Microbes, clean coal, underground digestion. How could you not like Luca Technologies. The company -- which has discovered a strain of microorganisms that can convert coal into methane -- has raised $75.9 million in a third round of financing, according to VentureWire. (subscription required.). In a nutshell, the microorganisms eat coal and methane comes out the other end, which is really the same thing that occurs when cows eat grass. Burning methane is cleaner than burning coal. Thus, Luca's bugs can cut down the fumes and pollution from what is probably the inevitable continued consumption of coal. The microbes can also eat dirty shale oil. They are anaroebic too. This...

If you are convinced that next year will be a painful one for solar, then check out the latest figures from market research firm iSuppli: Revenue for the global solar panel market is expected to plummet nearly 20 percent in 2009.

That would be a drop from $15.9 billion in 2008 to $12.9 billion in 2009, coming after solar panel companies have experienced eight years of growth.

Blame it on the oversupply of panels. There will just be too many companies making them and not enough demand to erect them all. The problem already has occurred: The industry produced 7.7 gigawatts worth of panels in 2008 but installed only about half of them, said iSuppli’s solar analyst Henning Wicht.

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It's another dismal day in the neighborhood. Connecticut's solar initiative -- which had hoped to offer consumers subsidies for installing solar systems over the next two years, is out of cash six months into the project says the Green Inc. blog at the New York Times. The governor is trying to scrape a little cash together and the federal tax incentives passed in the week of the financial debacle could help, but installers are worried. Spain went through a similar turmoil, which lead to an oversupply of panels. Connecticut is much smaller so the same won't likely occur. Meanwhile, Nikkei Net (subscription required) reports that Toyota may suffer a $1.67 billion (that's U.S.,...

CSP Concentrating Solar Power

Despite the staggering capital requirements for the plant build-out, VCs have invested enormous amounts of early-stage funding in parabolic troughs, power towers, and Stirling engines. Once the technology is worked out, the challenge for these firms in 2009 is the financing of these billion dollar projects. VCs can’t do that without help from banks, PE investors, and government.

Ausra:  Utility-scale solar thermal using a parabolic trough-based system with a “compact linear fresnel reflector" used in conjunction with a yet undisclosed thermal storage technology.  Their most recent funding round was $60.6 million from KERN Partners, Generation...

There are some very strong arguments why hydrogen (used in a fuel cell EV) does not make sense as a short, medium or long-term solution. The most fundamental argument is that hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a fuel, since it requires energy inputs to "refine" into pure hydrogen from water or natural gas (it cannot be mined, like oil, coal or gas). Since the energy to create hydrogen for use in a fuel cell can be more efficiently transmitted and stored in a battery for use in a EV drivetrain, it will never make sense to pursue hydrogen since the energy is always better used in a battery electric vehicle (so the argument goes). The problem with this argument is that it is a...

This week the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition released the findings of our Bay Area Nano Survey. Of the 129 companies that we surveyed, we received seven responses that were complete. Although we didn’t find out all the information that we requested in the survey, we did find out one thing -- many companies are not willing to be transparent about how they handle nanomaterials. I live in Santa Clara County where more that 50 percent of the companies are clustered. This made me especially worried about the lack of responses to our survey. While I was mapping the location of the companies we surveyed, I realized that a good chunk of them are located less than three miles from where...