It's been a good month for Energy Recovery. The company, which makes energy efficient systems for desalinating seawater, pulled off an IPO in the beginning of July in the middle of a swoon on the stock market. The stock is trading in the $11 range, or 40 percent plus the initial price. Ironically, the IPO took place a day after there was much hand-wringing about the lack of IPOs. And since then, it's announced two big deals. The company will supply equipment to the Hadera Sea Water Reverse Osmosis Desalination Plant going up near Haifa, Israel. The plant, being built by IDE Technologies, will open in 2009. Initially it will be capable of converting 100 million cubic meters of sea water into drinking water a year. Eventually, it could be expanded to 130 million cubic meter. ERI will also participate with IDE on the expansion of a desalination plant on Cyprus. Today, meanwhille, Singapore's Hyflux said it will adopt the company's PX Pressure Exchanger for a desalination plant in China. Desalination is a great idea, but it remains an expensive way to produce water. It takes quite a bit of pressure to get the water through the membrane, and over time the membrane can foul up and clog. ERI helps lower the energy costs by converting the pressure in the wastewater into electricity. Other companies like NanH2O are working with better membranes. Todd Kimmel, of Advanced Technology Ventures, is among the many in Silicon Valley scouting for water deals. He's particularly hot on desalination, he told me in a meeting yesterday. 98 desalination projects have been launched in the last three years. The tough part of the market, however, is that utilities are some of the main buyers. They aren't known for being speedy. "The value of water goes up when you don't have it," he said.

OriginOil should have called itself Shake and Bake. The Los Angeles-based company--one of the several start-ups trying to produce oil from algae--is seeking a patent on its process for growing and subsequently harvesting oil from the single-celled buggers with vibrations. The process, roughly, works like this. Nutrients such as carbon dioxide are injected into the growing medium and then fractured into micron-sized bubbles with ultrasonic waves. Breaking down the nutrients makes the nutrients easier to absorb (just as if you were incapacitated and someone pre-chewed your food for you.). Thus, the algae grow faster. Then, when it comes time to harvest water and other catalysts in the growing medium and wiggled at a high ultrasonic intensity to crack the organism's surrounding membrane. When the membrane is cracked, algae floats out of the cell, presumably, and to the top of the water. The oil can then be skimmed off the top of the pond. Death by tiny vibration. I can see the t-shirt now: Kill 'Em All, and Let the Water Pik Sort it Out. OriginOil in some sense is more of an equipment company than an oil company in my book. Extracting algae from the water and then extracting the oil from the algae are two vexing problems for algae companies. Some have come up with clever ideas to solve this problem. Solazyme, for instance, doesn't grow its algae in ponds. It grows it in kettles with sugar. No water, no extraction problem. Synthetic Genomics is working on a way to genetically modify algae so that they membrane will crack easily, or on its own But many algae companies--are there are at least twenty out there--haven't solved this problem yet. Some, judging by discussions with them, think they can get rich by merely getting some desert land and plastic bags. Some of these me-too companies would pay dearly for the OriginOil system.

Fremont, California-based Solyndra is a secretive solar company.  As secretive as you can be when you have 400+ employees, are looking for a valuation of greater than a billon dollars, and occupy a 183,000 square foot building on the side of a major highway.  (I’ve verified those valuation claims from a number of Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists who passed on the funding deal.) But today we get two big Solyndra contract announcements from: Solar Power, an OTC-traded, Shenzen-based module manufacturer and “vertically integrated, turnkey solar power solutions provider,� with an agreement to purchase approximately $325M worth of Solyndra solar panels over the next five years. As well as a supply agreement with Phoenix Solar, a Germany-based solar integrator, worth approximately $700 million.  They claim that Solyndra’s solar panels are “highly innovative and distinguish themselves significantly from conventional solar modules.� I’ve tried to contact the firm a number of times but they’ve been less than communicative.  We’ll keep trying.  I have spoken to some former Solyndra employees.  In fact, oddly for a start-up with a brilliant trajectory, they’ve had a number of senior executive shake-ups.  The first was an “exodus� of their CTO, CFO, and President and the next was a loss of the senior staff that replaced the original team. One of their original technologists, in fact the gentleman who has some of the core CIGS IP, is polite but says they have very little chance of scaling to volume at the right cost due to enormous packaging and encapsulation challenges. However, there has been some progress in CIGS solar packaging materials of late. According to Martin Roscheisen, the CEO of Nanosolar, in a comment he posted to one of my blogs, “If anything, CIGS is easier to package than CdTe: Because unlike with CdTe, at least the thin-film device stack is fundamentally stable with CIGS. (The CdTe thin-film stack is not intrinsically stable; its backelectrode is known to be instable.) So the packaging solutions that work for CIGS are a superset of what works for CdTe.� We’ll get you some more info on these contracts and Solyndra in the coming weeks. BTW, Solyndra is hiring. But, some CIGS execs say they are seeing an increased flow of Solyndra resumes too. The same thing happened in 2007 before Miasole announced it was having problems. But this was before these two big contracts.