The wind industry had close to $4.8 billion in transaction value in 2010, which included private fund-raising deals, initial public offerings, and mergers and acquisitions. Solar generated a transaction value of $3.2 billion, and energy efficiency, which includes smart grid and LED lighting companies, followed with $2.5 billion.

The transaction values run parallel to the cleantech investing numbers for 2010, which found that solar startups continued to draw the most money in venture capital investment last year, while energy-efficiency startups garnered the largest number of deals, according to the Cleantech Group. However, given utility-scale wind is a more matured market, there are fewer investments in next wind technology startups.

A bulk of the transaction value that went to wind was for building energy generation projects, the report noted. An analysis by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) showed that wind energy companies had grabbed the most money from a Treasury Department program that was set up in 2009 to subsidize renewable energy generation construction. As of November of last year, money that went to wind companies accounted for 85 percent of what the government had given out (solar took 8 percent).

In terms of the number of deals, the energy efficiency sector took the top spot, garnering 104 deals (fundraising rounds and M&A) last year, the Peachtree report said. Solar ranked second with 99 deals, followed by wind with 35 deals.

The report surmised that the strong interest in energy efficiency companies and projects will continue partly because they require less money and give quicker returns than more capital-intensive businesses such as solar and biofuel. Apparently, psychology also played a role, the report said, noting that many so-called energy-efficiency technologies are formerly called information technology and many investors came from the IT world.

Overall, $14.7 billion flowed into 371 fund-raising deals and mergers and acquisitions across all greentech sectors in 2010, and that reflected a 55-percent jump from 2009. Fund-raising deals, including equity investments in companies or projects, totaled $10.1 billion, a 65-percent hike from 2009. Mergers and acquisitions accounted for $4.6 billion in 2010, a 37 percent increase from the previous year.

So who are the losers? Bioenergy firms such as makers of biofuels to power cars. About $1.4 billion flowed into that sector, a 27-percent decline from 2009. Investors showed a strong interest in biofuel a few years back, when gasoline prices jumped dramatically and lawmakers began to approve policies and funds to jumpstart this new industry.

It has become painfully clear since then that figuring out how to make fuels from plants is trickier and takes more time and money than many had anticipated. Many companies have pushed back the time they will start mass-producing biofuels, prompting the government to dramatically scale back its expectation of gradually replacing fossil fuel with more renewable sources.

The energy storage sector, meanwhile, saw a 40-percent drop in deal values. But the report said the number is skewed by A123 Systems’ $378 million IPO in 2009, therefore, the storage business actually had a good year in 2010. Other fields that received less money included ocean and tidal power, carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.

Related Content From GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Top 10 Greentech Companies of 2010
• 7 Things That Spell Growing Pains for Greentech in 2011
• Green IT 2011: China Marches Towards Greentech Dominance

Photo courtesy of Christopher Chappelear

As Commerce Under Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco put it in a statement today, “There are many new and exciting renewable energy opportunities waiting for us in the ocean.” But the newness of this technology means these opportunities are also shrouded in uncertainty. How should siting proposals be evaluated? Will noise from ocean installations influence migratory marine animals? A round of federal grants totaling more than $4.2 million announced on Tuesday will support a crop of research projects seeking answers to these questions and more over the next three years. (An eighth project funded in this grant round will look at best practices for storing carbon dioxide under the ocean floor.)

The results could have lasting effects on the nascent market for these technologies as they move beyond the research and development stage to pursue permits for large-scale deployments, paving the way for new planning and evaluation processes. According to a report released earlier this month by the research firm Emerging Energy Research, “The global ocean energy sector is at a turning point,” with more than 45 wave and tidal prototypes slated for ocean testing in 2010 and 2011, up from only nine tested last year.

Despite its promise, however, to provide continuous electricity — a benefit that solar and wind don’t offer — development of so-called “hydrokinetic” technology (relating to the kinetic energy of moving fluid) has run into technical and fundraising difficulties. For example, the California Utilities Commission rejected a power purchase agreement from utility Pacific Gas & Electric to buy electricity from a project by Finavera Renewables, saying the technology was too unproven and costly.

So far, few studies have looked into the environmental impact of ocean and tidal power equipment worldwide. As researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State explained recently, some of the limited studies have taken place outside the U.S., focusing on wildlife not commonly found in the estuaries and oceans hugging this country.

Here’s what the seven projects awarded funding today by the Department of Energy, the Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for ocean energy research will be investigating:

1. Parametrix, an engineering, planning and environmental sciences firm in Auburn, Wash., scored $499,000 for a 2-year project using statistics to help determine how siting proposals for renewable ocean energy projects should be evaluated. The team will be using probabilistic statistics to integrate information from a range of sources in a variety of forms, including oceanographic and ecological data, stakeholder input, human use data and cumulative impacts.

2. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program in Ithaca, N.Y., won a $499,000 grant for a 3-year project looking at how noise from offshore energy projects affects marine animals. More specifically, the lab plans to “measure, characterize and evaluate the influences of construction and operation noises,” of these installations on “acoustically active” migratory marine vertebrates that live in the project area seasonally.

3. University of Rhode Island plans to develop and test a set of protocols for collecting and comparing scientifically valid data about offshore renewable energy issues, and develop a “conceptual framework” for evaluating the cumulative environmental impact of offshore renewable energy development. The group won a grant of $745,000 over two years.

4. The University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Scientists in Seattle will be evaluating three technologies — echo sounders, acoustic cameras and multibeam sonar — for their ability to monitor animal densities at sites where hydrokinetic projects are proposed. The team, which scored a $746,000 grant over two years, plans to deploy instruments at the site of a tidal energy demo project proposed by the Snohomish Public Utility District, in Washington’s northern Admirality Inlet.

5. Pacific Energy Ventures, based in Portland, Ore., plans to build a framework for identifying, collecting and comparing environmental data that’s relevant to baseline studies, as well as monitoring of operational wave, tidal, and offshore wind projects on the West Coast. According to the project description, however, the tool will be portable to other regions and marine ecosystems and consistent with programs in Europe. The project has been awarded $499,000 in grant money over two years.

6. The University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies in Fayetteville, Ark., plans to develop a system for designing the layout of an offshore facility and generating realistic visualizations of the project. The system will allow users to import geospatial data and define wave and light conditions, among other things. This project won a $497,000 grant over three years.

7. The University of Massachusetts’ Marine Renewable Energy Center in Dartmouth, Mass. plans to develop a roadmap for assessing spatial resources at offshore renewable energy sites. The group also plans to craft a plan for monitoring offshore wind and hydrokinetic energy resources once facilities are up and running. According to the project description, most of the evaluations in this study will use models and existing data, as well as field tests to look at specific survey technologies. The project won a $748,000 grant over two years.

Chart courtesy of Emerging Energy Research. Top photo courtesy of Flickr user Wonderlane. Lower photo courtesy of Wavebob.

For more research, check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• The Real Reason Google Is Buying Wind Power
• Facebook’s Coal-Powered Problem
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

While renewables have driven investment in the energy industry, however, clean power has seen a drop from the nearly $471 million invested in 15 deals in the renewable energy sector during the third quarter of last year, and the approximately $1.2 billion in 24 deals in the same quarter of 2008.

Tracking investments by venture capital firms, corporations, private equity firms and individuals into companies that have closed at least one round of venture financing, VentureSource reports that venture investors poured a total of $5.5 billion into 662 deals with companies based in the U.S. during the third quarter. That’s a 5 percent drop in the amount invested, but a slightly higher number of deals (up 2 percent) compared to the same period in 2009.

Early stage investments, including seed and first rounds, made up a slightly larger portion of the activity during the third quarter of 2010 than in the same quarter a year earlier. According to VentureSource, seed- and first-round investments made up 34 percent of deal activity and 20 percent of the capital invested during this most recent quarter. That’s up from 31 percent of deals and 15 percent of capital invested in the third quarter of 2009.

Yet, as Jeff St. John explained in his latest Green IT Quarterly Wrap-up on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), the green technology sector as a whole saw a substantial drop-off in early-stage venture capital and an even steeper decline in solar power investments during the third quarter of 2010. Firms with novel manufacturing and materials offerings have struggled to compete with entrenched suppliers of more “bankable” technologies, and solar power has become a harder sell with VCs.

The information technology industry took the lion’s share of investment during the third quarter, according to the VentureSource report, with $2.8 billion in 232 deals — up 35 percent from the same period last year in terms of capital invested. Software in particular saw significant activity, with $1 billion invested into 159 deals. That’s a whopping 67 percent increase in the amount invested compared to the year earlier quarter.

Image courtesy of NREL.

For more research, check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• The Real Reason Google Is Buying Wind Power
• Facebook’s Coal-Powered Problem
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

Speaking of Big Data, we saw even more evidence that startups selling the tools of tomorrow (i.e., Hadoop and NoSQL) are in a good position to capitalize if they follow the right strategy. Cloudera continued to bolster its partner portfolio to ensure that it will be the platform layer for Hadoop as it increasingly sees adoption among enterprises. Provided Cloudera maintains a reputation of stability, it’s about the only vendor selling distributed data crunching until Microsoft rolls out its Dryad project commercially. For database startups pushing NoSQL, organizations appear willing to give them a chance, but they will need to address reputation issues stemming from a few high-profile failures.

Elsewhere in the sector, in the realm of public clouds, the quarter was marked by perpetual motion. Very few CIOs are still questioning the value proposition for cloud computing, so providers are pushing to differentiate themselves wherever possible. Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Joyent, RightScale… everyone rolled out a variety of new features to make their respective offerings as palatable as possible to as many groups as possible. As the market shapes up, we see it will be a marathon, and providers that sat in the background early might end driving momentum in the future.

The internal cloud market was defined by attempts to peddle turnkey solutions addressing users’ needs around multi-tenancy, provisioning and self-service. VMware did it with vCenter Director, OpenStack did it with its collection of technologies, and a handful of startups did it with their own products. There are some disruptive options — none more so than OpenStack – but it will be a tall order for anyone to compete with VMware increasingly driving the cloud discussion.

We also learned the price the web companies must pay to deal with their success: millions in capital expenditures to meet current and future demand. With Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter all significantly upping their infrastructure investments, it will be interesting to see what services they roll out next.

For a full recap and analysis of the news and trends that defined the past quarter, read the entire report here.

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Wednesday’s announcement provided no details as to when Alstom and BrightSource expected to start building solar-thermal plants together, or the scale of their plans. The two did say they would combine Alstom’s plant integration experience and power generation equipment with BrightSource’s solar field and tower-based technology to tailor projects to specific customer needs. As to where they planned to focus their efforts, the two looked “in particular in the Mediterranean ring and Africa,” according to their press release.

Desertec, whose consortium members include power and engineering giants Siemens and ABB, solar developer Solar Millenium, and thin-film giant First Solar, has also been envisioned primarily as a solar-thermal power project. Capturing the sun to heat water or other liquids and generate steam to spin a turbine can be less expensive than solar PV at massive scales, and it can also offer a means of storing heat energy to generate power when the sun goes down.

The Desertec initiative remains in the early stages of raising money, and it will likely require quite a bit of government support to reassure investors in such a massive scheme. BrightSource and Alstom will also, in all likelihood, face a long a difficult road when it comes to financing.

BrightSource is one of few solar-thermal startups still standing as an independent company in a time when many companies have been acquired, shut down or scaled back. Siemens bought Israeli solar-thermal startup Solel for $418 million last year, and French nuclear power giant Areva bought startup Ausra for an undisclosed sum in February. Google-backed eSolar, meanwhile, has seen would-be project partner NRG Energy drop solar thermal plans in favor of photovoltaics for a proposed 92-megawatt solar project. In August, Schott Solar said it would halve its production of solar thermal gear and lay off 30 workers. There’s a big difference between developing new technology and finding the financing to build a massive power plant, after all.

In that context, BrightSource’s relationship with Alstom could prove crucial in boosting prospective investors’ confidence in the company. Alstom also invested $55 million in BrightSource in May as part of a Series D round that has since climbed to a total of $176 million. The Oakland, Calif.-based company is expected to announce an IPO soon, although whether that comes next year or later is the subject of much speculation.

In the meantime, BrightSource has been pushing ahead with its own 392-megawatt Ivanpah solar-thermal plant, supported by a a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. BrightSource plans to start construction of Ivanpah by the end of this year, and it expects to complete it in 2013.

For more research on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Cleantech Financing  Trends 2010 & Beyond
• Smart Algorithms: The Future of the Energy Industry
• Renewable Energy Charging Up Electrical Transmission Tech

Image courtesy of BrightSource.

Among the highlights for greentech in the four-year comprehensive spending review presented by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on Wednesday are £200 million for green energy development projects (including off-shore wind and port infrastructure for massive turbines), £1 billion for a financing program called the Green Investment bank, and up to £1 billion for a planned carbon capture demonstration project. As of this morning, when E.ON announced it will not continue in the competition for the carbon capture demo funds, Iberdrola SA is the only company still in the running for that project.

The spending review also includes £860 million for renewable heating incentives over the next four years, and the feed-in tariff is slated to hold fast until at least 2013, as previously planned.

The Green Investment Bank, according to the text of the spending review, is envisioned as a “radical new contribution to financing green infrastructure,” with an “explicit mandate to tackle risk that the market currently cannot adequately finance.”

The program’s public funding has been set for about half of the amount anticipated by some advocates and one-sixth of what others have said would be necessary to help keep the UK on track with its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Andy Atkins, executive director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth commented today that the Green Investment Bank “will need significantly more than the £1 billion allocated to be effective.” Osborne described the £1 billion as a “backstop” for the program, with sales of government assets expected to bring in “significant” proceeds and hopes for the bank to spur private investment.

For more on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Report: Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond
• EPRI’s Solar Power Phrasebook — A Guide for Future Communications
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

Image courtesy of Flickr user phault.

The idea behind iSeeU is pretty simple: Mount a mirror on your cell phone, and you’ll be able to film yourself during a call with a rear-facing camera. Check out the rather charming video below for a quick demo.

The neatest thing about iSeeU seems to be that you can easily swivel it around, making it possible to share all kinds of stuff without having to move the phone (or switch camera inputs on the 4G, for that matter). The company also has a number of additional videos up on YouTube, but there’s really not that much more to explain. It’s a cell phone accessory, after all, albeit a clever one.

Related content on GigaOm Pro (subscription required):

• Report: The Consumer Video Chat Market, 2010-2015
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How Intel Clawed Huge Profits from the Global Downturn (From Ars Technica) It helps to be among the most important companies in a field that will never decrease in importance. Intel was poised to strike whichever iron was hot, even during the downturn.

Cloudharmony: KT’s Cloud Faster than Amazon, Rackspace (From the Cloudscaling blog) The point here isn’t to illustrate that internal clouds are faster than public clouds (they probably should be), but that you can achieve this performance using commodity gear and building for failure.

Twitter Solves its Data Formatting Challenge (From Computerworld) The decision to choose the Google-created protocol buffers was based on the 12TB of data Twitter stores each day. If you’re wondering why it relies so heavily on NoSQL and Hadoop, here’s a big reason.

Overland Storage Announces Acquisition of MaxiScale Inc. (From Marketwire) That didn’t take long. MaxiScale has been around for about a year (or thereabouts) and it’s already been bought. We shouldn’t be surprised. If you have good scale-out storage technology, you’re on somebody’s list.

Verizon Reveals Plans for Massive NY Data Center (From the Web Host Industry Review) Verizon has been building out its cloud footprint lately; is this new data center part of that strategy? Of course, it has another business that might need additional capacity …

For more cloud-related news analysis and research, visit GigaOM Pro.

Image courtesy of Intel.

Keeping with its strategy of the past several months, Cloudera added even more partners to its expansive stable. It now counts data-management vendor Talend and NoSQL-database startup Membase among its technology partners, and Japanese service provider NTT DATA has signed on as a Cloudera reseller in the country. Additionally, business-intelligence and data-integration peddler Pentaho released Hadoop integrations for both of its product lines, compatible with the Cloudera, Apache and Amazon Elastic MapReduce Hadoop distributions. Existing Cloudera partnerships also expanded — namely, partner Quest Software officially released the OraOop connector between Hadoop and Oracle Database, and Vertica Systems released its second-generation connector for the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH).

Cloudera also upgraded CDH to incorporate additional security and cloud capabilities. For security, the latest CDH upgrade adds the Kerberos authentication standard recently integrated into Yahoo’s Hadoop with Security distribution. On the cloud front, Cloudera has integrated the Apache Whirr product, which according to Cloudera “is a tool for quickly starting and managing clusters running on cloud services like Amazon EC2.”

Cloudera’s spate of Hadoop World news is hardly surprising. When I spoke with CEO Mike Olson last week, he indicated that Cloudera is determined to become the de facto Hadoop platform: a strategy that means partners, partners and more partners. If someone is going to integrate Hadoop support into existing software, develop higher-level Hadoop tools or just deploy their own Hadoop cluster, Cloudera wants CDH to be part of the plan. Considering there are still dozens of database, BI and analytics vendors that have yet to announce a Hadoop strategy, not to mention potential customers, Cloudera has plenty of opportunity ahead of it.

This untapped potential is the reason Olson is so excited about Cloudera’s future (he cites the potential to “build a billion-dollar business”) and why he isn’t sweating to follow in recent partners’ footsteps by getting acquired in the short term.  “This opportunity is still too nascent and too potentially enormous for us to do anything other than focus on building the greatest business that we can possibly build,” he explained.

Startups Karmasphere and Datameer used Hadoop World to let the world know that their flagship products — Karmasphere Studio: Professional Edition and Datameer Analytics Solution — are generally available. The Karmasphere product is designed to ease the process of developing Hadoop workloads and applications, even from the desktop, while Datameer targets BI professionals with a spreadsheet-style Hadoop analysis tool. Unlike Cloudera, Karmasphere and Datameer aren’t yet household names in the Big Data community, but they could be on their way. A recent survey showed a steep learning curve as the No. 1 impediment to Hadoop development, and this is exactly the issue Karmasphere and Datameer address.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melaclaro.

Related Research about NoSQL Databases from GigaOM Pro:

• Why All the Hoopla About Hadoop?
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Fortunately, a crop of companies are eager to solve the problem with single sign-on (SSO) solutions, which provide dashboards that allow administrators to add and configure SaaS applications for an entire workforce. Users get the simplicity of a single access point for all their web applications, and companies can easily set and track policies.

Another feature companies relish is integration with Active Directory, the de facto standard from Microsoft in enterprise identity management that allows administration of roles and assignments for individuals and their access credentials.

Here are a few contenders in this cloud SaaS management arena including their self-described categories:

• Okta: identity and access management software. Okta, which recently hit the scene following a $10 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz this past summer, promotes the concept of a Cloud Area Network, described as a collection of on-demand services.
• OneLogin: single sign on for the cloud and SaaS. OneLogin, funded by Charles River Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, also fits directly in this arena. The company claims to have over 900 pre-integrated applications and offers a free plan for a single user, as well as paid group plans.
• ProtectNetwork: cloud-based e-credential management service. ProtectNetwork is a product of 9 Star Research, a company started in 2002 and likely familiar with e-credential management software before the cloud came along. They now have ProtectNetwork as an online, hosted offering for identity management.
• Conformity: cloud identity and SaaS management solutions. Based in Austin, Texas, Conformity is backed by Guggenheim Venture Partners. The company has a thorough website on SaaS identity management issues, as well as some clever marketing as the anti-SSO SSO. Go figure.

On the surface, a managed single sign-on solution for companies seems like a no-brainer. (I expect there are other companies I missed in the roundup). But there’s a bigger issue and opportunity here, in my opinion: Rather than merely managing the sign-ons and security, these services could back a step to the selection of SaaS applications themselves.

SSO providers can aggregate the menu of applications at each company and the amount of application use. Combine that with clever polling of customers’ favorite applications, and you start to build a database where pattern-matching across companies (anonymously) could drive SaaS sales. The metadata about the applications becomes more valuable, in my opinion, than the service of managing the sign-ons.

Perhaps these SSO providers give birth to enterprise SaaS app stores. Customers will like the fact that they can benchmark and see patterns of application use amongst peers, and SaaS providers could benefit from a direct-line sales and marketing channel. No doubt there are still plenty of short-term sign-on challenges to solve, but if SaaS sign-ons are the enterprise check-in, I think we’ll see these SSO providers expanding to other interesting territory soon.

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user Klearchos Kapoutsis.