the second quarter. (A list of the 20 cleantech IPOs so far this year is at the end of this story.)

Three U.S. cleantech companies went public during the second quarter that ended June 30, and two were biofuels companies: South San Francisco, CA-based Solazyme (NASDAQ: SZYM) raised a total of roughly $227 million (including over-allotments) before the Memorial Holiday weekend. Pasadena, TX-based KiOR (NASDAQ: KIOR) raised $150 million in late June. The third company to go public, Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar NASDAQ ZIP), raised $174 million in its April debut.

Zipcar also serves as an example of the inherent challenge in categorizing cleantech companies. While Zipcar ostensibly operates vehicles as part of a nationwide car-sharing service, the Cleantech Group counts Zipcar as a cleantech company because the company says each car shared takes 15 personally owned vehicles off the road, reducing overall gasoline consumption and lowering CO2 emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons each year. Some IPO watchers, however, don’t include Zipcar in their IPO tallies.

Including Gevo (NASDAQ: GEVO), a Denver-area renewable chemicals and advanced biofuels company that raised … Next Page »

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Tomorrow the New York Academy of Sciences will be home to New York’s first ever Energy Infotech Forum—a full-day event for entrepreneurs who are developing cleantech applications and the investors who want to support them. The day will feature expert speakers, as well as presentations from nine New York-based cleantech startups.

For the event’s host, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the conference marks a full-scale effort to close a gap in New York’s cleantech economy. “We have one of the largest IT industry clusters in the U.S.,” says Michael Shimazu, senior project manager for NYSERDA. “We have significant challenges that create a market for renewable energy, smart grid applications, and a broad range of other energy products. And we have financial resources. But we need to convene those communities to pull it all together.”

The Energy Infotech Forum will feature some of the city’s best-known cleantech executives. Speakers include Jane Snowdon, a senior manager at IBM’s Industry Solutions and Emerging Business department, Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO of Brooklyn-based cleantech startup Energy Hub, and several Con Edison executives.

The centerpiece of the event will be the presentations by the cleantech entrepreneurs. Shimazu says each company will be given two minutes to give its … Next Page »

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The corporate controller at San Diego’s Sapphire Energy was killed earlier this week when an out-of-control sport-utility vehicle swerved into a bike path while he was bicycling home from work. A close friend told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Poway, CA-resident Nick Venuto, 40, was an avid bicyclist and married father of two. Venuto was pedaling home from work on a bike path along State Route 56 Tuesday evening when he was struck by a Ford Escape driven by 27-year-old Sheena Saranita after she lost control of her vehicle. Another bicylist, Baron Herdelin-Doherty also was hit, and was taken to Scripps Memorial Hospital in critical condition.

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Sun Catalytix, a Cambridge, MA-based energy storage and renewable fuels startup, said today it has added Mike Decelle as its new president and chief executive. Decelle is a photonics industry veteran who was mostly recently CEO of LumenZ, a Boston-based LED technology company that was reported by the Boston Globe to be shut down earlier this spring. Sun Catalytix raised a $9.5 million Series B round last October, which was led by Tata and included Polaris Venture Partners.

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The big news this week, if it happens, will be the Active Network’s IPO. But we’ve also rounded up all the other important developments from San Diego’s tech community, and our briefing begins now.

—The San Diego-based Active Network could have a market valuation that is close to $1 billion if its IPO takes place this week as expected, according to Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, CT-based investment banking firm that tracks IPO activity. The Active Network is seeking to sell about 8.2 million shares, and could raise about $127 million (after fees) at $17 a share, which is the mid-point of the price range set two weeks ago. With almost 53 million shares outstanding, that would set the company’s market cap at over $900 million. Shares of the Active Network, which provides online registration services for recreational sports and other activities, will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ACTV.

—King of Prussia, PA-based InterDigital (NASDAQ: IDCC), which develops innovations in wireless technologies, has opened an R&D center in San Diego. The new facility, which has about 12 employees, is focused on advances that improve the capacity of wireless networks. InterDigital holds about 1,300 U.S. patents and about 7,500 non-U.S. patents related to technologies that enable wireless communications.

—Aptera Motors, which has been developing a three-wheel hybrid electric and electric vehicle, says it is moving its headquarters from Oceanside, CA to Carlsbad, CA as part of a strategic update over the coming six months. In its newsletter to prospective customers, Aptera says the company also “has been exploring the impact of consolidating our production facility plans, from two lower volume plants (one in North San Diego County and one proposed elsewhere in the U.S.), into one higher volume facility outside of California.”

—Privately held General Atomics, a diversified industrial technology conglomerate and defense contractor in San Diego, said … Next Page »

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San Diego Gas & Electric has added two more 25-year contracts with French-based Soitec, which will supply a total of 125 megawatts from solar energy sites using Soitec’s Concentrix CPV (Concentrating Photo-Voltaic solar panel modules.

In a statement today, the two companies say Soitec Solar Development will manufacture the modules in a new factory to be built in San Diego. The two local agreements follow three previous contracts for 30 megawatts of CPV-generated solar power. All five local projects, with a combined total of 155 megawatts, will be built in San Diego County near SDG&E electric substations. The California Public Utilities Commission still must approve the proposed power contracts.

As I reported last month, Soitec also has been working with Tenaska Solar Ventures to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant in the desert east of San Diego. The French semiconductor manufacturer says its concentrating photovoltatic technology converts sunlight into electric power at better than 37 percent efficiency for direct current, or at roughly 25 percent for alternating current.

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San Diego algae biofuels developer Sapphire Energy said today it has signed a multi-year agreement with the Linde Group of Munich, Germany, to co-develop a low-cost system for supplying carbon dioxide to commercial-scale, open-pond, algae-to-fuel cultivation systems. Linde, the leading commercial supplier of carbon dioxide in the United States, agreed to deliver carbon dioxide to Sapphire’s commercial demonstration facility near Columbus, NM, and to work with Sapphire to reduce the costs associated with re-purposing manmade carbon dioxide for commercial-scale open pond algae cultivation.

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Another survey on venture capital activity during the first quarter shows that venture investors put $6.4 billion into 661 startups nationwide. That’s a 35 percent increase in capital and a 5 percent rise in deals, according to the report from Dow Jones VentureSource.

It’s the third survey to show a substantial increase in the amount of money invested during the first quarter, while the number of deals stayed relatively constant or declined.

Big investments in capital-intensive industries, such as renewable energy, healthcare, and information technology, accounted for much of the increase, according to Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource. The Dow Jones data also showed:

—Capital invested in venture-backed healthcare companies increased by 21 percent compared to the same quarter last year, but the deal count declined by 6 percent, with $1.6 billion going into 148 deals. As usual, most of that went to venture-backed biopharmaceuticals, which raised $849 million for 61 deals, a 15 percent rise in capital invested and a 13 percent decline in deals.

—Information technology companies raised $1.6 billion for 212 deals nationwide. That was a 16 percent increase in capital invested capital and a 10 percent gain in deals compared to the same quarter last year. Software companies closed 152 deals for $741 million, a 24 percent increase in deals and a 10 increase in capital invested.

—The energy and utilities industry raised $742 million for 33 deals, almost double the capital raised during the same period last year. Six renewable energy companies raised rounds of $50 million or larger, and two of those represented rounds of at least $100 million.

—Seed-stage and Series A rounds accounted for 38 percent of the deals and 16 percent of the capital that was invested during the first quarter. Later-stage deals accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s deals and 64 percent of total capital raised in the first quarter.

The numbers from Dow Jones follow the MoneyTree Report, which found that VCs invested $5.9 billion in 736 deals during the first three months of 2011. When compared to the same quarter in 2010, the MoneyTree Report showed a 13.7 percent increase in capital and a 6.4 decline in the number of deals.

We also reported data from CB Insights, a New York financial data provider, which said venture investments amounted to $7.5 billion during the first quarter (a 27 percent increase over the first quarter of 2010). CB Insights counted 738 deals throughout the country during the first quarter, which was not a significant change over the deal count in the same quarter of 2010.

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The French semiconductor manufacturer Soitec generated headlines in San Diego last month when it said it has been working with Tenaska Solar Ventures to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant in the desert east of San Diego—at an estimated cost of $500 million.

To support the project Soitec also revealed plans to build a factory somewhere in San Diego County to manufacture the proprietary solar panels that will be used to generate enough electricity for an estimated 55,000 households in the San Diego area.

Yesterday, Soitec Chairman and CEO André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé returned to San Diego with what he calls “a California story, but from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.” He briefed local reporters about the project, which needs a federal loan guarantee to secure financing, and later met with local officials to garner their support.

Soitec says its Concentrix Solar CPV (concentrating photovoltatic) technology converts sunlight into electric power at better than 37 percent efficiency for direct current, or at roughly 25 percent for alternating current. With some additional advances, Auberton-Hervé says the company’s technology should enable Soitec to increase the energy output of its solar modules to an unprecedented 50 percent DC efficiency in coming years.

As part of Soitec’s broader corporate strategy, Auberton-Hervé says the company’s Concentrix Solar division has worked with Chevron to complete construction of a 1-megawatt solar facility north of Taos, in Questa, NM. Auberton-Hervé says the facility, which has 173 Concentrix Solar panels that track the sun to maximize energy production, represents Soitec’s first “utility scale” project in the United States—and the first in a series of solar ventures the company aspires to develop. At least 30 states have established minimum requirements for renewable energy (California recently enacted a requirement for 33 percent renewable energy by 2020), making the U.S. an attractive market, especially in the sunbelt states, according to Auberton-Hervé.

André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé

Auberton-Hervé co-founded Soitec in 1992 with Jean-Michel Lamure to commercialize so-called “atomic scalpel” technology that is used to create multiple, ultra-thin layers in the silicon wafers used to make semiconductors. The technology led them to develop Silicon-On-Insulator (the “SOI” in Soitec) material, which has helped semiconductor makers create faster and more powerful processors by shrinking the distance between microcircuit patterns from 180 nanometers to less than 45 nanometers.

Soitec has grown from four employees in 1992 into a public company and global player in the semiconductor industry, with about 1,200 employees and a market valuation equivalent to roughly $1.4 billion, Auberton-Hervé says.

The CEO says Soitec’s solar strategy began to emerge in 2003, when … Next Page »

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Venture capital investments surged during the first three months of 2011, driven mostly by sharply increased funding for Internet and cleantech-renewable energy startups, according to CB Insights, a New York information and data services firm.

Venture investors sunk a total of $7.5 billion into 738 deals throughout the country during the first quarter, a 27 percent increase in dollars (with no significant change in deals) over the same quarter of 2010, when CB Insights reported $5.9 million in 730 deals. The $7.5 billion invested also was 15 percent higher than the $6.5 billion that went into 735 deals during the preceding quarter—which represented a two-year high water mark in both deals and dollars invested.

CB Insights says the consecutive quarterly increase in funding levels and deal flow is back to “pre-recession levels,” but left it to others to decide whether that represents a return to normalcy or an untenable VC investment bubble. The firm says most of the increase was due to substantial increases in funding levels for Internet companies and in the cleantech-renewable energy sector.

First-quarter venture funding for Internet startups amounted to $2.3 billion in 286 deals. That was an 83 percent increase in capital and a 29 percent increase in deals over the first quarter of 2010, when VCs put almost $1.3 billion in 221 deals. For reasons I still don’t understand, CB Insights split Chicago-based Groupon’s $900 million financing in December into two parts, counting half during the fourth quarter of last year and the other half in the first quarter of this year. Other notable Internet deals include $70 million for AppSense (based in the U.K. and New York) and $53.6 million for Indianapolis, IN-based Angie’s List.

In the cleantech and renewable energy sector, more than $1.9 billion was invested in 86 deals during the quarter. That was a 46 percent increase in dollars over the first quarter of 2010 (with no change in deals), when $1.3 billion flowed to 85 companies. Some notable deals: Almost $202 million for Oakland, CA-based BrightSource Energy, $150 million for Irvine, CA-based Fisker Automotive, and almost $52 million for Waltham, MA-based Harvest Power.

California—especially Northern California—continues to … Next Page »

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