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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EnVerv, a chip design firm based in San Jose, CA, says this morning it has raised $12 million in a Series B round for its “system-on-a-chip” technology, which enables a utility to use its own power lines to serve as a smart grid communications network.

Benchmark Capital led the new round, which was joined by existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Walden International. The proceeds will go toward further development and working capital.

Reza Mirkhani, the company’s San Diego-based founder, is now EnVerv’s president and chief operating officer. Since I talked with Mirkhani about EnVerv and its strategy earlier this year, EnVerv’s executive chairman, Shahin Hedayat, the former co-founder and CEO of Santa Clara, CA-based Beceem Communiations, has stepped in as CEO. (Irvine, CA-based Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) acquired Beceem for more than $310 million in October 2010.)

EnVerv continues to maintain a San Diego office and also has established an office in China.

The fabless semiconductor company says it has developed and delivered a range of high-performance power line communication (PLC) modems for utility smart meters, PLC head-end modems, display modems, smart homes, solar panel control and monitoring, and other applications. In recent months, EnVerv says it has been field testing its products in cooperation with its customers and utilities.

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Some Silicon Valley CEOs moonlight as racecar drivers, others as winemakers. Gary Bloom, the outgoing CEO of San Mateo, CA-based eMeter, is probably the only one who spends his off hours as an emergency-response volunteer.

Bloom trained a Menlo Park, CA-based FEMA disaster team that helped with the federal responses to Hurricanes Ivan and Gustav. And as the leader of the San Mateo County sheriff’s rescue team, he directed search operations after the PG&E natural-gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, CA, last September. But the pipeline disaster, which leveled an entire neighborhood, “was not the normal kind of search and rescue,” Bloom says. “It’s usually lost hikers in the mountains, or Alzheimer’s victims.”

Now Bloom has pulled off a rescue of sorts for his own company. Siemens Industry (NYSE: SI), the Atlanta-based U.S. wing of the German electrical and engineering giant, announced yesterday that it’s acquiring eMeter in a deal expected to close this month, just 20 months after eMeter’s board brought Bloom in to give the smart-grid startup the enterprise-software credentials it needed to compete.

Outgoing eMeter CEO Gary Bloom

The companies aren’t disclosing the financial details of the acquisition. But it’s likely that eMeter’s investors—who include Sequoia Capital, Foundation Capital, Northgate Capital, and DBL Investors, and who had together poured roughly $70 million into the company over 11 years—are breathing a sigh of relief. “It’s a positive outcome for the shareholders and the employees,” says Kyle Arteaga, eMeter’s global head of corporate communications. “Everyone is going to see a return on their investment, which isn’t always the case in cleantech. I think everyone is quite happy.”

EMeter’s entire 175-person workforce will be joining Siemens, with the exception of Bloom himself, who says he will step down as soon as the deal closes. That’s not a total surprise, given his history as CEO of Veritas Software and as a high-level executive at Oracle and Symantec. “Gary has the DNA of a CEO, not a division leader,” says Arteaga. “He completed the task he was invited to do.”

That task was a formidable one. It was to take eMeter, an aging startup with its roots in the utility and telecommunications industries, and make it into a company that could compete with the likes of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Itron (NASDAQ: ITRI) when it comes to selling utilities the software they need to make sense of data from the growing number of smart meters at commercial and residential sites.

“The founders [Cree Edwards and Larsh Johnson] have an unbelievable amount of smart-meter and utility experience, but if you walked down the halls of the company, nobody had enterprise software experience,” says Arteaga. “Gary started bringing in new executives and partners in sales, marketing, business development, and product management who all had enterprise experience, and we really started operating like an enterprise software company. When we did that, we doubled our customer base, our deals became more profitable, and the company was worth more.”

The Siemens acquisition offer wasn’t the first one eMeter had received—but it was “the first time that it presented enough of a value to the shareholders that it was taken seriously,” says Arteaga, who attributes the larger offers to Bloom’s leadership.

I met with Bloom back in August and talked with him about the company’s technology and the personal challenges of making the switch from the business software industry to cleantech. Though the interview took place well before an acquisition was in the air, we hit on many of the themes that likely made eMeter an attractive purchase for Siemens. An edited writeup of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: Why did the eMeter board hire you?

Gary Bloom: I think they hired me for my ability to run a company. We are selling to a big industry, and we have to operate like a big company to service that industry. I have big-company experience. This is the smallest thing I’ve run, shy of the Menlo Park fire and disaster team for a year.

X: What struck you most, when you arrived at eMeter?

GB: What I saw coming in here is one of the last two industries in the world that has not transformed itself with technology. I lived through the telecom transformation and I watched Wall Street adopt electronic trading systems, but if you look at healthcare and the utility industry, those two haven’t transformed themselves at all, and the common denominator is … Next Page »

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Things aren’t looking so sunny for Tyngsboro, MA-based Beacon Power (NASDAQ: BCON) and Devens, MA-based American Superconductor (NASDAQ: AMSC), a couple of prominent public companies in the cleantech sector.

—Beacon Power, a flywheel energy storage company, filed documents seeking Ch. 11 bankruptcy protection. The move has shone some negative light on the U.S. Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, which two years ago provided the cleantech company with a $43 million loan guarantee, as financing for an energy storage facility Beacon planned to build in New York. Just two months ago, DOE-backed solar panel maker Solyndra, based in California, filed for bankruptcy, a move that has seen some serious political fallout. The Beacon deal has some differences though, according to a Department of Energy spokesman, Reuters reports. The Beacon plant is continuing to operate despite the bankruptcy filing, and the government loan is the first debt Beacon is responsible for paying.

—Renewable energy technology company American Superconductor backed out of plans to acquire Finnish firm The Switch Engineering for about $265 million cash. The deal fell through because of “adverse market conditions for a financing required to fund the acquisition,” according to the company announcement. Shareholders of The Switch, a maker of magnet generator and power converter products, will retain the roughly $20.6 million upfront payment from American Superconductor. The news paints an even bleaker picture for American Superconductor, which less than three months ago revealed its plans to cut 30 percent of its workforce (about 150 people) and take other measures to improve its finances.

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Plastic, oil, natural gas, paper, solar panels, analytics, semiconductors, blimps, mobile phones, wind turbines, smart grid. These were some of the words tossed around by the six teams presenting at last night’s Cleantech Open Northeast Regional Finals. Three companies were selected to go on and compete in the Cleantech Open Global Forum in California next month. Interestingly, a few of the semifinalists are also part of the local startup program MassChallenge, which like the Cleantech Open, models itself as a startup accelerator and mentoring program with a business plan competition tucked into it.

Can you guess which of the words above apply to the three winning teams below? Take a look and see if you were right.

—PK Clean (a MassChallenge 2011 finalist) is “converting mountains of trash into barrels of oil.” The company has developed and tested a process that converts plastic waste into oil, using a proprietary catalyst. PK’s CEO Priyanka Bakaya, an MIT Sloan MBA, says the 45 million tons of plastic occupying landfills per year can be turned into about 9 billion gallons of oil (representing 25 percent of annual U.S. auto consumption). The company has already tested the tech at a pilot facility in India and is targeting the metal recycling industry as its first customers. After taking apart old cars, metal recyclers are left with plastic remnants that they have to pay to get landfilled. PK will take that away for free to turn into oil. There’s other competition in the field, namely from Portland, OR-based Agilyx (which recently raised $22 million in venture funding), but Bakaya says PK’s catalyst and cheaper process give it an edge.

—Qado Energy, a smart grid analytics startup, was the big IT play in the bunch. While maybe not as sexy as turning plastic to oil or printing invisible solar panels on paper (seriously), it’s aiming to solve a big problem for utilities and energy developers: accurately predicting the distribution and effect of new cleantech sources plugging into the grid. As co-founder Lorraine Wheeler explained, when wind or solar developers want to add their technology to the energy distribution grid, utilities have to perform studies analyzing the impact of the new tech on the grid, and produce a list of needed upgrades that the developer must pay for. Qado’s technology is designed to make this planning process more accurate and efficient, with software that pulls in utilities’ data from different sources and converts it to a standard format. From there, the potential effect on the grid can be modeled and analyzed in displays for utilities, regulators, and energy developers.

—Last up was fabless semiconductor developer Arctic Sand. The company is making smaller, more efficient power converter chips designed to cut down on the electricity needed to run traditional data centers. The company, whose team comes from MIT and Harvard, aims to design the chips for other applications like powering mobile phones and hopes to get its tech to the market through licensing deals with existing computing players, says CEO Nadia Shalaby. Arctic Sand was also a participant in MassChallenge earlier this year.

There were some familiar faces among the other three semifinalists. OsComp Systems—developers of a more efficient natural gas compressor—took home a check from MassChallenge last year and presented at our XSITE Xpo this year. Altaeros Energies also talked about its blimp-hoisted wind turbines at our Xpo. The last Cleantech Open Northeast semifinalist, Ubiquitous Energy, is working on the aforementioned printable solar photovoltaic cells for paper and fabric. The cells are designed to power mobile phones for owners in areas that aren’t even plugged into the power grid, and even further down the line, could enable dynamic displays on surfaces like cereal boxes (think digital display expiration dates). We’ll still have to keep an eye out for those teams.

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Plenty of New England startups across IT and biotech sectors inked investments from area venture capitalists this week.

—Interactions, a speech and customer service technology developer of Franklin, MA, nabbed $12 million in a deal led by Sigma Partners. Interactions said it will use the money—which also comes from North Hill Ventures, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, and Updata Partners—to support its customer base, expand its market presence, and invest in new technology.

—Natick, MA-based medical device developer Boston Scientific (NASDAQ:BSX) revealed its plans to repurchase about $1 billion in common stock. The announcement came alongside other details from its Q2 earnings report.

—Stealthy Nashua, NH-based networking startup Plexxi pulled in $20 million in a Series B round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing backers Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners also put money into the round, which brings Plexxi’s funding total to $28 million.

—Boston-based online data backup firm Carbonite indicated in an SEC filing that it plans to raise as much as $122.2 million in an initial public offering, up from the $100 million it first estimated in May. The company expects to sell 6.25 million shares, plus 937,500 additional shares for underwriters (as an option), at $15 to $17 per share.

—Pathogenetix, a Woburn, MA-based firm developing biodefense and diagnostic technologies, snapped up $4 million of a potential $9.5 million equity round, according to an SEC filing.

—Beacon Endoscopic of Newton, MA, inked a $5 million Series B financing from Boston- and London-based MVM Life Science Partners. The medical device startup also said it took in new money from existing angel investors.

—Newton-based Ambient, which makes technology for utilities to run smart grid applications, is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq today under the symbol “AMBT.” It previously traded on the OTC Bulletin Board.

—Knome, a Cambridge, MA-based personal genomics company, pinned down $5 million of a targeted $20 million equity offering.

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Newton, MA-based Ambient (OTC: ABTGD), a maker of technology for smart grid connectivity and communications, expects to start trading tomorrow on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol “AMBT,” the company announced today. It will continue to trade today under its current symbol on the OTC Bulletin Board.

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Cambridge, MA-based Gridco has raised $12.5 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The form lists venture capitalists Ric Fulop of North Bridge Venture Partners and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst Partners as the company’s directors, along with Naimish Patel, formerly of Sycamore Networks. Back in May, the Boston Globe reported that North Bridge and General Catalyst were backing Gridco, a new startup focused on smarter power management technology for utilities and industrial power consumers.

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San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless, which has been on quite a romp over the past year or so, recently raised $11.5 million of a planned $14.7 million round from investors, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The investors were not disclosed in the filing.

On-Ramp, which was founded in 2008 to develop low-power wireless networking technology for smart grid and other utility-scale applications, previously raised at least $16.5 million.

Last week, the company also landed an undisclosed dollop from a $63 million pool that GE and four VC firms awarded to 10 cleantech companies as part of the “GE ecoimagination Challenge.” The U.S. Department of Energy awarded On-Ramp a $2.1 million grant in November as part of an initiative to help modernize the nation’s electric grid infrastructure.

On-Ramp also has been drawing increased attention. MIT’s Technology Review (popular among techies) profiled the company this week, and in December, CEO Joaquin Silva gave a presentation at Xconomy’s very own “5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas” in Boston.

And then there was the recognition that On-Ramp got last September from no less than the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, which named On-Ramp to its 2011 global list of “technology pioneers.”

On-Ramp’s wireless network technology uses the same frequency as Wi-Fi, but the system operates with much less power, using advanced algorithms to filter extraneous radio interference and keep the network locked onto its own signals. It sounds a bit like modern Astronomy.  On-Ramp says its “Ultra-Link Processing” technology transmits data at a trickle, just 50 bits a second compared to 5 million bits for a Wi-Fi Internet connection. But the system can collect sensor data from an underground utility vault, and is capable of transmitting its signals 45 miles. The company told Tech Review a trial network in San Diego County requires just 35 strategically located access points across a 4,000-square-mile area to collect data from smart meters and other sensors.

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Fairfield, CT-based GE (NYSE: GE) and four venture capital partners said today they plan to invest a total of $63 million in 10 cleantech companies developing energy-related concepts in solar, communications and software, and building efficiency.

The funding represents the second phase of a crowd-sourcing challenge, this time focused on “Powering Your Home,” that GE launched in January with four venture capital firms, Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Rockport Capital. With today’s announcement, the partners funding a $200 million pool for the “GE ecoimagination Challenge” have so far committed to invest $134 million in companies developing advances in home energy and power grid technologies

The recepients include cleantech companies in three Xconomy cities: Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. GE says its challenge has resulted in a total of 22 new commercial partnerships, as well as the acquisition of FMC-Tech, a smart grid technology company in Shannon, Ireland, that was among 12 companies that received funding in the first-round awards announced last year.

The amount of funding invested in individual companies was not disclosed. The companies are:

Ember, Boston, MA (Communications and software)

GMZ Energy, Waltham, MA (solar systems and services; co-investment with KPCB)

Hara, San Mateo, CA (Communications and software; co-investment with KPCB)

Nuventix, Austin, TX (Building efficiency)

On-Ramp Wireless, San Diego, CA (Communications and software)

Project Frog, San Francisco, CA (Building efficiency; co-investment with RockPort Capital)

SunRun, San Francisco, CA (Residential solar systems and services; co-investment with Foundation Capital)

Viridity Energy, Conshohocken, PA (Communications and software)

VPhase, Manchester, UK (Building efficiency)

WiTricity, Watertown, MA (Communications and software)

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During a panel discussion with three cleantech investors at the Energy Infotech Forum in New York City yesterday, an audience member posed a provocative question: “What won’t you invest in?” he asked. Scott DePasquale, a partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, responded “consumer space travel.”

DePasquale was only half kidding. Ever since Braemar was founded in New York in 2003, it has invested in virtually every corner of the energy sector. “We don’t fashion ourselves as a cleantech fund,” DePasquale said during a sit-down interview at the conference. “We’re an energy venture capital firm. We invest in cleantech and renewables, but we’re also investing in any technologies that can help extract oil and gas more efficiently and in a cleaner way.” DePasquale works in Braemar’s Boston office, which opened in 2007.

Braemar, which is in the process of raising money for its third fund, has a portfolio of more than 25 investments. They run the gamut from Cerion Energy, which makes a fuel-based additive that reduces emissions, to Convey Computer, which has developed a technology to make high-performance computers run faster with less energy. Braemar also has investments in smart grid, energy storage, lighting, clean coal, solar, and biofuel technology companies.

The firm’s co-founders bring a wealth of experience and perspective to energy investing, DePasquale says. Neil Suslak has experience as an investment banker in the energy, communications, and transportations sectors. George Reichenbach ran two divisions of the industrial-products maker Norton Company. And William Lese worked for NPS Industries, which made equipment for the power industry, and Vivendi affiliate Sithe Energies, an independent power producer. “What’s unique about us is our founders have a really good sense of what it means to scale technology solutions around the utility customer,” says DePasquale, who was a vice president at GE Energy Financial Services before joining Braemar in 2009.

Braemar’s first fund made just north of $50 million in investments. An early bet on EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC)—a cleantech firm that pulled off a $98 million initial public offering in 2007—helped Braemar launch a second fund with a total of $250 million to invest. And according to a May regulatory filing, Braemar is now in the process of raising $300 million for the third fund.

DePasquale makes a strong case that there’s rarely been a better time for energy entrepreneurs with good ideas to raise capital. Quoting figures from the National Venture Capital Association, he points out that cleantech companies 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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San Diego-based Proximetry, which I profiled last summer, today named Andres Carvello as executive vice president and chief strategy officer. In its statement today, Proximetry says Carvello was previously the chief information officer at Austin Energy and chief architect of the first fully deployed smart grid in the United States. He will be responsible for setting Proximetry’s technology strategy in electricity, oil and gas markets, public safety, telecommunications, and transportation industries.

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San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless says it has formed a partnership with Sacramento, CA-based GridSense that will combine On-Ramp’s low-power wireless networking technology with GridSense’s TransformerIQ technology. In a statement today, the companies say that combining their technologies will enable electric utilities to monitor their distribution networks at a lower cost, improve outage restoration, and improve demand-side load management.

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Braemar Energy Ventures, which has offices in New York and Boston, plans to raise $300 million for a new fund, according to an SEC filing. Braemar focuses on energy technology and is invested in more than 25 companies in the fields of oil and gas, lighting, solar, clean coal, biofuels, smart grid, and more. Its current investments include South San Francisco-based Solazyme, a company that’s making clean energy from algae and other marine microorganisms and that recently filed for an initial public offering.

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Michigan may have potential in medical devices and software but in the end, the state’s high tech future, for better for worse, is really tied to cleantech.

For one thing, it offers the most natural and logical extension of Michigan’s core expertise in automobiles/manufacturing, experts say. Think lithium batteries, electric cars, next generation engines equipped with software that smartly manages energy consumption.

“I think Michigan has a great chance at cleantech because it so tied with transportation,” says Chris Rizik, CEO and fund manager of Renaissance Venture Capital Fund in Ann Arbor, MI. Rizik is a featured panelist for Thursday’s Xconomy: Michigan 2031, a forum for the state’s best investors and entrepreneurs to envision the future of Michigan’s high tech economy and brainstorm ways to make that vision a reality.

But here’s what really pushes cleantech ahead of the pack: unlike medical devices and software, cleantech enjoys significant financial and institutional support from both Uncle Sam and Michigan’s top politicians.

Last fall, Watertown, M-based A123Systems opened a lithium battery plant in Livonia, MI, thanks a $249 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and $125 million in refundable tax credits from Michigan’s 21st Century Jobs Fund. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, along with then Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, attended the plant’s opening ceremony.

In 2009, Michigan established the Centers for Energy Excellence program, which provides $45 million over three years to fund technology commercialization and research between companies and universities and national laboratories.

Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and University of Michigan are hosting a conference exploring Michigan’s investments into manufacturing and clean energy.

“Though Michigan’s research infrastructure suffered during the deep recession that forced major cutbacks in the research funded by the auto industry, the state has leveraged local investment, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [federal stimulus] funding, and the strengths of its universities to begin rapidly rebuilding manufacturing by investing in new industries,” the DOE said on the conference website. “Many of these new investments are in clean energy, and the DOE is interested in learning from this natural experiment in rapid rebuilding of R&D and manufacturing capability.”

Not surprisingly, local cleantech startups attracting investor cash are developing auto-related technologies. Khosla Ventures, for example, is backing lithium ion battery maker Sakti3 in Ann Arbor, MI, and EcoMotors in Allen Park, MI, which is developing a more energy efficient engine. (Sakti3 CEO Ann Marie Sastry will be joining ups at Michigan 2031 as well.) General Motors has invested $5 million in wireless charging startup Powermat in Commerce Township, MI.

But is there more to Michigan cleantech than just greener cars? … Next Page »

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Recently I attended the Boston Smart Grid Forum, where some of the leading “smart grid” minds met to discuss the challenges and opportunities that currently exist. Ontario has been one of the investment leaders in smart grid technology, much of which is being developed through the University of Waterloo. There are a number of similarities between Ontario and the Boston-area energy ecosystem, as new technology developments come from close relationships between the universities and entrepreneurs to develop great technology in emerging markets. Here are some thoughts about the pilot programs currently running in Ontario and the opportunities that exist for similar programs in New England.

Through pilot programs and tests in communities in the Northeast U.S. and Canada, individual efficiency and renewable energy technologies continue to evolve, becoming more efficient and effective every day. Photovoltaic cells are getting more efficient, improving the value of solar panels. Wind turbines are transferring more energy from the blades to the electrical grid.

While significant investment has been focused in these areas, insufficient attention is being paid to the ways in which they can be operated to maximize the benefits across a broader “energy system.” For example, a lot of effort is being exerted in order to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells beyond the current levels. There is a big opportunity to increase the value of this existing technology if it were coupled with an energy storage technology so that energy could be stored now and discharged later, during peak demand times, reducing the strain on the overall system. In response to this need, the Province of Ontario, in conjunction with Energent, Hydro One, Ontario Power Authority, Milton Hydro, and the University of Waterloo, are developing the Energy Hub Management System (EHMS).

Energent has been working with utilities in Canada and the U.S. developing smart grid technology for consumers since 2007. In creating the backbone of EHMS, Energent has defined a “hub” as a single, static location, such as a home, manufacturing facility, farm, etc. The management system consists of three key elements. First, there are two-way controls on all energy-consuming and producing devices within the energy hub. These controls will have the capacity to record energy consumption/production, and to direct the operation of the individual device, such as a motor, compressor, or dishwasher.

The second element will be a central core module that consolidates the information from the devices, the external environment (weather, energy prices, etc.), and user-defined models to effectively manage energy.

Finally, the third element is a Web-based portal, which is the user-friendly interface between the energy hub’s managers and the core module technology. This information will also be available on mobile devices for the three major smartphone platforms. Using a local home network to connect the home to the grid, the EHMS provides an effective, integrated interface for both the energy consuming/producing devices within a single, static location. It will also receive, analyze, and act on system-wide information, not seen in most in-home technologies.

The transformational change that comes from this program is the … Next Page »

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Qualcomm announced a series of new technology initiatives just a few weeks ago, which CEO Paul Jacobs reviewed during the wireless chipmaker’s shareholder meeting last week. And we’ve got a review of San Diego’s biztech news for you here:

—Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ: QCOM) Paul Jacobs marked his fifth anniversary as CEO of the world’s largest wireless chipmaker at a shareholder meeting last week. In an upbeat overview of Qualcomm’s technology development and business performance, Jacobs said the migration of mobile users from 2G (where Qualcomm has relatively little technology) to 3G (where Qualcomm technology is pervasive) increased 380 percent, to about 1.2 billion subscribers, from 2003 to 2010.

—I interviewed UCSD professor James Fowler, who specializes in social networks and in understanding the differences between social networks in the real world and in cyberspace. He said that online social networks are particularly well-suited for conveying information, which is a different thing than the effects that real world networks play in changing behavior, such as persuading someone to stop smoking.

—Qualcomm’s William F. Davidson talked with me about what makes the wireless chipmaker different from computer processor manufacturers that have entered the market for smartphones and other mobile devices. Davidson said that while processor chipmakers boast about peak download speeds and gigahertz, Qualcomm focuses on power requirements, spectrum capacity, and integrating functions to work efficiently.

—San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies acquired Round Rock, TX-based Hodyon, which makes auxiliary power systems for trucks. Terms were not disclosed, but Fallbrook CEO Bill Klehm told me that buying Hodyon was “a perfect way to display our technology, save truckers money, and improve fuel economy.”

—San Diego Gas & Electric said a solar power plant now under contract to … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Grid2Home, a smart grid software developer, says it completed a second round of funding led by Granite Ventures that will enable the company to take its software into production to meet the demands of its growing customer base. The company did not disclose the amount of funding, but a regulatory filing yesterday shows Grid2Home raised almost $2.6 million of a planned $3.1 million in equity investments. Grid2Home’s software, provides two-way data communications from a meter to “smart” household appliances and electric vehicles.

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San Diego-based EDSA, which specializes in software analytics for complex electrical power systems, is changing its name to Power Analytics Corp. In a statement from the company, chairman and CEO Mark Acolese says, “the name Power Analytics reflects the enormous technological revolution that has occurred with the advent of our Paladin Live and Paladin SmartGrid platforms… not just for our company, but for the mission-critical community as well.”

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