• Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) announced C$42.5M in new funding for a variety of Canadian clean technology companies. Tyler Hamilton of Clean Break has some good thoughts on the news. Earlier today, a reporter asked me why "Canada seems to be so active in cleantech compared to the U.S." Hmmm... Good question.
  

• Meanwhile here in the States, mainstream VCs continue to look into "interesting areas" like cleantech. See this article from Red Herring. Is cleantech "muddy water", per the "big fish" quote by Rob Chandra? On the other hand, the article puts the increased VC interest in cleantech in context, given the wide range of other investment areas mentioned, and the fact that "clean technology" isn't even mentioned while energy is only mentioned in passing... Such mainstream VC interest undoubtedly seems more noteworthy to the people inside the industry than to the people currently outside looking in...
  

• On the general topic of fuel cell markets and timing, here are some outspoken comments from the President and CEO of PolyFuel. "When," "how" and even "if" remain key questions for cleantech investors looking into various aspects of fuel cell markets, so Balcom's thoughts are interesting to read.

• Finally, as we often note, there are some fun things to think and learn about in the world of early-early-stage clean technologies. Here's today's fun story.
  

Happy to note amongst the regular cleantech deals tracking that Expansion Capital Partners' Clean Technology Fund II has announced the purchase of additional shares of portfolio company Biorem Inc. in a PIPE transaction. The press release is here. Biorem manufactures biofilter media for use in air pollution control.

• Organic Holding Company, which offers the Organic-To-Go delivery/ pick-up service, announced a $2.5M Series B raise. The round was provided by Funk Ventures, and brings total capital raised in 2005 to $5.5M.

• There's been much news lately about the continuing strong fundraising in the VC community. And this is being seen in the cleantech portion of the industry as well. Here's a good article highlighting DFJ Element's emergence and discussing the broader trend (mea culpa: also includes a couple of quotes by yours truly, but it remains a good article nonetheless). [Update: Here's a good in-depth article in Red Herring]
  

• Building off of the mention a couple of weeks ago of In-Q-Tel's investment in Tendril Networks, the Christian Science Monitor has an article profiling another investment by the CIA-backed venture group: SkyBuilt Power. No details on the round are mentioned, but we'll provide them when they're available.
  

SmartSynch, which has technology for advanced wireless automated meter reading (we've discussed the topic before here), announced a $12M Series C round. Battelle Ventures (with affiliate fund Innovation Valley Partners) provided the new outside capital in the round, along with existing investors Siemens Venture Capital, JPMorgan Partners, Kinetic Ventures, Nth Power, Endeavor Capital, Lime Rock Partners, Cinergy Ventures, and GulfSouth Capital. The general AMR industry appears to be re-energizing lately.

Following on the heels of the various news reports last week regarding emerging solar technologies, there's this brief column in the MIT Technology Review. Worth checking out.

Biodiesel and ethanol continue to attract project financing, with the announcement that New Energy Capital has committed to funding a 55m gpy ethanol plant in Michigan, with total construction costs expected to reach $86M (pdf of the press release is here). This follows similar news from New Energy Capital, Seattle Biodiesel, and others.

What's interesting about this from a venture capital perspective is that several venture capital firms are getting into these biofuel project finance deals indirectly -- by funding the project finance firms. Rustic Canyon and others recently funded US Renewables Group, and New Energy Capital raised $30M from Vantage Point and CalSTRS.

So in effect, these venture capital firms are providing project financing for biofuel facilities. And others are looking at the possibility. It's an interesting development. It reflects the fact that technological advantage isn't necessarily going to be a determinant of project success in biofuels as much as geographic location, capital efficiency and strategic relationships might be. And the way it's happening reflects that VCs may be looking to get into biofuels, but are finding it hard to find technology pure-plays in the space, where they presumably could apply their core competency in identifying winning technologies -- and instead are giving their capital to project financiers who presumably have better expertise in funding "steel in the ground". This, despite the fact that project financing often targets lower returns than venture capital investments aim for. ...Of course, these venture capital firms would likely counter-argue that their expected returns in these particular cases are competitive, and that there are additional strategic benefits to having good exposure to real-world use of energy technologies. No matter what, it's an intriguing development.

An early sign of a growing trend of indirect investing by cleantech VCs? Or a technology-specific solution that won't be applied in other cleantech market segments? These investments raise some interesting questions.

[10/25 update: US Renewables Group has made another investment, acquiring Bottle Rock Power Corporation, a geothermal operation. These project plays, as noted, go beyond biofuels.]

NP Photonics, which has advanced optical-fiber sensor technology, announced an additional $2M investment in their Series A2 led by Shepherd Ventures (pdf here). This brings the total A2 raise to $7M.

Optical sensing technology, often drawing from breakthroughs developed originally for telecom purposes, are having increasing impacts on clean technology applications. Some new-technology optical sensors are being used to detect contamination in environmental conditions, manufacturing conditions, natural gas pipelines, etc. Others, such as the fiber-based sensors that NP Photonics are developing, are being used in a wide range of cleantech and non-cleantech applications -- on the cleantech side, for example, fiber-based strain detectors are being used to measure "sag" conditions on powerlines to predict outages, and to monitor underground storage tanks for leaks. There are other applications that are not directly cleantech-related as well. So optical sensors are a good example of the kind of platform technologies that are increasingly crossing across and into clean technology investing areas -- other examples would include M2M communications and manufacturing-focused software.