Hidden amid the technology startups clamoring for attention in New York, which is packed with media, data, and social networking players, is an unlikely company more interested in vegetables than video sharing. Gotham Greens Farms is out to prove its resilience by cultivating crops on rooftops in a landscape dominated by bricks, mortar, and steel.

Gotham Greens is an unusual mix of clean technology and agricultural tech. The startup operates a computer-controlled, solar-powered 15,000-square-foot greenhouse on the roof of The Greenpoint Wood Exchange, an 80,000-square-foot building that houses furniture, cabinetry, and woodworking companies. The greenhouse functions year-round and yielded its first crops of herbs, lettuce, and salad greens last June. Viraj Puri, CEO and co-founder of Gotham Greens, plans to expand the operation this year. “We’d like to have at least one more greenhouse built, if not two, to at least double our current production,” he says.

The notion of growing plants along the skyline of New York is not completely unheard of. Some residents plant gardens on their roofs, and sections of the old West Side Line elevated railway were redeveloped into High Line Park. However, Gotham Greens is pursuing an ambitious plan to establish more greenhouse farms across the city.

Puri, who previously worked in project management for environmental engineering firms, says he is looking at potential sites in Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens for future … Next Page »

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A 48-percent uptick in new company formations, a funding deal, and two acquisitions made for an encouraging week in San Diego’s innovation economy. This is our roundup of tech sector news.

—The California Public Utilities Commission approved five power purchase agreements that Soitec, the photovoltaic chip maker based Bernin, France, negotiated with San Diego Gas and Electric. The five deals represent a total capacity of 155 megawatts of new solar power for San Diego, according to Soitec. As we explained in April, Soitec says its innovation, which combines concentrating Fresnel lenses and high-performance PV chips, operates twice as efficiently as conventional solar cells. Soitec plans to manufacture its solar modules in the San Diego area, creating about 450 new jobs. Building the solar facility will cost an estimated $500 million.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired HaloIPT, a UK-based startup developing wireless charging technology for electric vehicles. Financial terms were not disclosed. The technology uses inductive power transfer to charge an electric vehicle (EV). The car parks over an electromagnet, which generates an electric field that transfers energy to the EV power system. A couple days after announcing the deal, Qualcomm said it’s planning to carry out a field trial in London that calls for establishing the wireless EV charging systems for 50 vehicles.

—Cubic (NYSE: CUB), the San Diego defense contractor, conducted a series of local exercises to demonstrate new “combat ID” technology, which is intended to reduce friendly fire casualties among U.S. troops in combat. The technology integrates laser targeting with radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) and a GPS-based system in a rifle-mounted targeting scope, according to Cubic. The RFID tag, mounted on each soldier’s helmet, transits a coded radio signal that enables users to distinguish between friend and foe combatants.

—The San Diego-based Active Network (NYSE: ACTV) paid $21.5 million to acquire RTP (also known as Resort Technology Partners), a specialized IT company in Colorado that provides online reservation and registration services for Vail and other ski resorts. The Active Network already provides Web-based registration services for … Next Page »

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In a very difficult climate for U.S. solar companies, one Boston-area startup has made some significant progress in solar technology. SiOnyx, a Beverly, MA-based semiconductor company known for its “black silicon” approach to various applications, including solar cells, is reporting today that it has achieved an overall efficiency that is higher than the current industry standard, and more uniform from cell to cell—and that this result should have commercial impact soon.

“We have a solar program that’s starting to have tremendous results,” says James Carey, the company’s co-founder and principal scientist.

When we last caught up with SiOnyx almost exactly a year ago, the company had just closed $12.5 million in second-round venture financing. (Its investors include Polaris Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Vulcan Capital.) The firm’s black silicon technique involves peppering silicon wafers with ultrafast laser pulses to roughen their surface, such that they become more efficient at absorbing near-infrared light.

That means a solar cell made with the technique will absorb more light and, in principle, produce more electricity than one made of conventional silicon. But until now, the company hadn’t proven this to be the case in a manufacturing setting. In partnership with German research institute and chip foundry ISC Konstanz, SiOnyx has demonstrated an improvement of 0.3 percent in absolute efficiency—the ratio of electrical energy out to light energy in—over industry-standard silicon. (The cutting edge of conventional solar cells is just over 17 percent efficiency.)

Big deal? Well, it turns out that 0.3 percent represents roughly a year’s worth of progress in the traditional solar cell industry, says Chris Vineis, the company’s director of solar technology. “Existing solar cell manufacturers can take this [SiOnyx process], drop it into their line, and get an efficiency boost,” he says.

The SiOnyx technique is inserted in the early part of the conventional silicon wafer processing. The method substitutes lasers for chemicals in the initial texturing step, but the rest of the manufacturing process is untouched, Vineis says. The end result, he says, is slightly higher efficiency, potentially thinner wafers that use less silicon, and more uniform efficiency across wafers. Together, those factors could lead to savings of “several cents per watt,” Vineis says.

But it’s still early days for the company’s solar business. SiOnyx, which has nearly 30 employees and says it is still growing, is in initial conversations with potential solar customers. The idea is the company will license its black silicon process to solar cell manufacturers. “We’re not actually making solar cells, which is good for us,” Vineis says. “The industry is in a very tough spot.”

Solar is actually only a small part of the startup’s overall business, however. SiOnyx plans to make about 80 percent of its revenues on its image sensor products and 20 percent on its solar process, Carey says. The image sensor application, which I wrote about last year, uses the same black silicon technology to create fundamentally more sensitive cameras and other imaging equipment.

“We’re more than a one trick pony,” Carey says.

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Seattle-based 3Tier, the company that uses supercomputers to map the best spots in the world for setting up solar and wind energy projects, has found a way to put its tool in front of a lot more people with money to bankroll the work.

3Tier said today it has formed a partnership with Bloomberg New Energy Finance to offer what the companies call “the world’s first real-time, interactive wind asset valuation tool.” The new function on Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals will enable its subscribers to get current information on 3,400 wind projects around the world, with data on tariffs, local electricity market rates, inflation, cost of turbines, and available wind resources. Financial terms of the partnership aren’t being disclosed.

Bloomberg—the financial information and media powerhouse where yours truly happened to work before joining Xconomy—has been expanding its offerings beyond its traditional base in markets like those for stocks and bonds. 3Tier, founded in 1999, has long had its eye on providing its wind and solar information to folks at utilities, and big corporations who want to know what they’re getting into before they sink $100 million to $200 million in a big renewable energy project.

And, evidently, so do the financial types who help underwrite the work. The new data from 3Tier “permits robust scenario analysis based on best-of-breed wind and market data, without the need for privileged access to the project’s historic production data,” said Michael Grundmeyer, 3Tier’s vice president of business development, in a statement.

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One of South Korea’s largest conglomerates led a $50 million Series A financing for OneRoof Energy, a San Diego company with a leasing program that enables homeowners to install photovoltaic (PV) solar tiles on their roofs without paying upfront costs.

The company says Hanwha International, part of the Seoul-based Hanwha Group, is getting a “significant, non-controlling stake” in the San Diego company. The Hanwha Group operates 59 affiliated companies, including Hanwha SolarOne, a global solar manufacturing company. OneRoof says Hanwha’s equity investment will enable the company to fund its rapid-growth plan, which calls for developing the residential solar leasing market by working with local roofing contractors and homebuilders.

OneRoof said it also has closed on an unspecified fund to finance these residential solar projects with Black Coral Capital, a Boston-based cleantech investment firm, and a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp. “We’re excited about the company as we think their approach of working closely with roofers is the next big step forward in lowering the cost of residential solar,” Black Coral VP Nikhil Garg wrote in an e-mail to Xconomy Boston.

San Diego’s OneRoof says it’s focused on installing PV solar tiles during new home construction or replacement roofs. OneRoof finances the solar installation, arranging a power purchase agreement, so homeowners pay no upfront costs. Instead, they make monthly lease payments to OneRoof. A homeowner’s monthly solar PV lease payment— combined with the promise of a significantly reduced electric utility bill—is intended to be lower than the homeowner’s monthly utility bill prior to the PV solar installation.

The new venture, if successful, appears to provide a new channel for Hanwha SolarOne to sell its PV solar tiles into the American residential market.

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Here in Boston, September 1st brings about quite a bit of change: students migrating back into town, moving trucks and furniture in the streets, and street cleaners around my office (all cutting down on parking options, sorry to say).

We’ve weathered Tropical Storm Irene and a roller-coaster stock market, felt the mild rumblings of an East Coast earthquake (OK, most of us here didn’t), and are waiting to see how the Red Sox-Yankees series plays out tonight. And football season. Did I mention football season?

It’s also a time of change and opportunity in the tech-business community, as we look forward to a high season of events and news. Here are some quick hits:

—Joi Ito has officially started as the new director of the MIT Media Lab (he succeeds Frank Moss). In a blog post, Ito writes, “The awesome space that the Lab lives in, and the somewhat tricky issues around IP and confidentiality, have kept a lot of the great things going on at the Lab out of the public view. I’d really like to have the Media Lab be more involved in the conversation that is the global Internet, and to invite everyone to participate in what we do.”

—CSN Stores is now officially Wayfair.com. No surprise there, as the Boston e-retailer (think Amazon for the home) has rebranded its 200-plus sites under a unified name. Wayfair, which has long been profitable, recently raised its first round of outside funding, and it was a doozy: $165 million from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital. It sounds like a lot of the money will go towards marketing and building the new brand.

—A number of Boston-area companies are hiring up a storm in a seriously competitive job market. HubSpot is among the usual suspects, coming off its recent acquisitions of Performable and Oneforty. The company is 285 employees going on 2,085. (We’ll be keeping an eye on how it manages its growth and integrations.) Other firms looking to hire include Gemvara, PeerTransfer, and a bunch of TechStars Boston companies—plus giants like Verizon and Pfizer (both are setting up R&D beachheads in the Boston area). I’m guessing Google and ITA Software aren’t exactly sitting still in Kendall Square either.

—While on the topic of Kendall Square tech icons, I should mention that Akamai has formed a partnership with fellow Cambridge startup Happy Cloud to speed up software downloads via Akamai’s content delivery network—in particular, downloads of high-quality PC games. Happy Cloud came out of beta with its on-demand game store in July.

—In the “dead” category, consider U.S. solar panel startups. This week’s news about Solyndra, the Fremont, CA-based company that said it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, is another nail in the coffin. Solyndra raised nearly $1 billion in private equity financing (and borrowed $500 million-plus from the U.S. Department of Energy), making it one of the largest failures in venture capital history. Solyndra was backed in part by Boston and Silicon Valley-based RockPort Capital and a number of other firms, including Madrone Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.

The news comes on the heels of Evergreen Solar’s bankruptcy—which Black Coral Capital’s Rob Day says isn’t the end of the story for the Marlboro, MA-based firm. And last week’s bankruptcy filing by Intel-backed SpectraWatt, in upstate New York. The broader consensus seems to be that U.S. solar investors didn’t look out far enough on the cost curve and didn’t have deep enough pockets to keep supporting companies trying to compete with cheaper solar overseas. There are still big opportunities to innovate in solar, of course, but the investor climate is looking pretty dour.

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Lots of comings and goings in the Boston technology scene in the past week. Here’s a sampling of notable high-level moves:

—Michael Simon, founder and CEO of LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), has joined the board of Cambridge, MA-based HubSpot, the marketing tech company. Simon replaces former (and longtime) HubSpot board member Gail Goodman, the CEO of Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT). HubSpot chief Brian Halligan wrote in a blog post that Constant Contact’s social media tools “are starting to partially overlap with some of our stuff.” He adds that “the overlap is pretty minimal at this point and our target market is different, but it is close enough that we thought it would be prudent to part ways amicably.” (The board move has been brewing for a while, as Goodman indicated in a recent interview.)

—Ben Levitan, a former partner with In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies), joined Waltham, MA-based IMN, an e-marketing firm, as its new CEO as of July. In an e-mail statement, Levitan said he is “excited about returning to operating and to be a CEO again,” as well as participating in the “fast growing world of marketing and customer communications.” He previously served as CEO at EnvoyWorldWide (now Varolii) and James Martin & Co. Levitan spent four-plus years with In-Q-Tel (which he could tell you more about, but then he’d have to kill you).

—Doug Levin, the Black Duck Software founder and former CEO, has joined the board of the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation (MTDC), a Boston venture firm that’s state-owned and invests in Massachusetts companies across software, IT, digital media, health IT, and cleantech. MTDC’s portfolio includes Harvest Automation, OwnerIQ, Illume Software, uTest, Life Image, and Ze-gen. Levin, a former Microsoft exec, most recently founded Ayeah Games, a social gaming startup that closed down earlier this year.

—Daniel Matloff has joined Lexington, MA-based 1366 Technologies, the solar energy company, as its chief financial officer. Matloff was previously corporate controller for Hittite Microwave (NASDAQ: HITT), which he joined before its 2005 IPO. Before that he was with Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. So is 1366 looking to go public? Not just yet, especially given market conditions. But the company is looking to expand its solar-cell manufacturing business, said CEO Frank van Mierlo in a statement. So presumably it’s a good time to get its finances in order.

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An August 5 regulatory filing shows that Milpitas, CA-based NuvoSun, a maker of thin-film photovoltaic arrays, has added $8.6 million to a $3 million round first reported in January 2011. Past backers included Dow Chemical.

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A state initiative intended to facilitate technology commercialization by designating regional iHubs (or innovation hubs) has expanded San Diego’s iHub to include much of Southwest Riverside County. The California Governor’s Office of Economic Development established the San Diego iHub last year, enabling a local consortium to apply for federal economic stimulus funding in three focus areas: mobile health, biofuels, and solar energy and energy storage. Expanding San Diego’s iHub designation will expand the consortium and add the field of biomimicry as an additional focus area. San Diego and Riverside already have joined forces to collaborate on a grant application for the i6 Challenge, a $12 million federal competition intended to stimulate green technology development, new venture formation, jobs, and economic growth.

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One of the many tasks confronting the energy industry, if we’re to have any hope of sidestepping a climate catastrophe, is to dramatically increase the efficiency of photovoltaic cells, so that more of the sun’s energy can be converted into electricity. Sunnyvale, CA-based Innovalight has developed a material it calls “silicon ink” that’s helping in that regard—and solar panel manufacturers in China have been slurping it up. It’s such an attractive market that chemical giant DuPont (NYSE: DD) wants to get in. So it bought the company.

DuPont released the news this morning. The Wilmington, DE-based company’s materials are already used in about 70 percent of all photovoltaic panels manufactured around the world; for example, under the brand name Solamet, it makes the metal contact fingers that manufacturers place atop a photovoltaic panel’s crystalline silicon layer to collect the free electrons knocked loose by sunlight.

Innovalight’s silicon ink, which consists of tiny, extremely pure nanocrystals of silicon suspended in a solvent, is designed to be applied beneath those metal fingers; it gets into the crystalline silicon and acts as a doping agent, decreasing electrical resistance and allowing more electrons to make their way to the fingers. Which meant DuPont was already very familiar with the startup.

“DuPont has been working with Innovalight for four or five years from a supplier perspective, and in the last couple of years we’ve been growing closer together through product impact and business synergies,” says Rob Cockerill, the DuPont executive who has been named business manager of the new DuPont Innovalight division. “We’ve always been extremely impressed with Innovalight’s technology, so they were a natural fit for us in the photovoltaic space.”

DuPont didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition, but it said that all 58 current Innovalight employees, including former CEO Conrad Burke (pictured above), will stay on, and that the division will remain headquartered in Sunnyvale. Burke has been named general manager of the division.

Innovalight was founded in 2002 but long struggled to find a viable market for its silicon nanocrystal technology. Its first foray, into the lighting industry, fizzled. Burke, a former Sevin Rosen partner, restarted the company in 2005 (as we explained in an October 2010 profile of Innovalight). At first he intended to remake the firm as a photovoltaic manufacturer, but after low-cost solar plants in in China gained a huge lead in solar manufacturing, Innovalight reinvented itself as a materials supplier. The company announced the first two customers for its technology, Baoding-based Yingli Solar and Shanghai-based JA Solar, in 2010. It has collected just over $60 million in venture funding over the years from a large group of investors including Apax Partners, Arch Venture Partners, Convexa Capital, EDB Investments, Harris & Harris Group, Leader Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Silicon Valley Bank, Triton Ventures, and Vertex Venture Holdings.

As a part of DuPont, Innovalight will have much greater reach as it attempts to convince more panel makers to incorporate silicon ink into their manufacturing process, Burke says. “They are located, in terms of sales, marketing, and tech support, in all the key regions where our customers are,” Burke says. “The very large footprint that DuPont brings to the table is something we could only dream of building ourselves over a long period of time. Also, the unspoken message here is that this brings a lot of comfort to our customers—knowing we’ve got the backing of one of the giants in the industry.”

Cockerill says DuPont won’t immediately attempt to integrate the silicon ink technology into any of its own products. But he says there will be opportunities in the near future to tweak Innovalight’s material and the Solamet metallization technology in concert drive up panel efficiency. “One of the most interesting opportunities is that if you look at Innovalight’s roadmap for the next five, six, or seven generations, it’s an exact match to Solamet; they want to do the same things we do,” Cockerill says. “Together we believe we can make a huge impact with our customers.”

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Oakland, CA-based Brightsource Energy, which is building a massive solar thermal energy plant in the Mojave Desert, said yesterday that it has collected $200 million in Series E funding. Existing investors Vantage Point Venture Partners, Alstom, CalSTRS, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DBL Investors, Chevron Technology Ventures, and BP Technology Ventures took part in the round, which also included unnamed new investors. A regulatory filing put the exact amount of the round at $201.7 million. It was not immediately clear whether the round described yesterday was the same as the $90 million round disclosed in an earlier filing in February. Brightsource has collected $530 million in equity-based financing overall.

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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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Solar Power Partners, a Mill Valley, CA-based solar electricity producer that manages large solar installations and sells the power to utilities and commercial entities, has raised $3 million in debt and securities, according to a regulatory filing. The amount was small compared to previous fundraising rounds, including a $100 million round in 2008 led by Globespan Capital Partners and Silicon Valley bank and a $32 million round in 2009 that also involved Globespan.

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Bad news for the Massachusetts cleantech industry—and a lot of factory workers. Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR), a developer and manufacturer of solar panels, said today it will shut down its manufacturing plant in Devens, MA, and lay off 800 workers there by the end of the first quarter of 2011.

The plant represented a great hope for the state’s renewable energy industry when it opened back in 2008, but the writing has been on the wall for some time now. In late 2009, Evergreen Solar said it would move some of its solar panel production from Massachusetts to China for economic reasons. And the company has been losing money because of falling prices in the solar industry, as well as fierce competition from overseas.

“Although production costs at our Devens facility have steadily decreased, and are now below originally planned levels and lower than most western manufacturers, they are still much higher than those of our low cost competitors in China,” said Evergreen CEO Michael El-Hillow in a statement. “We have consistently stated during quarterly conference calls throughout 2010 that we would continue to manufacture in Devens as long as it was economically feasible.”

Apparently that is no longer the case. But Evergreen said it will continue to operate its plants in Midland, MI, and Wuhan, China. El-Hillow joined Evergreen in September, after former chief executive Richard Feldt left to become the CEO of Advanced Electron Beams.

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In 2011, the U.S. economy will come roaring back as our businesses and their customers gain confidence that the electorate has come to its senses and chosen not to grow governments but economies instead.

In 2011, the last jihadist jerk will accidently blow himself up, at home without harming anyone else.

In 2011, the progress of solar energy will be outpaced by natural gas but accelerating against coal.

[Editor's Note: This is part of a series of posts from Xconomists and other technology and life sciences leaders from around the U.S. who are weighing in with the top surprises they've seen in their respective fields in the past year, or the major things to watch for in 2011.]

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BrightSource Energy, the Oakland, CA, company building a massive, 392-megawatt solar thermal plant in Ivanpah in California’s Mojave Desert, said today that NRG Solar, a subsidiary of Princeton, NJ-based NRG Energy (NYSE: NRG), will become the lead investor in the project, contributing up to $300 million over the next three years. The plant, which is expected to be completed in 2013, is also backed by $1.4 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. BrightSource and NRG plan to sell electricity generated at the plant to Southern California Edison and PG&E.

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1366 Technologies has the cash to advance toward production of technology that could reduce the cost of solar energy. The Lexington, MA-based firm said today it has brought in $20 million in Series B funding, including investments from Korea-based Hanwha Chemical and the European cleantech investor Ventizz Capital Fund.

Those new investors joined previous backers North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners in funding 1366, which has now raised a total of $37.6 million. In addition to investing in 1366, Hanwha is planning to become a buyer of the Massachusetts-based firm’s silicon wafers. 1366, an MIT spinout founded in 2007, has been rapidly developing an efficient process of making silicon wafers that’s more cost-efficient and wastes less silicon than standard techniques, according to the company.

“Now, with this investment, we’re moving towards manufacturing,” Frank van Mierlo, the CEO of 1366, said in a press release. “Our goal is to bring our transformative Direct Wafer technology into production and deliver the manufacturing innovations that will make solar electricity cheaper than coal.”

Indeed, the firm has made significant strides in proving that its production method could be done on a commercial scale. In December 2009, the Department of Energy awarded the firm a $4 million grant to advance development of the technology, which produces silicon wafers that can be used in the existing supply chain for manufacturing photovoltaic cells.

1366 also received DOE funding to develop a new solar-cell architecture that it has been selling for the last year under the name “Self-Aligned Cell.” 1366 co-founder and chief technology officer Emanuel “Ely” Sachs, who is a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, told Wade last year about how the architecture uses unique texturing and a new metallization pattern to allow solar cells to trap more light and convert it to electricity.

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Silicon Valley is a place defined by big numbers and rapid change. Since the 1960s, the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit for the same cost has doubled every two years or so. The capacity of Flash memory chips has been increasing even faster of late, doubling every year. So when a company comes along promising to make solar panels that are a measly one percent more efficient than today’s standard technology, you might be tempted to shrug.

Don’t. That’s actually a lot, and it’s exactly the kind of incremental improvement that could soon raise solar energy to what’s known as “grid parity”—the point at which it’s equal to the cost of grid electricity, which, in the U.S., comes mostly from plants burning inexpensive but climate-destroying coal.

Today’s photovoltaic panels, which are made of crystalline silicon and capitalize on the photoelectric effect first explained by Albert Einstein, convert about 18 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, on average. Panels treated with “silicon ink,” a liquid material developed by Sunnyvale, CA-based Innovalight, can hit 19 percent or more. If you’re a solar panel manufacturer like China’s Suntech Power, which produced a gigawatt’s worth of solar products last year, “going from 18 to 19 is a big deal, because it has an enormous impact on the output of your manufacturing infrastructure,” explains Conrad Burke, Innovalight’s CEO. “A gigawatt factory in China will have 40 individual 25-megawatt lines, each a football field in size. If you can find a way for them to add one step to their existing equipment and help to get a 25 megawatt factory line up to 30 megawatts, suddenly you have a 1.2 gigawatt factory for no more cost in capital, and that has a huge impact on the bottom line.”

Which could also help Innovalight’s own bottom line. And none too soon: the company’s investors, who’ve put about $60 million behind its silicon nanocrystal technology, have been waiting a long time for some good news.

Innovalight was founded in St. Paul, MN, back in 2002, and originally intended to go into the lighting industry—hence its name, which isn’t a reference to sunlight. “It turned out that didn’t work, and we were faced with the dilemma of whether we should shut this down or do something else with it,” Burke says.

Burke, a native of Ireland, was first introduced to Innovalight when he was a venture partner at Sevin Rosen Funds, one of the company’s original investors. Eventually, he decided he needed to take a more hands-on role himself.

“In essence, I restarted the company,” Burke says. “I took two of the original team, moved them here, hired a chief technology officer, raised a little more money, and sold the investors on the premise that there was an application here for solar.” That was five years ago. Now the company has 60 people, almost a quarter of whom have PhDs in material science and related fields.

At the core of Innovalight’s technology is a method for turning silicon into a gas, and then collecting the gaseous atoms into pure silicon nanocrystals, each 5 to 10 nanometers in size and completely free of oxygen. Silicon atoms love oxygen, and left to their own devices, they will … Next Page »

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San Francisco-based Recurrent Energy, which develops distributed solar generation projects for utilities, said yesterday (PDF) that it will be acquired by Japan’s Sharp for up to $305 million in cash, subject to balance sheet adjustments. “It is essential for Sharp to function as a developer in the photovoltaic field, in order to further expand its business in this area,” Toshishige Hamano, Sharp’s exectuve vice president for overseas business, said in a statement. “With Recurrent Energy’s know-how as a developer, Sharp aims to become a total solutions comapny in the photovoltaic field, extending from developing and producing solar cells and modules to developing and marketing power generation plants.” Recurrent has contracts to deliver 2 gigawatts of solar generating capacity to customers such as Ontario Power Authority, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and Southern California Edison.

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Yesterday we told you all about Recurve, a San Francisco home energy auditing and retrofitting startup whose founder argues that before energy-conscious homeowners put solar panels on the roof, they should focus on fixing what’s under it—poor insulation, leaky ducts and windows, inefficient HVAC systems, and the like. But let’s assume you’ve done all that. What’s next? Here in California, there’s an array of companies working to make it far easier and more affordable to install electricity-generating solar panels on your home.

One of the most innovative and fast-growing startups in this industry is Oakland, CA-based Sungevity, which is probably unlike any cleantech company you’ve heard of. The company doesn’t have its own installation workforce, and unlike competing firms such as SunRun, it doesn’t have “power purchase agreements” under which homeowners buy electricity from the company. What it does have is software. It’s got applications that allow technicians to peer down from the sky (via Google Earth-style satellite photos) and figure out exactly how many solar panels will fit on your roof, then generate a project estimate. It’s got applications to automate the sales process, and it’s got applications to cut through the red tape around permitting for solar installations.

In effect, Sungevity is a new low-overhead, high-efficiency middleman in a business that’s long been a cottage industry, dominated by small solar installers who have to roll a truck every time a potential customer requests an estimate. (In many of these respects, Sungevity is similar to Recurve, which, as I explained yesterday, is also using software to systematize and scale up a cottage industry—in its case, home energy retrofitting.)

Danny Kennedy, Sungevity’s founder, argues that simplifying and automating the solar installation process is the only way to bring this form of renewable power to the mass market. Together with co-founders Andrew Birch and Alec Guettel and chief financial officer Charles Ferer, he’s built a business that’s collected $9 million in venture backing and is set to grow from $3 million in revenue in 2009 to nearly $30 million this year, with no end in sight. The core of the business model is the 10-year “solar lease,” an idea Ferer brought with him from former employer Solar City. In return for assigning solar tax credits and rebates to the lender—Sungevity and its financial partner US Bank, in this case—homeowners get to install solar panels for only about half of the actual cost of equipment and labor, and they can pay for the project over the course of 120 months.

Sitting down with Kennedy to talk leases and rebates and software is an unusual experience, given that his background isn’t in the energy business at all, but in environmental activism. A native of Australia, Kennedy is a 12-year veteran of Greenpeace, where he started out in the 1990s working to block oil projects in Africa and went on to run the organization’s California Clean Energy campaign. That campaign helped to bring about Governor Schwarzenegger’s $2.8 billion California Solar Initiative, under which the state is providing cash rebates of $1 to $2 per watt for solar photovoltaic installations. (A typical home installation might amount to 3 to 10 kilowatts.)

Those rebates are a big part of what’s making programs like Sungevity’s solar leases affordable, and are one of the reasons Kennedy and co-founders decided to build their business in the Bay Area. Another is the population’s openness to new ways of doing business: “If there is anywhere that’s going to be comfortable adapting to Internet commerce models [for solar installation], it’s California,” Kennedy says.

Our look at Sungevity comes in the form of an extended Q&A. In Part 1, below, Kennedy talks about Sungevity’s business model and technology, and describes how the installation process works. In Part 2, coming tomorrow, he talks about how he made the leap from Greenpeace to energy entrepreneurship, how Sungevity plans to scale up, and how the company’s work fits into global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the effects of climate change.

Xconomy: What is the mission of Sungevity?

Danny Kennedy: The big picture mission is to take solar to scale. Which I’m sure every solar entrepreneur says they want to do, but our vision is to do it in the residential market, which is ultimately the highest value market for solar electricity. Finding a scalable way to deliver solar electricity to residential customers in middle America is the best chance to make large profitable ventures, which will in turn scale the production and consumption of solar itself.

If you can capture developed-country, grid-connected markets, such as the wealthy German, Japanese, or California markets, it will drive solar production in … Next Page »

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