We also haven’t heard of most of these firms, so I wanted to include the whole list here and see what you guys think of their choices. The picks include everything from startups to publicly traded companies, and from American firms to companies in Canada and Germany.

1). Beta Renewables: A $350 million joint venture between Gruppo Mossi & Ghisolfi and TPG, Italian company Beta Renewables is scaling up a commercial cellulosic ethanol factory, which it began operating in the fourth quarter of 2012 in Italy. The plant is supposed to eventually make 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year, starting from an initial volume of 40,000 tons. Beta Renewables uses enzymes to break down non-food biomass and then uses a fermentation process to turn it into biofuels.

2). Materials Innovation Technologies: The company makes carbon fiber parts for lightweight vehicles from recycled materials, and it’s also been working on natural fiber bio-based parts and recycled fiber parts. Founded in 2004, Materials Innovation Technologies has big partners like Boeing, and has a factory in Lake City, South Carolina.

3). N-Solv: N-Solv injects heated gas into oil sand reservoirs to extract more oil, but says its process is more efficient, more sustainable and cheaper than competitive processes. The company has a pilot plant that is supposed to start production in spring of 2013 in Alberta.

4). Imprint Energy: Imprint Energy makes zinc-based flexible, slim batteries for electronics. The company, based in Alameda, Calif., was founded in 2010 and the technology was developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

5). Phosphagenics: The only non-energy company on the list, Phosphagenics is an Australian publicly-traded biotech company that makes skin-based drug delivery technology (like a patch or a cream).

6). Azzurro Semiconductors: A German semiconductor maker that develops gallium nitride on silicon substrates, called GaN-on-Si. These semicondcuctors are used to makes LEDs and as the basis for power electronics. The company is backed by Good Energies, Emerald Technology Ventures, Wellington Partners Venture Capital and GoodVent.

7). Enbala Power Networks: Enbala creates a network that can manage building power devices — like boilers, chillers, and battery stations — to sell what’s called regulation services, or making sure the grid is kept in balance in real time, to utilities and power companies. With headquarters in Toronto, the company is backed by Walsingham Growth Partners, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, and others.

8). Boulder Ionics: The company makes ionic liquids that can be used as the electrolyte for energy storage technologies like batteries and ultracapacitors. The company raised $4.3 million from Pangaea Ventures, 9th Street Investments, CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund, JSR Corporation and Protonic Capital. The company also has a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Air Force (USAF) and U.S. Navy (USN).

9). Silevo: One of the few companies on the list we’ve profiled, Silevo’s solar cells use silicon to convert sunlight into electricity, but its cells use more efficient single-crystal silicon (as the substrate) and amorphous-silicon to manipulate the voltage and current of the cells. The company also uses copper instead of silver, which is more expensive, to create the ultra thin lines that ferry electricity out of solar cells. The result is a solar cell that is more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than the dominant silicon-only cells on the market today.

10). Desalitech: Desalitech is a water desalination tech company that says its water cleaning process is more reliable, flexible and costs 20 percent than competitors. Israeli water company AquAgro Fund and private equity fund Liberation Capital are investors.

Images courtesy of drewgstephens, N-Solv, Beta Renewables,

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Lux Research says for at least three years it’s given Konarka a “strong caution” rating for its technology that was “ten times higher cost, and ten times lower efficiency and lifetime compared to alternative solar technologies.” More than technology development, Konarka’s skill was in fund raising, says Lux Research, and its “underlying technology was never market ready.” Lux writes:

Driven by the promise of cheap, printed solar modules that can be made colorful and transparent, technically unsavvy investors rushed to invest in Massachusetts organic photovoltaic developer Konarka to the tune of $170 million, with an additional $30 million coming from grant funding. Konarka took that investment and built what it claimed was a 1 GW manufacturing line, although the line would certainly never come close to that capacity.

We, too, have long been skeptical of Konarka. It’s amazing that Lux points out that Konarka finally went bankrupt “in the middle of yet another funding round.” Here’s a list of investors that Konarka managed to raise money from: Konica Minolta, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, 3i, Mackenzie Financial Corp., Pegasus Capital, Asenqua Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Vanguard Ventures, Chevron Ventures, Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, NGEN Partners, Angeleno Group, Total, Good Energies, and 3i.

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How hot the geographical market is depends entirely on the state or country subsidies available. Take New Jersey, the lead market in Lux’s report, which has both a strong state renewable portfolio standard, and incentives called Solar Renewable Energy Credits, or SRECs, which are credits that can be traded on a market.

As we described in an article earlier this year, New Jersey’s solar market started to ramp up in 2010, installing more than 25 MW per quarter in the first three quarters, then grew to installing more than 50 MW in the last quarter. The pace continued into 2011 with as much as 15-20 MW of new capacity being installed each month.

Ucilia has pointed out how India, Lux’s fifth choice, could be a massive largely untapped market for solar companies. Part of the reason is that last year India published a policy called National Solar Mission that called for adding 20 GW of grid-tied solar energy generation capacity and 2 GW of off-grid projects by 2022. In addition, the Indian state of Gujarat also has its own solar incentive program.

The result of India’s goals, as well as a wide-spread lack of access to electricity, has made the country an interesting solar market for large players like First Solar and Suntech Power. First Solar CEO Rob Gillette said in a recent earnings call that the Indian market “has changed meaningfully in a positive way,” and said “We are putting people on the ground and figuring out ways for First Solar to have a leading position.”

While the number one determining factor for a hot solar market continues to be policies, solar prices have also dramatically dropped over recent months. That’s good news for solar buyers and consumers, but not such good news for companies that don’t have the lowest cost manufacturing — Solyndra, SpectraWatt and Evergreen Solar all have announced bankruptcy plans in recent weeks. Solar is now a commodity, which means it’s maturing and that’s what we need to push it into the mainstream.

Image courtesy of Evergreen Solar.

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And yet, we in the lighting controls industry shouldn’t be too quick to pat ourselves on the back, since the hype does not yet represent the reality. According to a recent study from Lux Research, 37 percent of commercial energy in the U.S. is controlled by smart controls, such as a networked building management systems. But compare this with the 1 percent of buildings that use a smart lighting control system, and just 7 percent of commercial lighting energy is controlled by a smart control system.

Why the disparity? It’s not that lighting control systems are a new concept, or that their value is unproven – quite the opposite. Lighting is the second largest driver of energy consumption in buildings (behind heating and cooling), and scores of real-life examples over the last 20 years speak to the ability of advanced lighting controls to save money and energy. Yet centralized control systems for lighting is still rare.

What are the hurdles?

Is it because lighting control systems are still too expensive? This is certainly a factor, yet advanced building management systems have managed to justify their expense to become a trusted part of a facility manager’s toolkit.

So where have we in the industry fallen down? One of the answers has to do with the way we have adopted technology standards. Other advanced building systems have come to accept the concepts of interoperability and “open architecture” – using standards that allow products from many vendors to easily communicate with each other. This has helped the building management system vendors gain trust among building professionals, foster innovation, and grow rapidly.

Meanwhile, the lighting controls industry has remained stuck in a world of incompatible systems. Most advanced lighting controls systems on the market today can’t talk to one another. Customers buy one company’s control system and are forced to use that company’s specialized sensors, dimmers, ballasts or LED drivers. The communications between these devices is proprietary –- so the devices have to be proprietary as well.

If lighting control connections were standardized, the communications between devices would use an open industry protocol – be it a wired one, or a wireless one like ZigBee. Any control system using the standard could take inputs from any sensor or wall switch, and could control any luminaire – LED, fluorescent and other sources. And any vendor can easily build products that work with that standard, increasing their sales opportunities and allowing them to focus on building the best products for the market.

A trusted market

It’s no surprise that the lighting industry evolved like it did. Incompatibility can be good for individual vendors. It means that once a customer is yours, they stay yours – switching costs are high. But that’s a limited view. It doesn’t work in a growing industry like controls, trying to prove its value and increase trust among an often skeptical community.

When I talk to lighting designers, architects and engineers, the number one message I hear is that they have been burnt by lighting controls before. Their customers were stuck with control systems that don’t work, can’t be fixed or are too complicated to even try. Their level of trust is low, and needs to be earned.

Standards provide a fast route to that trust. Customers gain a proven technology, have more choice, and feel secure that their system is future-proof. Standards also remove a development barrier from vendors, allowing them to focus their efforts on being more innovative in their core expertise – be it sensors, optics, or software. And when communications between devices is standardized, that means some components can be produced in massive volumes – reducing product costs for everyone.

Fortunately, we’re not as far from that world as people might think. There are open standards currently available – like BACnet in the building automation world, and the ZigBee wireless protocol – that already contain many or all of the application capabilities needed.

Advanced lighting controls have a tremendous capacity to connect, control and ultimately reduce energy consumption for all of the lights – everywhere. We as an industry simply need to be farsighted enough to help it happen.

Danny Yu is CEO of Daintree Networks, a provider of standards-based wireless lighting controls systems for the commercial, industrial and government markets. 

Image courtesy of Daintree Networks, m.gifford.

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Part of the reason for the oversupply of EV batteries is simple: The market for electric cars is looking like it’s going to be a lot smaller than predicted, at least in the short term. The crunched market is something battery maker Ener1, which had a deal with electric car maker Think, and Johnson Controls, which has a battery partnership with Saft, have discussed publicly. Johnson Controls is looking to end, or expand, its deal to work on EV batteries with Saft, because it wants to pursue the power grid battery market. And Ener1 cut its losses on its investment and partnership with Think, partly because the EV market was looking slower than expected. Think eventually went bankrupt.

At the same time that the EV market is looking tiny, battery makers have been expanding capacity substantially for making EV batteries and new battery makers have been moving into the EV market. But Lux says even if oil prices jump to $200 per barrel, which could cause the EV market to grow substantially by 2020, five of the leading battery makers — LG Chem, GS Yuasa, SB LiMotive, AESC, and Sanyo — would have enough capacity to manufacture far more than needed to cover that market. That means there will be dozens of battery makers with way too much supply, particularly if gas prices remain low.

In fact, Lux predicts there will be only a few winners in the EV battery market, and some of the ones already ahead include LG Chem, SB LiMotive, and Chinese makers China BAK, China Aviation Lithium Battery (CALB), and BYD. Lux also gives Envia Systems props for its innovative technology and GM backing — there will be room for small, innovative tech developers to do licensing deals and be acquired, says Lux.

On the other hand, Lux says A123 Systems and Ener1 face “an uphill climb” — marking both of them as “caution.” Lux also issued caution takes for International Battery, K2 Energy Solutions, Valence Technology, Leyden Energy, Electrovaya, and gave a “strong caution” to Altair Nanotechnologies (ouch).

There are a few ways for these battery makers to survive the coming market crunch and consolidation. One is to find new partnerships — because the market is so immature, the partnerships that are already in place are relatively tenuous. Another survival method will be to find battery markets outside of pure EVs, like hybrid vehicles, e-bikes, and the power grid.

But there will be a significant amount of losers in the market. As an anonymous president of a battery material company says in the Lux report:

“If someone wants us to build out capacity, what happens if no one use it? If we return to just phones and laptops, then my investors are looking for new management because we’re bankrupt.”

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That data is from Lux Research’s latest report (PDF) on the smart grid, and it underscores what the industry’s known for a long time. In less than a decade there will be millions of smart meters delivering daily and hourly updates, distribution sensors and controls demanding split-second decisions, and back-office analytics to churn all that data into dollars and cents. And utilities are just starting to invest in this technology.

“Everything in the smart grid is tied to the flow of data,” Steve Minnihan, the report’s lead author, said Wednesday. “Some will outpace data growth, some will lag.”

For example, while smart meters have been the first wave of smart grid implementation, not all utilities have been making the best use of the data that those smart meters provide. A case in point is Pacific Gas & Electric, which ran into early implementation problems with its multi-billion dollar smart meter rollout. An independent study found the utility could have done better if it had used the data those meters were providing to help resolve customer billing problems and other issues.

Turning the flood of smart meter data into actionable information will take another wave of integration and investment, Minnihan noted. Almost all utility back-office billing IT is done in batch processing style today, which means tech partners will be asked to manage much of the processing of smart grid data for as long as it takes utilities to upgrade their own systems.

Distribution grid monitors and controls will be the next big wave of smart grid implementation, Minnihan said, but the data they create will require a very different set of underlying technologies to manage. Simply put, while grid sensors and controls may generate a lot less data than smart meters, “their data carries a far greater value,” he explained.

Lux’s emphasis on opportunities for telecommunications and IT systems and services for the smart grid is matched by other analysts. Pike Research has predicted that smart grid data management, for example, will grow to a $4.2 billion market globally by 2016, while utility IT consulting and management services will reach a $4.8 billion market and smart grid networks will be a $4.9 billion business by 2016.

Among other key findings from Lux’s report was the rising might of China as a smart meter market. Right now the world’s estimated 80 million smart meters are about evenly divided between Europe (with a slight lead) and the U.S. and Canada. But while North America has about 150 million meters waiting to be upgraded, China has 185 million, Minnihan said — and that’s just the start of a market that has yet to serve most of its 1.2 billion citizens with electricity.

In an interesting departure from common wisdom on the subject, Minnihan said that China will probably end up spending about as much as European and U.S. utilities are per smart meter, about $150 to $200, rather than the sub-$50 per-meter prices some industry analysts are targeting for the Chinese market.

To learn more about software, tools and new companies working with big data, come to our Big Data event in New York on March 23. I’ll be there!

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Lux’s Jason Eckstein, author of the report, argued that a new shakeout is coming as government subsidies in countries such as Germany and France are set to decline. These subsidies, the feed-in tariffs, are supposed to fall gradually as production scale and technologies improve and presumably the prices for them should fall as well. That puts pressure on manufacturers to lower the prices of their goods. Plus, the market is getting new entrants who believe they’ve got something the dominant players don’t.

Eckstein anointed Amonix, Enphase and Abound as breakout stars in their class and, as a result, are likely to go public and reward their investors some nice returns. Kleiner Perkins-backed Amonix is a high-concentrating PV panel maker based in Seal Beach, Calif., that seems to have emerged from hibernation to win some utility-scale contracts. The company has been around since 1989, and it closed a B round of $129.4 million earlier this year. Last month, news came about Amonix’s biggest deal announced to date: a 30-megawatt project in Colorado by Cogentrix Energy, which signed a power sales agreement with Public Service Co.

Enphase got the nod because it was early to the market of microinverters and has “high sales volumes,” according to Lux. Microinverters, unlike centralized inverters, are added to each solar panel to convert direct current to alternating current for feeding the grid. The Petaluma, Calif.-based startup, another Kleiner Perkins pick, is likely to dash across the IPO line quicker than others, Eckstein said. The company’s use of contract manufacturers is a smart move because it eliminates the need to raise a lot of money to build and operate factories, he added.

Lux isn’t alone is feeling bullish about the microinverter technology. In a report released last month, IMS Research said microinverters and their cousin technology the DC-DC power optimizers are likely to generate more than $1.5 billion in revenue over the next five years worldwide.

We all know that First Solar has been super successful. Startups want the same thing. Lux selected Abound Solar from the lot as a rising star in making cadmium-telluride solar panels. Abound, based in Loveland, Colo., and backed by DCM, last raised venture capital in 2008 ($104 million), opened its first factory in 2009 and won a $400 million federal loan guarantee to expand manufacturing in 2010. Its panels can achieve about 10 percent efficiency. First Solar can do 11.2 percent efficiency.

Eckstein also didn’t forget the biggest army in the war for solar market dominance: companies making crystalline silicon solar panels and their suppliers. Not surprisingly, he noted the rise of Chinese solar panel makers, some of whom have their own plants to make polysilicon, ingots and wafers, the materials necessary to make solar cells and then panels. Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar are examples. He also gave a shout out to newer players such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics.

Despite the high amount of buzz about thin film solar players Nanosolar and Solyndra, the Lux report issued cautions on these startups. Nanosolar received low marks for both technical value and business execution, while Solyndra drew low marks for technical value. Solyndra withdrew its IPO plans earlier this year. The Lux report says “The space is becoming bifurcated as start-ups such as Solyndra and Nanosolar fail to execute on their ramp-ups and become long-shots.”

The solar market is still young and relies heavily on government subsidies to grow. That, by definition, means it will be in flux and not so predictable. Already, forecasts for 2011 solar power project installations vary widely, from nearly 13 gigawatts to almost 19 gigawatts.

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Lux finds that each of the next-gen peak demand technologies have unique benefits in terms of cost and capacity scale. For example demand response, where building operators either automatically or manually turn down their energy consumption at certain times of day, is by far the most cost-effective technology and is best positioned to replace natural gas peaker plants at really extreme peak periods (middle of Summer afternoon when people are blasting their air conditioning). Yet demand response can only be used for 1 percent of the time, because of the practical limits of deploying the technology.

Energy storage (FAQ), like compressed air, has the most potential to offer capacity, but Lux finds that the immature stage of the technology “cripples adoption.” It’s a “non-starter today on cost and bankability,” says Lux. While compressed air, pumped hydro, and various types of batteries are actually decades-old technology, they are far too expensive right now.

Solar technology being used to generate power at peak demand, is the second most economic option out of the three — well, thanks to subsidies. But because of the limiting factor, (there’s only so many rooftops and utilities willing to invest), solar can only supply 23 to 30 percent of the capacity to allay peak demand.

So currently “natural gas will continue to win the peak for years to come,” says Lux. Bummer, because natural gas peaker plants are themselves expensive, and of course are based on a fossil fuel and emit carbon. Lux finds that in order for demand response, solar and energy storage to become more attractive, p”olicymakers need to better align subsidies for wind and solar with their actual cost to utilities.”

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Image courtesy of griffithchris.

The firm anticipates that by 2020, LEDs will provide 60 percent of low bay lighting for commercial, industrial, government and public buildings, while advanced lighting controls will be put to work in an impressive 90 percent of government and public spaces. Advanced lighting tech will be less dominant in homes, according to Lux, with LEDs providing 42 percent of the lighting in the residential market (if you want to hop on the LED train, check out our roundup of 5 LED bulbs you can buy soon to replace incandescents).

High price tags historically have been a major barrier to adoption of LED bulbs. For example, General Electric introduced an LED bulb in April that can replace a 40-watt incandescent bulb, but consumes just 9 watts and could last 17 years if used for four hours a day. In addition, the bulb — like a growing number of offerings from startups and lighting giants alike — can fit into a standard incandescent socket. But GE priced this long-lasting, highly efficient, drop-in bulb at $40-50 at retailers.

While government and commercial customers generally factor in long term operating costs, for a consumer to hand over $50 to replace something that usually costs them less than a buck up front will require a major shift in thinking.

By improving on cost and efficiency, however, LED developers are coming within striking distance of delivering a payback period of about one year. Already, Home Depot has begun selling an LED from Lighting Science Group that breaks the $20 barrier (GigaOM Pro, subscription required). Upon reaching the one-year-payback threshold, Lux predicts, “LED-based illumination will explode onto the scene,” edging out T8 fluorescent lamps often used in government and commercial buildings by 2014.

Image courtesy of Mike Deal aka ZoneDancer’s photostream.

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Lux studied the opportunities for grid storage in three disparate regions — a crowded urban city with a distant power source, a more environmentally conscious community with progressive regulations, and a micro-grid style island ecosystem — and found that the different regions differed greatly in what kind of energy storage would be most economical and beneficial. For example a (hot) region where air conditioning is the major driver of peak load, using ice for thermal energy storage, like the service delivered by Ice Energy, offers a solid option. But in an area where stability is a problem for the grid, lithium-ion batteries provided the best choice.

The research is one indicator that it’s still an early market for grid storage. The current power grid works by constantly balancing supply and demand (generation and load) and must be kept at a specific frequency and perfect balance. Without energy storage that’s a difficult task. When demand spikes, utilities are forced to turn to expensive plants that utilities power up as a last resort as well as generators that can smooth out the load. The whole system is complex, expensive and volatile. PJM, a regional transmission organization serving a population of 51 million, commonly pings generators to control regulation as often as hundreds of times per day.

Lux reports that the early stage of the energy storage market means there’s a lot of opportunities for innovation and disruption. New business models, and new technologies will play a significant role in the growing storage market, says Lux and points to AEP’s community energy storage pilot concept, Beacon Power’s business model of a “vertically integrated electricity storage utility,” and Ice Energy’s next-generation storage-focused demand response service as examples of storage innovation.

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Image courtesy of pcgeek86′s photostream.