Not quite a screeching halt…

...but a pretty big drop-off nonetheless.

As we’ve discussed ad nauseam here on this site, every tracker has a different tally for cleantech venture capital dollars and deals, for a wide range of geographic, definitional, and methodological reasons.  But it’s still really useful to be able to be able to compare one tracker’s quarterly tallies against their own earlier results, to get a good sense of overall market trajectories.

The Cleantech Group released preliminary Q4 figures this week, which are largely consistent with Eric Wesoff’s tally that came out a few days back.  Here’s the key part:

Q3:  158 deals totaling $2.7B.

Q4:  99 deals totaling $1.7B.

The Cleantech Group puts a positive spin on it, but that’s a heck of a drop-off, both in deals and dollars.  Still, given how heated things were in Q2 and Q3, it’s probably a very healthy thing to see the industry take a bit of a breather—and hey, it’s not like 99 deals isn’t still a lot of activity.  Less healthy?

40% of the cleantech VC dollars in 2008 went into solar alone.

Yikes.

Some other news and notes:

• James Hansen’s message to Michelle and Barack.

• Apologies for the blatant self-promotion, but I’m just really excited about the addition of Eric Apfelbach to M2E Power and eager to share the news…

• Some good thoughts from Alan Salzman of VantagePoint on the impacts of low oil prices on cleantech.

• Here’s a pretty good green business report from Environmental Defense Fund (note: opens pdf).  And let me pass along a little snarky “tip”:  If you ever want to flood your inbox with messages, set up a Google news and blog alert for the phrases “eco-friendly” and “introduced”.  Then just sit back and enjoy the greenwash deluge…

• Joel Serface pointed me to this major, major problem for the wind industry.  Uh oh!

.

.

.

.