We got BOTH kinds of cleantech here:  Solar and PV

Seems like it’s all solar, all the time in cleantech VC land these days.  Here are the deals and tidbits from this week:

• Recurrent Energy, a “solar as a service” player led by infrequent-but-very-smart blogger Arno Harris, announced a $75mm round of financing from Hudson Clean Energy Partners.

• Advanced Technology Ventures announced they have led a $9.5mm series A in Wakonda Technologies, a developer of high-efficiency PV.  General Catalyst, Polaris Venture Partners, Applied Ventures and the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund also participated in the round.

• ATV also led a $14mm Series C in Nuventix, a developer of cooling technologies for advanced lighting and other applications.  New investor Braemar also participated in the round, as did existing investors CenterPoint Ventures, InterWest Partners and RHO Ventures.

• As part of the Miasole round which we mentioned a while back, ArcelorMittal has put $20mm into the company.  They’ve also launched two investment vehicles, one in cleantech and the other in carbon.

• Concrete technology developer Hycrete has raised a $15mm Series C led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, and including participation by Series B investors NGEN Partners and RockPort Capital.

• Cleantech investors in the news:  Venture capital fundraising across all types of firms was up slightly in terms of dollars, but down in terms of the number of funds that closed during the second quarter, so fewer, bigger, later funds is the clear trend… And speaking of Kleiner Perkins, Al Gore’s visionary goal for carbon-free power got a lot of attention this week—and note that he supports the tax shift we’ve discussed here before...  A sign of the times:  Can the YCombinator model work in cleantech, just like it has in Web2.0? Or is it unrealistic to expect hardware development efforts to bang out beta version prototypes just like coders bang out websites…

Other news and notes:  IBM’s Drew Clark on the opportunities and challenges for investors in smart grid technologies…  Andrew Dougherty pointed me to this parody of BP’s marketing campaign…  Finally, and painfully, climate change will mean more kidney stones???