Three-year-old Gridco is selling this networking gear and software to utilities to enable them to have greater control over their networks and to be able to maintain a greater degree of reliability, more similar to the reliability that Internet companies currently have, and utilities rarely have. The promise is that potential utility customers can have self-healing, and smarter grids, so when one section of a grid goes down, other areas of the grid can route around that section and the overall system can maintain function.

With old-school electromechanical grid equipment, which is the dominant form of grid power electronics today,  it’s hard to create this type a resilient grid. The sector needs digital control systems, says Patel, to enable the installation of widespread solar panels and wind turbines. These type of new solid state transformers are new, and so is the combo of using them with more sophisticated digital networking tools.

Gridco has raised a little over $20 million so far, from investors including General Catalyst, North Bridge venture partners, Lux Capital, and RockPort Capital. This is a Series A round, so you can imagine that the company might raise quite a few more rounds before it matures.

Patel tells me he wanted to create a product in the power grid industry because of the “massive opportunity” for “an industry that sorely needs it.” He likes “solving big problems,” says Patel, as does his investors. The team is still a small group, though Patel wouldn’t name how many employees the company has. The company also was mum on all details of its technology.

“The network could embody the best of telco networks, delivering higher degrees of reliability to the distribution network,” says Patel. Patel wouldn’t tell me which utilities were trialling its technology, but said the company is engaged in talks around pilots for a variety of vendors.

The clear draw back of this technology is that because it’s a replacement product, meant to replace the current old mechanical transformers, utilities — and their rate approval boards — might take awhile to justify the investment.

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The 7 MW pilot project is built by Fremont, Calif-based GlassPoint Solar, and will be crucial for the four-year-old GlassPoint to validate its concentrating solar thermal technology, says Rod MacGregor, CEO of GlassPoint Solar.

The company is building the project for Petroleum Development Oman, which is a joint venture between the government of Oman, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Partex. On Tuesday GlassPoint plans to announce a $26 million round of investment from Shell, RockPort Capital, Nth Power and Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital.

The project is only the second for GlassPoint, which built a 300 KW system for Berry Petroleum in central California in early 2011. But the Middle East is where GlassPoint wants to be. It’s the mother lode of oil production and where natural gas, which has historically been used to produce steam for oil extraction, remains expensive. Natural gas in the U.S., on the other hand, is too cheap right now to make solar steam production an attractive option, MacGregor said.

GlassPoint set out to design equipment for producing steam that is then injected by high pressure into the ground to loosen and thin the sticky oil in rock fissures. The use of steam to recover more oil from the field isn’t a new concept, but using solar energy to produce steam is a more novel approach. Many companies that are developing similar solar thermal equipment for electricity generation also are targeting the oil recovery operation. BrightSource Energy, for example, built a 29 MW project at a Chevron oil field in California last year.

GlassPoint’s solar steam equipment uses steel mirrors to concentrate the sunlight onto water-containing steel pipes to produce steam. The set up is similar to the equipment used by much bigger rivals such as Abengoa Solar and Areva. What sets GlassPoint’s design apart is the glass structure that seals each row of mirrors and pipes and protects the equipment from strong wind, sand, dust and humidity. Those same conditions present challenges to any kind of solar steam or electricity generation equipment and require more frequent cleaning.

MacGregor compares his company’s equipment design to that of a greenhouse. Growers “try to get as much light into a greenhouse while protecting the plants from the environment. That’s similar to what we do,” he said.

In addition to the glass shield, GlassPoint’s technology is designed to use low-quality water that likely contains crud from the oil field.  In comparison, solar steam equipment from rivals typically requires very pure water to run, or else their pipes will be clogged by the crud, MacGregor said. Eliminating the need to treat water saves costs.

MacGregor declined to disclose the cost of building the Oman project, which can produce, on average, 50 tons of steam per day. The company contracts with factories to produce the various components for its solar steam equipment. MacGregor plans to use the new round of funding to hire more engineers and people to work on finances and government relations.

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Honest Building’s site pulls data about energy use and green characteristics of buildings from sources including their owners, green building technology service providers and public databases. By putting all that data online, and letting anyone access it for free, Honest Building’s team hopes to promote transparency and some friendly competition between building managers. For example, potential occupants could look up buildings for rent or sale, and prefer to go with buildings that have solar panels or lower energy bills due to their use of energy efficient technologies.

The other aspect of the Honest Building’s site is a subscription service, which will enable green building service providers to engage with building owners. For example, a real estate company could put a request for proposal for a new lighting control system or smart energy management system, and the service providers could use the site to bid on the job. The company plans to make the bulk of its revenue from the subscription service.

This is one of the first cleantech-related investments I’ve seen from either RockPort Capital and Mohr Davidow in awhile. So-called “cleanweb” startups, which use information technology to address resource constraints, is one of the few areas of cleantech that venture capitalists still seem willing to fund. The economics of the deals look more like traditional web and mobile investing: smaller amounts of capital required and hopefully a quicker return on the investment.

Honest Buildings didn’t disclose the round size or terms. Previously the startup raised $750,000 and according to an SEC filing has been working on bumping that up to $2 million.

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As VentureWire puts it in this article, there’s a new term out there called “the Solyndra Effect,” which describes the sickly feeling that the limited partners of the venture funds that backed Solyndra are feeling right now. The reality is that losses that large can make fund raising really difficult for VCs, particularly in an environment when some funds have struggled to raise money.

Solyndra’s VC and private capital investors include Madrone Capital, RockPort Capital, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, CMEA Capital, Redpoint Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and Virgin Green Fund. The involvement of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Solyndra’s biggest backer, is the reason why Republicans are calling foul, as Kaiser has supported the Obama administration.

While Solyndra could still sell its assets for some amount of money, not many solar execs and VCs I’ve talked to think the assets are worth all that much. For the case of solar manufacturer Evergreen Solar, which also filed for bankruptcy recently, its secured debtors are trying to recoup $165 million in notes from an asset fire sale and its unsecured debtors are praying that Evergreen’s assets might exceed that figure, leaving something for them. But as our GigaOM Pro Green IT curator Adam Lesser put it for Evergreen: “Good luck,” getting more than that out.

Another huge loss for VCs was when fiber optic network company Western Integrated Networks (WINfirst) raised $889 million in the broadband build-out era of the late 90′s, and then fell into bankruptcy. WINfirst was able to sell its assets for $12 million.

Solyndra's factory full of panels in April

Solyndra also has reportedly drawn down $527 million of the $535 million loan guaranteed by the Department of Energy. Loan guarantees essentially serve as a promise by the government to make good on a loan if the company can’t, and typically enable better interest rates and lower costs than would otherwise be available to a company for project financing. But Solyndra actually borrowed the loan from the Federal Financing Bank, part of the Treasury Department, so basically the government was acting as a lender to the company directly. So there’s that $527 million to pay back, too, (on top of the $1.1 billion in private funds) if there are any assets out of the Solyndra bankruptcy.

Perhaps you’re wondering how investors could keep funding a company that couldn’t draw enough interest from investors to fulfill its IPO plans back in the Summer of 2010. Beyond the somewhat unexpected change in the economics of the solar industry (panel prices dropped dramatically while Solyndra grew), once investors put money into a company, it can be a difficult decision of when to pull out and when to put in more money.

Say, a fund puts in $50 million in a round, and then Solyndra later says it needs another $50 million to be able to expand production and deliver an economy of scale to reduce manufacturing costs, and some day recoup the fund’s initial investment. Does the fund double down and try to save the initial investment or pull out early on and cut its losses? As recently as March of this year, VentureWire reports that at least three of Solyndra’s backers — Madrone Capital, RockPort Capital and the George Kaiser Family Foundation — put more money into Solyndra in a recapitalization round. When you’re stuck in a hole, sometimes its hard to know if digging is going to help get you out, or send you deeper.

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GE launched its $200 million smart grid challenge a year ago, in conjunction with a group of venture capitalists, including Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins, RockPort Capital and the Carbon Trust. GE put up $100 million and the VCs collectively put up another $100 million, and the idea was to use the funds and the allure of partnerships with GE to help discover innovation around the smart grid, from networking technologies to new home energy management tools.

The funds announced on Thursday are the second stage of the smart grid challenge focused on home energy innovation, and the challenge previously unveiled another group of a dozen or so winners back in November. GE says with this additional $63 million the fund has allocated, or has planned to give, $134 million of the $200 million fund. In total, GE says the challenge to date has created 22 commercial partnerships, one acquisition (Irish powerline monitoring company FMC-Tech), and 5,000 submissions from 74,000 innovators.

OK, so enough of the background, and onto the winners. The 10 companies that will split $63 million are:

• Ember. Makes Zigbee chips and networking tech. Zigbee is a wireless standard used in smart meters and home energy gear.
• GMZ Energy. Develops thermoelectric material for vehicles and solar systems and services, such as applications for cooling and capturing waste heat. Kleiner Perkins had already backed this company, and GE’s investment was made alongside Kleiner Perkin’s.
• Hara. One of the more well-known carbon and energy software players. Another investment alongside Kleiner.
• Nuventix. Has developed a way to cool down LEDs without using a larger fixture size.
• On-Ramp Wireless. A smart grid wireless networking player.
• Project Frog. A building efficiency and design company. This is an investment with RockPort Capital.
• SunRun. A startup that has created a business model around home solar roofs, where it owns and maintains residential solar panels and offer solar contracts to homeowners where they can pay monthly fees over many years, with little or no upfront fee. GE’s investment in SunRun was made with Foundation Capital.
• Viridity Energy. Makes software that dynamically manages power loads on the grid in terms of energy pricing, renewable energy generation and energy storage (one of our Green:Net 2011 Big Ideas winners).
• VPhase. A U.K.-based home energy device and service maker.
• WiTricity. A wireless charging tech maker that is targeting gadgets, cell phones and electric cars.

And the 5 “Innovation winners” that received $100,000 each:

• E.quinox. A U.K.-based project to bring off grid clean power to developing countries.
• PlotWatt. First unveiled at our Green:Net 2011 event, PlotWatt has created smart meter software that deliveries energy-saving recommendations.
• Pythagoras Solar. Created solar window technology.
• Suntulit. A smarter air conditioning system that can reduce energy consumption from HVAC.
• Xergy. An efficient compressor for refrigerators and air conditioning systems.

Beyond these 15 winners, GE announced a partnership with Best Buy, which will work on commercializing the VPhase home energy device and service (check it out on their website), and the Suntulit air conditioning control system. GE has already been working with Best Buy to get its own home energy devices into Best Buy stores in 2012.

GE has a strong interest in the home energy market. At CES in January, GE showed off its new Home Energy Management business, including its Nucleus home energy device, as well as its Brillion line of smart appliances and smart thermostats. All these are meant to connect within the home to GE’s smart meters, then as a gateway to the smart grid.

Image is of GE’s own home energy device the Nucleus.

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But unlike these social media companies, Enphase is manufacturing actual devices (though also software) — buying goods from various suppliers — and that takes a lot of funding to scale up. It has designed a type of inverter that’s distributed for each panel — in contrast to the traditional single central inverter for a solar system — and Enphase says its microinverters are more efficient, safer, and can allow better monitoring. Here’s a look at Enphase Energy’s numbers via its just-filed S-1:

Proposed Maxium Aggregate Offering. $100 million.

Volume. Enphase says it has shipped 750,000 units through May 31, 2011, which represents over about 25,000 solar installations.

More reliable. Enphase says microinverters are 45 times more reliable than central inverters.

Background. Enphase was founded in March 2006 as PVI Solutions.

Financials. For the three months ended March 31, 2011, Enphase generated $18.07 million in revenues, up slightly from $11.59 million in revenues from the same quarter a year earlier. For the full year 2010, Enphase brought in $61.66 million in revenues, up from $20.20 million in 2009. However, Enphase has continued to lose money and has never been profitable. The company lost $9.29 million for the latest quarter, $21.78 million for the full year 2010, and as of March 31, 2011, had accumulated a deficit of $65.8 million.

Growth trajectory. While Enphase continues to lose money, it has been on a growth trend throughout 2010. The company shipped 11,000 units in 2008, 126,000 in 2009, and 414,000 in 2010. For the first three months of 2011, Enphase has shipped 123,000 units, or almost the same as it shipped for the entire year of 2009.

IPO proceeds. Enphase says the $100 million from the IPO will be good for funding the company’s activities over the next 12 months, but Enphase says it may need to raise more after the IPO for R&D, expansion, and acquisition. It’s a rather competitive market for Enphase, competing with large suppliers and sometimes the panel makers themselves.

Installer partners. Enphase says it works with 2,500 installers in North America as of May 31, 2011, and is adding new installers at the rate of about 100 per month.

Manufacturing and suppliers. Enphase works with Flextronics, which assembles and tests its microinverters; Phoenix Contact, which makes the AC cable for its third-generation M215 microinverter system; Fujitsu, for its ASIC; Epcos, for magnetic cores; Cree, for diodes; and TDK-EPC for magnetic components.

Funds raised to date. The company closed a $63 million private round in June last year, bringing the total private money raised to $104 million by the end of 2010.

Who will do well in the IPO? Third Point owns 19.10 percent of shares before the offering; RockPort Capital owns 18.10 percent; Madrone Partners owns 14.80 percent; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers owns 7.70 percent; Applied Ventures owns 6.30 percent; and Bay Partners owns 5.50 percent.

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Streetline embeds its wireless sensors on the streets around parking spots and in meters. Each sensor connects to a mesh network which feeds the parking availability data to a central office, and potential parkers can find open spots through updated street signs or on their cell phones. The company’s Parker app is available on iTunes .

The four-year-old company has deployed its technology in places like Los Angeles; San Francisco; New York City; Sausalito, Calif.; and the University of Maryland. Streetline CEO Zia Yusuf said its city and university customers commonly have between a few hundred to a few thousand parking spots connected via the system, and many customers are expanding early small deployments into larger networks. Streetline says the new funds, which are its Series B, will go toward expanding its network of sensors and services.

The company sells the service to the city or parking provider, and offers the driver access to the service and the mobile app for free. The network costs about $25 to $30 per parking space to install. Parking revenues are a major source of funds for cities, and parking providers can use the smart system to offer dynamic pricing to raise and lower prices depending on demand and time of day. For example, cities looking to reduce congestion in urban areas can raise parking rates at certain times to reduce traffic.

The app saves not only time, but also a lot of wasted gas, which is used up by drivers circling the block searching for a space. Streetline says 30 percent of traffic in cities comes from drivers looking for parking spaces, and the company cites a year-long study that says in a 15-block district in Los Angeles, drivers drove 950,000 extra miles, emitted 730 tons of carbon and burned 47,000 gallons of gas looking for parking.

Streetline is one of several companies using wireless and software to make transportation and parking smarter. A company called Skymeter is looking to deliver a similar smart parking service, but does so by installing a “black box” in the car that houses the network connection, computing device, GPS chip and software. Using a cell phone as a connection to the driver is a lower-cost way to do this, but Streetline’s sensors on the street can give more granular parking-specific data. Companies could also use the cell phone on its own without extra computing in the car or parking space, and a company called Virtual Vehicle Company is building software to offer car data services to companies.

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Abe Yokell, a principal at RockPort Capital Partners, said he thinks it’s easier to identify sales opportunities and determine potential return on investments in the consumer electronics and electric car markets compare to grid storage, given the utility industry seems to loathe embracing change and new technology.

“It’s very difficult to pin down a broad market where you can take a product and sell that product at a clear price,” Yokell said about the utility market. “It’s very ambiguous,” right now, he noted.

Utilities have started to consider installing energy storage as more solar and wind farms are built in their service territories. These renewable energy projects are materializing mostly as a result of state policies that mandate renewable electricity generation. But solar and wind farms can’t provide a steady supply of power that is critical not only for meeting customer demand but also for running the electric grid smoothly (the grid needs to operate at a frequency of 60 Hertz).

Energy storage can provide on-demand power to help balance the supply and demand of the grid. It also can allow renewable energy power plant owners to bank electricity and sell it when prices are high. Adding energy storage can even enable utilities to delay building more power plants and transmission lines because the storage systems – batteries or otherwise – can be recharged at night when electricity demand and price is low, and can add more power to the grid during the day when demand peaks.

But the reality is that market is so new that many potentially suitable technologies are still under development and too pricy. Utilities also want to maximize their investments by figuring out more than one way to make money off storage, and in many cases major regulatory changes need to take place for that happen.

“We’ve been looking for stationary storage (opportunities) for three years now, and we are crying out for companies that will fit our criteria for investments,” said Andrew Chung, a principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lightspeed has invested in lithium-ion battery maker Leyden Energy, which is targeting laptop and tablet PCs as its first market.

Here are some other risks involved with investing in energy storage technology:

1). Are we there yet?: VCs like to say they want to see returns on their investments by at least seven years after they put up their money. But developing marketable storage technology can take longer than that. Battery startups, for example, often need to spend at least several years to investigate different materials to figure out which combinations can deliver the highest energy output. They also typically have to design the battery system with proper software to manage it. Then they have to show that their technologies can perform well in real-life settings and generate several years of data, or else they could have a hard time lining up the money to build a factory and win over utility customers.

2). It takes a lot of money to make money: By now, VCs have learned that commercializing cleantech, such as building the next best solar cells, often requires a lot more capital than they initially anticipated. They are happy to see the federal government ponying up the money to fund research and development. But they aren’t so sure they want to take the big risk by investing early themselves.

3). The missing link: The potentially lucrative energy storage space already has attracted many entrepreneurs and early-stage investments from public and private sources. But there is something amiss that delays efforts to commercialize technologies: private capital providers who can give that last push to launch products or get expensive projects built. In contrast, the solar industry has seen some of these players come in to help finance giant solar power plants

“The call to us is let’s reach out to the financial community and use our policy and regulatory tools and pull in decision makers and thought leaders in the capital world,” said David Wells at Kleiner Perkins. “Let’s create that missing player at the table that allows this emerging technology to become multibillion dollar biz like wind and solar.”

4). Too many me-too technologies: The promise of a large electric car market and renewable energy market, along with billions of dollars in federal funding in the last two years, has attracted oodles of startups and established battery makers to the grid storage market. Many of them are experimenting with same materials and announcing results that aren’t dramatically better than their competitors.  Startups will have to come up with something great in order to compete with long-time battery makers who also are working on next-generation technologies.

Photo courtesy of International Battery

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This morning we’ve heard about three different cleantech investments in smart grid, distributed clean power and even, gasp, next-gen biofuels. GE and a group of investors including Altira, Rockport Capital Partners, NGP Energy Technology Partners, and the venture capital arm of Chevron Technology Ventures, have invested $10 million into small wind builder Southwest Windpower. The stimulus package allocates $872 million over 10 years for federal tax credits for distributed clean power generation like small wind.

Then there’s Ember, a company building wireless sensor network technology, which tells us it has raised $8 million from a long list of investors including Polaris Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, and Chevron Technology Ventures. Ember says the funding was fueled by the “significant surge in the deployment of smart meters,” but there’s another good $4.5 billion in direct investment and billions more in power grid construction in the stimulus package, which will really make that smart meter rollout pick up. Ember calls the stimulus funds a “significant opportunity” for its technology.

Lastly OPX Biotechnologies, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup that is working on genetically modifying microbes for biofuel production, plans to announce tomorrow that it has raised a $17.5M round of funding. The investment was led by Braemar Energy Ventures and also included Altira Group, Mohr Davidow Ventures and X/Seed Capital Management. While biofuels get a smaller piece of the stimulus package compared to clean power generation and power grid construction, they’re still getting billions in research and development and grants.

Last week Lilliputian Systems, a Wilmington, Mass.-based company developing fuel cells for cell phones, laptops and other consumer electronics, announced it has raised $28 million in funding from Stata Venture Partners, Altira Group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Atlas Venture, Fairhaven Capital and Rockport Capital. As far as I know, fuel cells didn’t get a meaningful chunk of the stimulus but energy storage and battery technology that can be used for the grid and electric vehicles did.

Any funding flowing into cleantech looks good given the first quarter of 2009 was as barren as the Mojave: The first three months of the year saw $1 billion, which was a drop of 41 percent from the last quarter of 2008 and 48 percent from the same quarter a year ago. So in those terms we’re expecting that at the very least the second quarter of 2009 will show a pick up of the first quarter. OK so it’s not a scientific study, but let us know if raising funds is getting easier. And thanks Obama!

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Quick, where’s that important note you need right this second? If it’s in Google Notebook, you might want to consider looking at Zoho. They’re taking a page right out of Google and seizing an opportunity. Last week Google announced they were shutting down several services: Jaiku, Google Video, and Dodgeball to name a few. Google Notebook is on the list as well, although it’s not shutting down at this time. It won’t see any additional development however, nor will the browser extension work with it. Effectively, you could keep jotting notes with it but without an expected future for the application or usable plug-in, do you want to?

That’s where Zoho is stepping in. They’ve quickly developed and announced Notebook replacement that fits nicely in their cloud productivity suite. Zoho has a Google Notebook import tool and supporting beta plug-in for Firefox all ready to go. The import instructions appear fairly straight-forward; I’m not a Google Notebook user, so I didn’t try them. Here are the three steps:

• Install the new Zoho Notebook Plugin
• Login to Zoho and Google Notebook
• Go to this URL – chrome://zoho-notebook/content/g2z.html – and click on Start

The Firefox plug-in offers two easy-to-use features that quickly get content into your Zoho Notebook. Select any text and right click to see a “Add to Zoho Notebook” option. Likewise, you can snap a screenshot of any web page or region of a page and have it added to your Notebook.

Props to Zoho for quickly making an import option and a plug-in available in such a short time. This is key aspect of end-user cloud computing that many folks often overlook. Since the software or service is centralized, the provider can be nimble when making changes: develop it, test it, launch it. BAM! It’s there for usage by every single customer in one fell swoop. There’s no having to worry about customers with various software versions, no packaging, no media creation and no delays.

We’re still waiting for cloud computing services to catch up with fully featured software applications, but speed to market and quick solutions are two advantages that I continue to enjoy with these services.

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