Seattle-based Principle Power, a company focused on offshore wind energy, announced today it has received a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop water power technologies. Principle Power is working with the National Renewable Energy Lab and Marine Innovation and Technology on the project, which seeks to incorporate wave energy generation into the company’s floating support structures for wind turbines.

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San Diego-based Helix Wind (OTC:HLXW) said today it has inked non-binding agreements to acquire the business assets of Abundant Renewable Energy, of Newberg, OR, and Renewable Energy Engineering for $4 million to $6.5 million in cash and restricted stock in Helix Wind. Helix reports that the buyouts will add more products to its portfolio, including Abundant Renewable Energy’s 2.5 kilowatt and 10 kilowatt wind turbines. Bruce recently spoke with Helix about the firm’s vision of small-scale wind turbines on every rooftop.

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The Knight & Carver Yacht Center was founded in 1971 along the southeastern shore of San Diego Bay, where it continues to build and repair large boats, specializing in custom-built yachts and commercial passenger vessels. Because so many boat hulls are made of fiberglass, the National City, CA-based boatyard also has worked extensively with fiberglass composites. So it was smart, really, when a wind turbine operator called the shipyard roughly 12 years ago to ask if Knight & Carver could repair a broken turbine blade. Figuratively speaking, the yard boss said, “Sure, we’ll give it a whirl.”

Today the Knight & Carver Wind Group operates as a separate company—a spinout, so to speak—with 250 employees, about twice as many as the yacht center. The wind group develops prototype turbine blades at facilities near its headquarters in National City, manufactures 82-foot-long turbine blades in a new facility the company built in Southeastern South Dakota, and dispatches dozens of wind turbine repair and maintenance crews to wind farms throughout the United States.

STAR blade

The Knight & Carver Wind Group is moving now to commercialize its design for an innovative curved wind turbine blade, which was developed to operate more efficiently than conventional turbine blades—and at lower wind speeds. A key feature of the blade, known as the Sweep Twist Adaptive Rotor, or STAR blade, is that it automatically twists to adjust to wind speeds. Twisting enables the massive blade to optimize the wind turbine’s energy output in much the same way that trimming a sail optimizes the speed of a sailboat. As a result, the STAR blade can operate in low winds of 10 mph to 15 mph, and adjusts its pitch as winds increase to reduce excessive loads on the electricity-generating turbine.

Sam Brown, Knight & Carver’s president, says the STAR blade was developed under a $3 million research and development project initiated by the U.S. Department of Energy. The company, which shared a third of the development cost, collaborated in research and development of the blade with scientists at U.C. Davis and the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. The project began in 2006, and culminated last year with the DOE’s Wind and Hydropower Technologies division naming the STAR blade as one of the agency’s “Top 10 Program Accomplishments.’

A set of three prototype STAR blades, each more than 89 feet long and nearly 8 feet wide, were used to replace standard blades on an existing wind turbine in Tehachapi, CA. Brown says field tests show his company’s blades are producing more electricity.

“We’re seeing a minimum of 8 percent improvement over exactly the same turbines in exactly …Next Page »

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Northern Power Systems is a busy company these days. The Barre, VT-based firm is expanding its business of designing and making medium-sized wind turbines to include the production of larger, utility-scale systems. Competition in the utility-scale market is fierce, but Northern Power has developed wind-turbine technology that its leadership believes will enable the firm to compete with the majors.

The company has undergone many changes since last June, when it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy along with previous owner Distributed Energy Systems, of Wallingford, CT. In September, a group led by Boston-based venture firm RockPort Capital Partners and New York investment bank Allen & Company purchased Northern Power. The new ownership group has invested more than $50 million to make the acquisition and recapitalize the company. Northern Power was one of two operating subsidiaries under Distributed Energy Systems. The other, Proton Energy Systems, also of Wallingford, is a provider of hydrogen fuel cell technology. It was sold last year as well.

“We were reborn with a company that was laser focused as a pure play in the wind turbine industry, but far more important laser focused on developing an extraordinarily differentiated technology approach,” says John Danner, president and CEO of Northern Power. Danner took the reins at the company in late October, having previously served as chief executive at Codon Devices, a former Cambridge, MA-based provider of synthetic DNA and other biological materials that was shut down this year. Yet he’s no stranger to energy systems. Earlier in his career, Danner was a naval officer who ran a nuclear reactor aboard an attack submarine called the USS Dallas.

Northern Power says its technology enables its turbines to operate with minimal maintenance and high efficiency. A key to the system is what the firm calls its direct drive technology, which enables turbines to convert energy without troublesome gearboxes. This is a big deal. Gearboxes—which are used in traditional turbines to covert high-torque, low-speed energy from the turning turbine blades into low-torque, high-speed energy for electricity generators—have many moving parts that need to be replaced several times during the typical 20-year lifecycle of a turbine. By removing the gearbox, enabling the motion of the turbine blades to directly drive the generator, you can eliminate or lower some maintenance and repair costs. Another key to the firm’s design is its use of magnetic materials in the turbine generators. The permanent magnet generators are said to be lighter and more efficient than traditional wound-rotor generators, among other benefits.

The company, which was founded in 1974, developed many of the technologies that go into its wind turbines in recent decades with grants from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, and NASA, according to the firm.

Northern Power’s technology is used in 100-kilowatt turbines that it has developed and installed in such places as remote communities in Alaska, as well as closer to home in Massachusetts. (For example, one of its 100-kilowatt turbines owned by the city of Medford is visible from Route 93 north of Boston.) There are few competitors for 100-kilowatt turbines, but that market is believed to be many times smaller than the utility-scale turbine business. The larger turbines are used, for instance, on  wind farms that utilize many machines. To capitalize on this multibillion-dollar market segment, Northern Power is developing a 2.2-megawatt wind turbine. The first of these turbines is slated for deployment as a testing model in the first half of 2010.

The foray into the utility-scale market is behind much of what’s making the company so busy. This summer the firm plans to open a Boston-area office focused on research and development for utility-scale wind turbines, Danner says. Northern Power is also in the midst of working out a deal to open a manufacturing facility in an undisclosed location in …Next Page »

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The climate in Boston this week was neither steamy nor stormy. Likewise, the week in deals was a little bit hot and a little bit cold —with not much on either extreme.

—Oracle flexed its muscle in Massachusetts, acquiring Lowell, MA-based Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. Virtual Iron specializes in virtualization technology, which allows multiple servers to behave as one, or enables a single server to juggle multiple operating systems.

—Waltham, MA-based drug developer Artisan Pharma raised $9.4 million in a round of debt financing.  The company’s SEC filing did not name the investors.

—Cambridge’s MetaCarta raised $910K in convertible debt with help from Sevin Rosen Funds, FA Technology, and Hunt Ventures. MetaCarta’s software plots the geographic location of news items onto digital maps.

—Wind turbines are coming to the Bay State, though not to the Cape: Massachusetts received $25M from the Department of Energy to build a turbine blade-testing facility in Charlestown. The center will specialize in the testing of large blades up to 300 feet in length and will be the first such facility located outside of Europe.

—MyVu added $3.25 million to the $11.5 million it raised in January 2006. Atlas Venture and Hillman Capital are listed as “related persons” in the latest SEC filing of the Westwood, MA company, a maker of LCD video goggles.

—GrandBanks, a Newton Center, MA-based venture capital firm, continues to support Canadian tech startups. The latest beneficiary is Toronto’s I Love Rewards, developers of an online catalog that allows corporate clients to incentivize employee performance. GrandBanks was joined by JLA Ventures and Lawrence Capital in this Series B round of financing, which totaled either $5.7 million (according to a GrandBanks announcement) …Next Page »

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The Boston Globe is reporting today that Massachusetts is in line for $25 million in funding for a wind turbine testing facility to be located on the Mystic River in Charlestown. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was expected to announce the funding, which is part of the Obama Administration’s economic stimulus package, during a visit to the site this morning. The creation of the facility, where very long wind turbine blades (up to 300 feet in length) will be tested under various hydraulic stresses, is expected to crate 250 short-term construction jobs and 10 long-term positions.

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Royal Bank of Scotland is leading a group of investors providing $376 million in financing for Boston-based First Wind’s project to build a 97-turbine wind farm in Milford, UT, the company announced today. The other lenders include Banco Espirito Santo, Banco Santander, BNP Paribas, CoBank, HSH Nordbank, KeyBank, Société Générale and Credit Suisse. Separately, First Wind said today that Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection has approved its proposed 40-turbine Rollins Wind project in Penobscot County, Maine.

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First Wind of Newton, MA, said today that it has filed a permit application with Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection to build a 34-turbine wind farm in Aroostook County in the state’s northern tip. The 1.5-megawatt turbines, which would be placed near the town of Oakfield, would generate power for up to 20,000 homes, according to the company. First Wind, which we profiled in January 2008, already operates the 57-megawatt Stetson wind project and the 42-megawatt Mars Hill project, both in Maine.

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Who’s Who in San Diego cleantech innovation?

At Xconomy San Diego, we wanted to answer that question as completely as possible, so we put together an accounting of all the local companies that are creating new ways to make biofuels, clean the environment, and improve the energy efficiency of our vehicles, homes, and businesses. In preparing our list, we owe a debt of gratitude to the nonprofit industry group Cleantech San Diego, which has compiled on its website a comprehensive inventory of every company under the sun with ties to the cleantech and renewable energy industries. We winnowed that list down to just the companies that are focused squarely on technological innovation (as opposed to other players in the cleantech arena, such as solar panel installers and engineering consultants).

Of course, our list likely isn’t comprehensive, and like so many good things, it will be outdated soon. If you know any companies we missed, please send us an e-mail addressed to “editors at xconomy.com”  (And if your interests lie further north, Xconomy Seattle recently published its guide to the cleantech clusters of the Pacific Northwest, breaking out separate lists for Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.)

Achates Power (San Diego, CA)
This venture-backed startup is developing a fuel-efficient, cleaner-burning diesel engine, based on a two-cycle, opposed-piston internal combustion design.

AdaptiveARC (San Diego, CA)
This waste-to-clean-energy startup is developing an arc-plasma reactor and related technologies and services that offer an alternative to landfills.

Allylix (San Diego, CA)
Allylix has developed technology to synthesize terpenes, a class of hydrocarbons naturally produced by conifers and other plants. The company has licensed its technology to an unnamed cleantech company to develop and commercialize terpene fuels and fuel additives.

Ambient Control Systems (El Cajon, CA)
Ambient has developed a customized solar energy device with a computerized energy management and control system to power and operate remote sensor and surveillance networks.

American Biodiesel and Community Fuels (Encinitas, CA)
This company conducts biofuels research and development, using animal fats, vegetable oils, waste oils, and other …Next Page »

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Vestas Wind Systems, a Danish wind turbine maker, reports that it plans to open an R&D center at an undisclosed location in the western suburbs of Boston, where it will develop generators, converters, and control technologies for future wind turbines. The company says that the core staff of the R&D hub will come from ePower, a Lunenburg, MA-based developer of motor technologies and power systems, which Vestas recently acquired for an undisclosed sum.

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