At Canaccord Genuity's very good sustainability dinner in Boston this week, I had an enjoyable conversation with CG's Marc Marano, a leader on their cleantech team.  He told me about some pretty interesting data they'd pulled together on the solar industry.

We're all familiar already with what a down year 2009 was for financings, but perhaps no sector was harder hit than solar panel manufacturers.  Marc's team had pulled together a list of all the financings in the solar sector for the five quarters Q1 2009 through Q1 2010.  And looking over their tally, I see 18 follow-on rounds during that period to solar panel manufacturers or their suppliers.

Twelve of those rounds were insider rounds, often bridge financings.  And two of the remaining ones were led by a corporate investor not an institutional investor.

Basically, during those five quarters almost no VCs were writing big new checks to follow-on rounds.  They were backing their existing solar panel plays, and making small Series A investments.  Marc notes that things have been better since then (including a couple of deals his group helped), but still... 

It's a wonder we haven't seen even more of a shakeout than is already going on in that sector.  I suspect we'll soon start being able to tell eventual winners from losers with a little more clarity...