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...

... is the sound of China deciding to become a big player in solar project installations, overnight.

It's clear that China is going to be a dominant force in cleantech in the coming decades, starting immediately.  But what that will mean for cleantech VCs remains very much unclear.  What is clear is that cleantech VCs need to start getting smart about that factor, asap.  And thus, so should their LPs.

But should cleantech VCs start investing in China?  It's not apparent that US-based investors do very well investing in China, at least without having a local presence on the ground.  Since most cleantech-specialist VCs don't have that, are they vulnerable to being left out?  There are...

We talked about Q2 numbers a while back, but Ernst & Young's Q2 release this past week is particularly useful to look through because of the depth of data they released -- a great breakdown by stage, category, etc. with historical data.  Inclusive not only of energy, but also other cleantech sectors often ignored.  The E&Y data was worth the wait... The headline which you've probably already seen is that it was a record quarter for U.S. cleantech venture capital, at $962mm, way up from Q1 and the biggest quarter since 2002 (barely beating out Q3 2007). Of course, that's on a dollar basis.  The NUMBER of deals was big, yes, at 41, but that only puts the quarter at the 3rd most...

OK, gross overstatement in the title for this column, admittedly intended to grab attention. But something that's been becoming clear for some time now, and was reinforced for me at yesterday's fun Greentech Media PV vendor showcase, was that the innovation backlog and the overwhelming VC interest in the sector over the past few years have made it a very challenging sector for venture investors now. The market for solar generating systems is big and growing attractively. Much of it looks like semiconductor technology, and there have been some successful IPOs in the sector, so it naturally draws VC interest. A lot of VC interest. The Cleantech Group tallied up around $4.6B...

Rob Day, pioneering renewable energy VC investor, blogger and all-around good guy is on vacation in much sunnier climes this week and has given me the honor of filling in for him. My name is Eric Wesoff and I’m a senior analyst at Greentech Media and the author of the Venture Power Report. Here’s this week’s Cleantech Investing blog, now with slightly higher snark. Stealth Solar Stealthy solar firm Solexel is listed on Technology Partner’s website and on KP’s website but information is scant. They do have some job listings for epitaxial silicon engineers and MEMS engineers and the MEMS aspect is intriguing. Their write-up claims that they develop, “disruptive,...

Almost all VCs will say that they look to invest in "disruptive" technologies -- new products or systems where the value proposition is so markedly better in comparison to the incumbent choices that the market will have little choice but to go with the new option. Venture capital, needing to see rapid growth potential, naturally needs to see such opportunities, so it's easy for VCs to say that they're looking for Disruptive Technologies. But VCs mean different things when they say this. And in cleantech, the differences between what I'll call Compatible Disruptive Technologies and Incompatible Disruptive Technologies are, perhaps, even more stark than in other sectors. Compatible...

We've discussed before the important role that angels have to play in the cleantech investment sector. The biggest reason is because there can be longer gestation periods for cleantech startups (hard to release an early beta version into the market, as you sometimes can with other tech plays).  Thus, in this sector more than others, angels with more patient approaches than institutional investors can play an important role in bridging the gap between invention and commercialization. So it's very interesting to see mention of this analysis from the Kauffman Foundation which looked broadly at angel investment patterns across all sectors and estimated that overall, angels are earning...