Up until this week, Ron Lloyd was the VP for Tesla's White Star program. Lloyd joined Tesla in 2005 to head up the program's vehicle manufacturing strategy, including the construction of a 150,000 square foot production facility near Albuquerque. The WhiteStar, which Tesla says will be available for sale by 2009 or 2010, is the company's attempt to break into the consumer market - it's a four door EV or REV sedan that will reportedly sell for between $50,000 and $70,000. Or maybe not. Fat Spaniel, the solar monitoring company, announced today that Ron Lloyd has joined the company as its new VP for Operations. Lloyd will be in charge of scaling the company's global monitoring services. Lloyd is just the latest in a series of high profile departures for the EV company, which has been plagued recently by a slower than expected production ramp up. In January, Tesla fired 15 employees, including three senior executives - two of which were manufacturing vice presidents. That happened a month after the company's board ousted founder and former CEO Martin Eberhard. The difference here is that it appears Lloyd left of his own volition, while the firings in December and January were, according to Tesla's VP for Sales Darryl Siry, "about accountability. If you don't get the job done, there are consequences." Presumably, then, Lloyd was getting the job done - it may have been Tesla that wasn't reciprocating. With only five Roadsters completed, and plans for the WhiteStar far from solid, the departure of the program's head may put a damper on the WhiteStar's production future. Already we know production on the WhiteStar was delayed three to six months because of allegedly substandard work performed by car designer - and current competitor - Henrik Fisker. Fisker's work, and subsequent introduction of a competing car, are the subject of a Tesla lawsuit and counter lawsuit and motion for arbitration filed by Fisker. So why would Lloyd leave a company where he was in charge of a potentially large breakthrough in the EV market? One guess may be that Lloyd was out of his range - he worked previously at Sun Microsystems and HP - and felt more comfortable working at a software-based company instead of the (supposedly) production-centric Tesla. Another, perhaps more plausible guess based on the company's slower than expected production and difficulties building a production-ready drivetrain, is that Lloyd got out while the getting out was good.

Innovation Fuels, a New York-based biodiesel company, has completed financing on a $15.5 million B round. The company raised $10.5 million in equity and $5 million in debt from Credit Suisse, RNK Capital, and Lyrical Partners. This is on top of the $15.5 million A round the company raised in 2007 to help finance its first biodiesel plant in New Jersey. What's interesting here is the $160 million in credit Innovation Fuels picked up from Citizens Financial Bank to finance their upstream and downstream market consolidation. This brings up two interesting questions. First, why would a company raise a credit line ten times greater than a concurrent venture round? Second, why wouldn't the investors foot the bill for this kind of capital? President and CEO John Fox said the company will use the credit "primarily for procurement of our feedstock and to ship our product internationally." Innovation Fuels is also opening a new European office. The upstream activities involve securing the acquisition of non-food feedstocks like jatropha, while downstream moves include buying up the holdings of North American Biodiesel, a Wisconsin producer. Expansion moves like these are outside of the traditional VC arena - early research, prototyping and technology piloting, new processes. But Innovation Fuels is still, roughly speaking, an early stage company. In other words, its likely the risk involved in scaling out is too high for more conservative project financing capital, but the moves are too staid for traditional VC. Though, its not like Innovation counts General Catalyst or VantagePoint amount its investors. I think Innovation Fuels has found itself in a spot that's becoming increasingly common among expanding greentech companies. While it's a relatively new company, its expansion moves are outside of the realm of traditional VC. But its relative newness means it doesn't have the capital base necessary to attract project finance. So, with a mix of credit and VC, Innovation will begin a slow scale out from 140,000 barrels per year in 2008 to over 1 million barrels in 2010. Okay, so not so slow. The point here is that a lot of greentech companies are facing a similar growth quandary - how do you expand into commercial production when you have a small capacity and capital base? Solar companies with 25 MW pilot plants and no revenues may find it hard to attract expansion capital in an increasingly crowded field of similar technologies. The rise of late stage funds, such as RockPort's new $450 million fund, may alleviate this. Though, most of those will be targeted to a small number of firms requiring large amounts to break into commercial production. Attracting the attention of those funds will be an increasingly competitive proposition, especially as VCs gain more experience in this market and become more choosy over which technologies they sink their money into. Which ones are those? The ones that have exit potential. Until then, we'll see a few more of these credit/VC combinations, though hopefully it won't become a trend.