Tidbits from the past week

It continues to feel like things are picking up a little bit in the cleantech venture world, but if so, just a little bit.  I continue to see lots of cleantech startups that are having a surprisingly hard time raising capital, given decent internal progress and good market prospects.  What deals are happening appear to be pretty small ones, some smallish Series A rounds, some smallish follow-ons, some extensions of previous rounds: deals done simply to pad out cash reserves or add a strategically valuable investor.  Not a lot of "inflection point" deals, ones where the capital is intended to dramatically accelerate a company's internal development and growth.  Entrepreneurs would do well to continue to focus on lean growth plans and capital efficient operating models when approaching investors over the near term.

With that in mind, here are deals and other items of interest from the past week or so:

• Solar panel inverter startup GreenRay has raised a $2M Series A from Quercus Trust and 21Ventures.

• In another example of a cleantech startup looking outside of the traditional VC financing path, MSW gasification startup Enerkem has taken in an asset-backed financing facility from ATEL Ventures.

• In China, Nature Elements Capital is looking to raise a $350mm fund to target investments in regional clean energy projects.

• Apparently, at least two Asian-based solar IPOs are planned for Q4.  Apparently.  We'll see...

Other news and notes: 

Here's a great follow-up on the NECEC's inaugural class of Clean Energy Fellows... 

Here's a good perspective from Joel Makower, who always is worth listening to -- but I do disagree with his concept of energy becoming cheap and plentiful anytime soon.  While we are bringing cost curves down on new energy sources, the scale disparity versus incumbent energy techs, and the continuing challenges, mean that even as alternative energy sources start to get close in some cases to incumbent energy benchmarks, we're still a long way from achieving "grid parity" with these new resources.  And crossing that threshold is a long way from energy being virtually free.  Basically, information is a virtual good and energy is a physical good, and as such requires a lot of capital expenditures to produce even when the "fuel" (photons, sugars, etc.) is free, so it'll always be costly.  If anything, I would expect energy prices to go up over the coming decades, not go down.  But others are encouraged to disagree.  What I do agree with is that diversifying our sources and virtual sources (ie: automated efficiency and demand response) of energy may well launch a period of amazing entrepreneurial and innovative efforts even outside of the energy industry, just like the internet has helped usher in a period of "creative destruction" across many different markets... 

Finally, I'd love to chat with any entrepreneurs working on biochar-related businesses -- just drop me an email if you are one.