It looks like eSolar is moving toward the equipment business too.

Power provider NRG Energy signed a deal with eSolar under which NRG has acquired the rights to build solar thermal power plants on three areas earlier secured by eSolar for $10 million. In turn, eSolar will provide the equipment for the project. The first solar plants from this deal should be operational by 2011. NRG will subsequently sell the power to utilities.

Under the deal, eSolar will become the equipment manufacturer and consultant, not the power provider.

If the contours of the deal sound familiar, that’s because they are. Earlier this year, solar thermal startup Ausra changed its business plans. The company had earlier planned to build solar thermal power plants with its own equipment. Revenue for Ausra would come from selling power. In January, however, Ausra said it would start to concentrate on selling solar thermal equipments and building out solar thermal plants.

The reason for the switch? Capital and time, said Ausra’s CEO Robert Fishman in an interview. Building and owning power plants takes several years and hundreds of millions in capital. Utilities and power providers have access to the kind of manpower and money needed to do that. Startups don’t.

Power plants "are way beyond" the capabilities of a startup, Fishman said. Besides, by shifting to power plants, Ausra could begin to garner revenue now, versus several years in the future when power begins to come online.

Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar has already raised $130 million. Still, it has been looking for additional funds. New CEO (and early investor) Bill Gross said in January that the company was looking to sell up to 10 percent of the company.

More will be released in a press conference later today.

The power versus equipment debate will likely be a big one this year. BrightSource Energy, another solar thermal company, says it will forge ahead with its plans to become a power provider. It recently signed a deal to build 1.3 gigawatts worth of solar thermal capacity. Southern California Edison will buy the power from BrightSource. BrightSource and Stirling Energy Systems also have other large solar thermal contracts.

Wind companies in Europe are also debating their options on this issue.

Companies will largely determine which way to go on this issue depending on the circumstances, said Travis Bradford, who heads up the Prometheus Group, in an interview last week. If they need money now, they sell equipment, which can be lucrative as well as cutthroat. If they have enough, they tend to look at the idea of being a power provider more closely.

“People fit their business model to whatever restraints they find themselves under,� Bradford said.

Solar energy system owners and installers know that shading -- shadows caused by chimneys, tree branches or dust -- is a problem. How bad is the problem? National Semiconductor paid for a survey to quantify the issue, right before it’s due to start selling chips that it claims can recover some of the energy lost from shading. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said the survey showed that 41 percent of solar installers have to deal with shading when they sell or install a system. Only a little over half of the surveyed, or 54 percent, said shading is not acceptable, suggesting that the issue might not be as dire as it seems. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research did the phone survey in January and spoke with 150 installers in the United States. The amount of energy lost from shade can be significant, National Semi said. A panel can produce more than 50 percent less power if just 10 percent of it is in the shadow or covered in debris, the chip company said. National Semi is proposing to fix this output problem with its SolarMargic branded power management chips. The chips would be attached to each panel to track the energy output and ensure that whatever a shaded panel can produce is harvested by the central inverter. In some current energy system designs, those shaded panels are bypassed, National Semi said. The company delayed its launch to later this spring. Last year, the company said it would start selling the chips at the end of 2008.

Everyone has heard the algae pitch by now. The rapid-growing, single-celled buggers produce an inordinate amount of oil. Approximately 30 percent of their body mass in a natural state is lipid content and genetic engineering and selective breeding can pop it up closer to 70 percent. The whole North Sea oil field was once a giant algal bloom. Algae proponents say they will ultimately be able to get 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of oil per acre per year from algae. That's better than cellulosic ethanol where the optimistic prognosis is 2,700 gallons. A couple of thousand square miles of desert land and you could provide all of the fuel the U.S. needs, in theory. Why so greasy? Evolution, says Jonathan Wolfson, CEO of Solazyme. By producing oil, algae effectively could store food. Oil also allowed algae to float to the surface and thus generate more food through photosynthesis. Being single celled in that case helped quite a bit: untethered by roots, algae might accidentally drift toward sunlight, or survive on oil if it were mired under a rock. Solazyme says it will be in position to produce algae-based fuel that's competitively priced in two to three years. The industry, though, is going to have to go through a massive evolutionary crunch itself. There are several ways for producing algae -- bioreactors, open ponds, industrial fermenters -- as well as ways of extracting the water (when necessary) and the oil. Genetic modification or natural strains? That's an ongoing debate. To make money, several algae producers say they have to sell the meal -- the parts of the cell that aren't oil -- as pet food to make money. There are even debates over whether the algae can be milked, rather than killed, to serve your driving needs. Solix, one of the few fifty plus algae fuel companies out there that has received VC funds -- says it costs $33 a gallon to produce algae fuel right now and that's in optimal lab conditions.

Ethanol from sugarcane will likely flow into this country in a few years, thanks to favorable weather conditions and legal loopholes. That's the prediction from Roger Ballentine, who heads up the consulting firm Green Strategies. Ballentine also served as chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force and Deputy Assistant to the President for Environmental Initiatives under Bill Clinton. "Sugarcane ethanol is the missing link between corn and cellulosic ethanol," he said. "Sugarcane is more environmentally beneficial and economical than corn and, on the flip side, we know how to do it." Among other advantages, sugarcane has an energy balance close to 8 (one unit of energy in -- eight out.) Corn is closer to 1.6. Cellulosic backers say they can get up to 22, but they are still in the experimental phase. Buy why Peru? Sugarcane can be grown there on a year-round basis, which boosts the gallons of fuel that can be extracted per year per acre. In seasonal Brazil, sugarcane produces about 650 gallons per acre. Additionally, the U.S. tariffs on sugarcane ethanol don't apply to Peru, only Brazil, he said. Hence, you have a cheaper product (because of the longer growing season) that avoids a tax. Ballentine's interest is more than academic. A client, Stratos Renewables, is building a Peruvian sugarcane plant that hopes to bring fuel to the U.S. Other things on Roger's mind:

• State governments are going to be hit with a whirlwind of funds in about six months. Some will be ready for the onslaught. Others will flounder for a while.

• Like Steve Chu, Barack Obama and nearly every utility CEO, he's a fan of spending on efficiency first and green power generation second. "You tend to get the most greenhouse gas reduction per dollar and you create a sustainable economic asset," he said.

• Efficiency can also create jobs. Lennox, the air conditioning company, recently hired around 80 people to help it assemble a high-efficiency air conditioner designed for Wal-Mart. For years, the knock (or fear) about efficiency is that it would be tough to make money off of it. "Even in a down economy, it (efficiency) makes a lot of sense," he said.

• He's also a fan of generating power from waste heat, one of our favorite alternative energy sources here. Ballentine consults for China Energy Recovery, which retrofits factories to capture waste heat in China.

The U.S. doesn't have an ideal solar policy, but at least it avoided the mistakes of Germany and Spain when it comes to feed-in tariffs. Earlier this week I spoke to Travis Bradford of the Prometheus Institute (Travis also writes reports for Greentech Media) and he reminded me why feed-ins aren't the perfect vehicle for promoting alternative energy. It's a good reminder because states and several national governments are tinkering with their policies right now. The problem with feed-ins is that the government tend to set the price of power from alternative sources relatively inflexibly. If set too high, it creates a boom in solar panel sales. Thus, taxpayers fund a solar manufacturing boom in China. If the country later tries to repeal or limit the feed-in, crushing surpluses and other problems emerge. Spain created the worst possible scenario by setting high feed-in prices and then attempting to cap the program. If feed-in prices are too low, they don't achieve their objectives at all. "If you have a policy that sets price it is by definition not going to be able to set the correct price," he said. Just thought you should know.

China plans to start building its first solar-thermal power plant next month, a pilot project that the government hopes will pave the way for building at least 150 megawatts worth of solar thermal power projects by 2015.

The China Academy of Sciences will design the 1.5-megawatt project, reported China Daily this week. The academy, along with the Ministry of Science and the Beijing city government, will fund the 100 million yuan ($14.62 million) project in Beijing.

The country has been a hub for making and exporting solar panels, and it's been busy installing solar-panel based systems throughout the country. Now it wants to explore other types of solar technologies. A solar-thermal power plant, unlike a solar-panel installation, uses the sun’s heat instead of light to produce electricity.

Building a solar-thermal power plant is a more complex and time-consuming project, but its large scale promises to delivery electricity at far cheaper prices. It requires a lot of land, and many projects already built or under development in Europe and the United States are taking place in sparsely populated areas. BrightSource Energy, a U.S. solar thermal power developer, recently inked a 1.3-gigawatt deal with utility Southern California Edison.

China’s pilot project is set to occupy 13 hectares (32 acres). It will take 10 Chinese research institutions and companies to build and operate the power plant, said the China Daily.

There are several solar-thermal power plant designs, and China is interested in the one in which an array of 100 mirrors concentrate and direct the sunlight toward a 100-meter tall tower for boiling some kind of liquid and generating steam. The steam is then piped to a generator for producing electricity.

The power plant is scheduled to come online in 2010.

Government and private automobile and trucking fleets invest enormous sums in equipment like tire sensors and aerodynamics for improved mileage and safety but  “there’s very little investment in driver behavior,� according to Eric Weiss, VP of Worldwide Marketing at GreenRoad Technologies. GreenRoad is primarily about auto and driver safety but the same systems that discourage aggressive driving also help their customers harvest the low hanging fruit of improved auto and truck fuel usage. Innovative software and electronics target driver behavior and, according to their empirical data, can lower fuel usage by 11 percent.  According to fueleconomy.gov, aggressive driving can lower gas mileage by 33 percent at highway speeds. Unsafe drivers also waste fuel and increase carbon emissions as vehicles burn 10 percent to 15 percent more fuel when driven aggressively. GreenRoad has won a number of customers in the U.S. and in the U.K. where occupational driving is the number three most dangerous job behind coal mining and deep sea fishing. GreenRoad’s business model is software as service -- the company leases its systems out to fleet owners and consumers for “a few tens of bucks per month per vehicle.�  Its underdash system combines a GPS unit, an accelerometer, a cellular modem, and its “secret sauce,� the software that interprets the accelerometer data and avoids false positives and false negatives. The sensor system detects overly spirited acceleration and cornering as well as emphatic braking and speeding. The driver is provided with real time feedback in the form of a red, yellow or green light. If a driver violates the GreenRoad rules -- their employers and family are alerted and they are not allowed to have any pudding after dinner.  Nope, strike that -- GreenRoad absolutely tries to avoid the Big Brother is Watching You model in favor of a more positive approach. This VC-funded start-up has 60 employees, just had a record revenue quarter, and is currently selectively hiring.  Their customers include T-Mobile, the U.K. Ministry of Defense, and Ryder Trucks. The firm has received about $20 million in VC funding from Virgin Green, Amadeus Capital, Balderton Capital and Benchmark Capital.