Green Options

Falcon-cams and electric-car chargers on streetlights may sound like things out of the future, but for the city of San Jose, California, the future is now.

Looking for a green job and wondering where they are? Well, as job hunters flood the usual suspects — such as solar and wind companies — with mountains of applications, you might have better luck finding your dream job in a more unexpected sector.

That’s the advice from Amy Vernetti, a managing director at headhunting firm Taylor Winfield. She says many of the green jobs are coming from areas that probably don’t leap to mind when you think of cleantech, such as companies developing fuel additives and air-filtration technologies. “These are hidden gems in the market,” she says, adding that some of them are “hiring like crazy.”

The bucket-wheel excavator has long scoured the lignite fields of western Germany, erasing whole villages and leaving a trail of bad soil and salty water.

With all sorts of claims being made about clean energy and clean tech, it is more than a mere academic exercise to explore what those terms really mean. One way of defining something

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A Cambridge, Massachusetts-based desalination start up has closed on a $10 million round of funding to develop its proprietary technology to produce clean, potable water from salt water using one tenth the amount of energy used in traditional desalination plants.

As we reported last month, Yale researchers Rob McGinnis and Dr. Menachem Elimelech have developed a proprietary desalination system called Engineered Osmosis that they say could produce clean drinking water from seawater or other wastewater at half the current cost. Now that their new company— Oasys Water—has secured Series A funding, it can proceed with the development of its potentially revolutionary commercial desalination platform.

In a move to expand its national reach, GroSolar announced plans Thursday to acquire Borrego Solar Systems’ residential solar installation business. With the acquisition, groSolar will emerge as the fourth-largest residential solar power installer in the United States. The company’s acquisition comes at a time when the industry is poised to reap the benefits of the economic stimulus’ eight-year extension of the solar tax credits.

President Obama’s stated desire to invest in smart-grid and broadband infrastructure syncs nicely with Google’s desire to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure and build a smarter grid.

Don’t think you can rise up to the X PRIZE ultracapacitor challenge? Maybe you should go for MIT’s Clean Energy Prize instead.  The competition, which is intended for university students, will award $200,000 to “jumpstart a business venture on an emerging clean energy innovation with significant market potential.”

It may be a bad time to seek funding, but some cleantech investors see it as a good time to get a deal. At the Clean-Tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, Calif., last week, Kevin Walsh, managing director of renewable energy for GE Energy Financial Services, said GE is taking advantage of the economic environment to snag good deals and is also looking at smart-grid and energy-efficiency opportunities. “We’re being opportunistic,” he said. “You’ll see more deals on the venture side in the next few months.”

Cleantech IPOs have ground to a halt, and industry insiders at the Clean-Tech Investor Summit this week said they expect the no-exit environment to continue.

Mohr Davidow Ventures partner Will Coleman, who moderated a cleantech-financing panel at the event, asked panelists to guess when the IPOs would come back. “The second quarter, which doesn’t mean the markets [will have] reopened,” said Gary Vollen, managing director of the Stanford Group Co. “I think the third quarter, probably,” guessed Jeff Lipton, managing director of Jeffries & Co. Inc.

Attendees of the fifth annual Clean-Tech Investor Summit, which starts Tuesday in Indian Wells, Calif., might notice a change in the agenda from previous years. The annual panel on cleantech investment exits –IPOs or acquisitions of venture-backed startups – has disappeared.

It’s a reflection of the economic environment, said Ron Pernick, a principal at research firm Clean Edge and a co-producer of the conference. “There haven’t been any exits to speak of, which tells you something,” he said.

At first glance, the latest numbers from the Cleantech Group look like terrific news. After all, they conclude that 2008 was a record year for cleantech investments, with venture deals in North America, Europe, Israel, China and India reaching a total of $8.4 billion, up 38 percent from $6.1 billion in 2007.

But most of that money was dealt out in the first three quarters, with investment slowing significantly – as expected – in the fourth quarter.

According to preliminary numbers, venture capitalists in these regions committed $1.7 billion in 99 deals in the fourth quarter, down 35 percent from the third quarter and 4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007. In North America, by far the biggest venture-capital region, fourth-quarter investments totaled $1.14 billion, a decrease of 38 percent from $1.83 billion in the third quarter and of 5.8 percent from $1.21 billion in the last quarter of 2007.