Thanks to Todd Kimmel of Mayfield Fund and overall green chemistry fan for updating us on this one. Last year, we wrote about how Kevin O'Connor at University of College Dublin had come up with a way to recycle old plastic bottles and containers with microorganisms. The bugs eat a cooked down version of a plastic bottle and metabolize it into new, saleable molecules. If I could do that, I'd never leave home. The plastic that comes out of the digestive process is also biodegradable. It can go safely into a landfill and will disappear over time. O'Connor has since formed a company, called Bioplastech, to commercialize it. CrapPlastic is funner, but might spook investors. If the process can be brought up to an industrial level, it could help the world get rid of the nation-sized mass of plastic that humanity has generated. Right now, there are two general ways of dealing with old plastic. Some countries, like England and Ireland, ship it to other countries after doing the green thing and recycling. Plastic bottles have a low recycling value; hence, a lot of the plastic ends up in landfills forever. (But the Irish are big into recycling — a 15 cent tax on plastic bags dropped their use by over 99 percent, O’Connor said.) The other method to “recycle� plastic is to burn it. Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and other countries practice it. It yields useable energy, but it’s not the cleanest practice in the world either. Bioplastech’s process works like this. Polypropylene (plastic) is cooked until it turns into a styrene oil. The oil is then fed to microorganisms, which metabolically turn it into globules of fatty acids. When 60 percent of the bacteria consists of those fatty acids, the microorganism is split open and the harvested fatty acids are converted to a biodegradable plastic. See why bacteria make such good workers? Keep your eye on Ireland in cleantech and advance science, by the way. For years, the Irish tech industry primarily concentrated on serving as an outsourcing destination for multinationals. But in about 2000, the government — realizing that Ireland was no longer a low-cost center — began to invest in technology transfer center and incubators.

I’m writing this from a BIPV Summit in San Diego. There are about 100 people attending, rather scant for a solar event, but it's an interesting group.  Utilities, roofers, architects, and the usual suspects from the PV world -- Suntech, Solyndra, Heliovolt, some startup called Pythagoras Solar. First let’s make the distinction between BAPV and BIPV.  BAPV is Building Applied PV -– it’s a retrofit added to the building long after construction, while BIPV is Building Integrated PV and it means just that -- the architects, building designers, building owners designed the photovoltaics into the skin and roof of the building from day one. And as of now -- it’s a tiny market.  Lots of potential, but tiny.  Nadav Enbar, Research Manager, of Energy Insights, estimates that the total amount of installed BIPV, even with the most aggressive estimates, is about 70 megawatts.  Lux Research says that 97 megawatts was installed last year but they are probably including BAPV as well.  Suntech's Leonard May, Director of BIPV Products, claims to have shipped $80 million in BIPV last year. And that’s a tiny sliver of world PV. But it feels like we’re at the inflection point of this market.  The new format of the U.S. investment tax credit and Europe’s new Energy Performance of Buildings Directive are policy tools that will  serve to accelerate BIPV penetration. Despite the potential, there are very few pure-play BIPV firms, and there are very few VC-funded BIPV firms. Here is a small gallery of examples of BIPV.  More info on BIPV in the next blog post.

EnergyHub has landed a series A investment for its energy monitoring dashboards for homes — and it thinks its products will be well received by homeowners with or without utilities' help. The New York-based startup didn't disclose terms of the investment from .406 Ventures and Physic Ventures, but CEO Seth Frader-Thompson on Tuesday called it a "typical series A" investment. EnergyHub plans to use the money for testing its devices in utility pilot trials and for continued product development. That includes plans to have its energy dashboards and energy-monitoring wall socket adapters and power strips available to consumers and utilities in mid-2009, Frader-Thompson said. EnergyHub's dashboard is a touch-screen, full-color display that shows data that is transmitted via ZigBee from in-home energy monitoring devices in a variety of formats. Tendril Networks, Energate and a host of other startups and established companies make similar energy monitoring devices (see The Smart Home, Part I). Frader-Thompson said that EnergyHub's dashboard offers a "higher-fidelity experience" than others he's seen. Of course, all of these companies have a very limited real-world market at present, with their devices now almost entirely in use with utility pilot projects. EnergyHub is working on a 50-home pilot with an undisclosed utility itself, Frader-Thompson said. But when it comes to selling its devices — which will likely be more than $100 for a starter kit, Frader-Thompson said — he doesn't think EnergyHub needs to wait for utilities to install "smart meters" able to beam energy usage data into homes for homeowners to start buying (see Smart Meter Installations Grow Nearly Fivefold). "The level of direct consumer interest and interest from retailers indicates that there's quite a bit of interest" independent of utility efforts, he said. That's what a lot of other companies in the home energy monitoring and control field have been saying (see Will Utilities or Customers Lead in Smart Grid?). Home automation system maker Control4, for example, is now offering energy usage and control features in its broader home entertainment and security automation system, although at $500 and up, it isn't a system that will fit every homeowner's budget (see A Broadband Smart Grid?). But other industry observers think that utilities will play a critical role in popularizing in-home energy systems, first by paying for the smart meter that will measure and broadcast the home's energy data, and then by offering rebates and incentives for people who curb their energy use. EnergyHub's dashboard will be able to collect data from ZigBee-enabled smart meters when they do arrive, and is in talks with undisclosed meter makers using older, proprietary wireless communications, Frader-Thompson said. Without a smart meter, homeowners could read the energy use data beamed from EnergyHub's wall socket adapters and power strips — or potentially other devices. While Frader-Thompson wouldn't go into details on what partnerships EnergyHub may be forming, he did point out that its dashboard has the ability to monitor and control temperature, though the company doesn't make "smart" thermostats. EnergyHub has been around for a little more than a year, and received a $156,000 grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in December 2007. Frader-Thompson and several other EnergyHub execs once worked for Honeybee Robotics, which makes hardware for NASA's Mars missions and the U.S. military.

In flush times, the funding of a company is not necessarily indicative of the potential success of that company (witness the last dot-com boom). One of interesting effects of a severe downturn in capital markets is that market forces have a tendency to mercilessly cull the herd. The money that does flow in times like these tends to be much more discriminating. That is why I received this morning's news that Fisker has secured an additional $85 Million in financing with such interest. I've been on record before with some skepticism about Fisker that went beyond the natural competitive sabre rattling that naturally happens when you are CMO of their competitor. My skepticism, which I think is fair and objective, mostly relates to the fact that they have not yet demonstrated a fully working prototype -- which needs to be completed for crash tests to start -- to journalists. This makes their previously announced schedules questionable, although they have recently slipped the expectation of customer deliveries to next spring. So that is why the news of a significant round of funding for Fisker in this environment must force me to recalibrate my skepticism (I just IM'd a reporter telling him that I was writing a positive post about Fisker and he said it was a sign of the apocalypse.) Incidentally, I don't buy the argument that a company's business plan is somehow viable just because a top-tier venture capital firm has invested. The nature of Venture Capital is to invest in a portfolio of companies with the expectation that most will fail. But an $85 million investment with new outside money is a positive sign, no doubt, that things are progressing. Bringing the car to market still depends on successful development of a working prototype and successful crash testing and production ramp up. These are not minor challenges. What makes this news all the more interesting is that Fisker's nearest competitor (and my former employer), Tesla, has struggled to raise significant capital since the capital markets collapsed last September. An internal convertible round was eventually closed, but by the company's own admission it has been difficult. This is despite the fact that Tesla has over 300 cars delivered to paying customers, who are reporting that the cars are working beautifully for the most part. So what is going on here? It is difficult to say. An announcement of money raised in a private company rarely mentions an important piece of data -- the valuation at which the investment was made. So we don't know if the $85 Million was made at a higher valuation than the last round or in a down round (that is, until Quantum has to report the dilution of its stake in its next 10Q). Similarly, we don't know if Tesla has been unable to raise capital or if they are just unwilling to raise capital at the valuations being offered. In any case, if you follow the money, Fisker's looking pretty good this morning. DISCLOSURE: Although I was formerly the CMO of Tesla Motors, I have no continuing relationship with or financial interest in the company. Likewise, I have no relationship with Fisker Automotive or their investors. Darryl Siry is the Senior Analyst for Cleantech at Peppercom Strategic Communications. He is also the former chief marketing officer for Tesla Motors. You can read more at his blog at http://www.darrylsiry.com or email him at djsiry@gmail.com.

If General Motors hasn't been kicked around enough in the past several weeks, the company today announced that it is working with Segway on the P.U.M.A. a two-wheeled vehicles for urban commuting that looks like a cross between a hot dog cart and an umbrella stand. Judge for yourself: You can already see hipsters lining up to get this. Didn't the Pope have something like this? It was demonstrated in New York City today. The personal transportation market has been the next big thing since Johnny Quest popularized the jet pack in the mid-1960s. So far, though, it's been the low-tech solutions like skateboards that have won out. Toyota has shown personalized vehicles, but only prototypes. Segway was supposed to revolutionize the planet back in the early part of the decade. The vehicles, though, cost quite a bit. Worse, it dovetailed with a growing concern about health and fitness in the U.S. Putting people on electric vehicles instead of walking didn't make a lot of sense. I mean, look what it did to 1976 Decathlon champion Bruce Jenner:

The Empire State Building -- one of the favorite places in the world to try to impale strangers by tossing change off the observation deck -- is getting a major retrofit, according to the Environmental Leader. Energy efficiency will constitute $20 million of the overall $500 million modernization project for the iconic building. Ideally, it will result in $4.4 million in energy savings annually. The payback on green building projects like this are typically faster than in solar, where payback can take eight or more years. Some of the improvements include: 6,500 thermal windows, individual power management consoles for tenants and a retrofit of the chiller and ventilation controls. (Air conditioning is one of the big power consumers in the U.S. -- read here for an overview of several startups in the field. The retrofit in part is being orchestrated by Johnson Controls, one of the old guard in building maintenance and management. When startups talk about companies doing more "traditional" technologies, they often mention Johnson. But the company is not lying down and over the next few years could become one of the major purchasers of startups.