It hasn’t sounded very promising for cleantech startups lately. As even the big guys fail and falter (think Evergreen Solar’s bankruptcy or Vestas’ lay-offs), one begins to wonder whether the little guys can weather the economic storm of this recession, not to mention Congress’ generally allergic reaction to any sort of federal renewable energy standards or goals.

Furthermore, the budget and debt crises here and abroad have led many venture capitalists (VCs) and investors to hunker down and hold on to their money. Some federal policies encouraging renewables have similarly slowed or are in danger of slowing: The production tax credit (PTC) for wind expires at the end of this year, as does the 1603 Treasury grant program that provides cash support to solar start-ups.

After reading all of this negativity, I figured cleantech startups were doomed…right?

But startups are nothing if not nimble.

Some mid-sized companies are taking extreme measures, like moving operations to China: The Chinese not only have a very friendly cleantech business environment, but are the top global market for solar power.

Some analysts predict a wave of buy-outs, mergers, and acquisitions in cleantech markets like solar, especially among panel manufacturers.

And still other start-ups are sitting in somewhat of a cleantech sweet-spot, being small and nimble enough to adjust to the downturn while taking advantage of the stimulus funds Congress invested earlier in the recession. Of course, we can all point to Solyndra as the poster child for what can go wrong, but there are many examples of what can go right when the government invests in an industry hungry for innovators.

Silent Power is a distributed energy storage systems company that manufactures and markets backup power systems for renewable energy, typically solar power. Located in perhaps the unlikely locale of northern Minnesota, the company has developed a battery that can store power for renewable energy and release it back onto the grid during peak demand times, and is one of the few companies that has a system compatible with an advanced battery chemistry, such as lithium-ion.

“The stimulus money invested in the solar and smart grid sectors has created a lot of projects that will keep us busy through 2012 and beyond,” explained Todd Headlee, CEO of Silent Power. “Many of the customers for our renewable energy storage units have been the smaller utilities, like the municipals and co-ops. They can move more quickly to create and implement cleantech pilot projects than the big investor-owned utilities.”

Headlee went on to explain that these storage pilot projects aren’t just free money from the government: Oftentimes utilities have to match half of the project cost. But the desire for renewable energy storage is great and utilities are willing to experiment. As these projects pan out and the successful ones get noticed, more and more utilities have shown interest in smart grid products like Silent Power’s.

Although funding is a priority and a challenge for any startup, Headlee is optimistic about the future because of a few key policies and because of utilities’ hunger for a more efficient grid. For example, Californians are now able to apply for a $2-per-watt rebate for an energy storage unit. This is a huge incentive in a critical solar market that will keep the demand for products like Silent Power’s going. Although it has fewer than 20 employees, the company counts an impressive list of partners and customers, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).

So although many cleantech start-ups have fallen victim to the recession, it’s not all doom and gloom. Many sectors will look very different coming out of the recession than they did going in, while others are able to corner a market supported by government investment, helpful policies and a returning optimism from VCs in particular areas like the smart grid and battery storage. The future indeed may still be bright.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by bisgovuk

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In 2003, several years after all the other manufacturing plants ceased production of the iconic Volkswagen Beetle, the last old style (Type 1) Volkswagen Beetle rolled off an assembly line in Pueblo, Mexico. After 21 million Beetles were manufactured worldwide, the long and storied career of the Type 1 VW Beetle finally came to an end. Or did it.

Although Volkswagen resurrected the Beetle with a totally redesigned "New Beetle" in 1998, Motorward reports that an American company called iCon wants to really resurrect the old Bugs by bringing back the original Beetle and update the rear-wheel drive, air-cooled economy car with a distinctly modern touch: a rear-wheel drive, air-cooled all-electric drivetrain. And with a sale price at or near $20,000, the 'New Old Beetle' would certainly be more of an economy car than any other electric car on the market.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Even if iCon can acquire the original VW tooling from a Mexican production line as it claims to be able — along with the tooling needed to remake other retired classics like the Karman Ghia, the Porsche 356 and the Porsche 550 Spyder — there is no indication that Volkswagen or Porsche would ever go along with the idea. Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield of Green Car Reports' is rightfully skeptical. She writes:

"While it’s not unusual to see defunct brands resurfacing as niche products -- as is the case with the P50 we wrote about earlier this week -- the only way we could imagine any of these classics return would be if it was under license from Volkswagen or Porsche.

Quite frankly, we can’t see that happening."

Both Porsche and VW have invested decades building their brands into the powerhouse brands they are today. They are not about to sign away the licensing of those vehicles unless they are totally certain that: a) The iCons are of a sufficient quality that they won't threaten the Porsche and VW brand positions, and; b) They are going get a serious chunk of change from iCon out of the licensing deal.

But considering iCon plans on crowdsourcing the $1 billion seed money needed for the venture, huge chunks of change may be few and far between.

Photo: Some rights reserved by !RD at flickr

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ForageSF's Underground Market has brought together hundreds of passionate players in the flavor game--the supportive community of creators, makers, eaters, and enjoyers sees 50 new vendor applications each month.  Now, with more members than the health department can snap a latex glove at, officials are saying "cease and desist".

Access to the farmers market with a social, night-life twist was gained by a (free) membership, RSVP, and five dollar entrance fee. While the membership form makes it clear that SF Underground Market goodies aren't health-code certified, the venue is so popular that health officials are stepping in to review the business model.

"This was not an unexpected event" forageSF founder, Iso Rabins told his supporters in an email. "We’ve known that it was only a matter of time until someone became upset about the popularity of the event.  Because we’ve been expecting it doesn’t mean that we accept it."

A trip to April's market could have included 23 Monkey Tree microbrew kombucha, SFQ's duck confit w/ BBQ sauce and Nanny's Mustard, a Loven Kitchen savory muffin, Marshmallow Mischief or Aarons almost better than sex cake; top that palette-pleasing tour off with a mug of Wrecking Ball coffee and you've just supported a dozen of your fellow foodie-friendly entrepreneurs (vendors set their prices).

Shutting down the popular monthly event means local kitchens will suffer and talented chefs who mix and pour the garden herb and oil-infused batters won't have a way to feed this alternative economy, but this alert should be taken as an opportunity to carve out a larger, legal space where indie endeavors can gain momentum.

Other forageSF programming includes Edible Food Walks and elaborate 8-course foraged feasts.

If you want to voice your support contact your local city supervisor or Mission District supervisor, David Campos at David.Campos@sfgov.org (415) 554-5144.

Image Credit: Andrea_Pokrzywinski

Follow Allison Leahy on twitter or reach her by email.

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BrightSource, one of the world's leading solar power startups, is going public.

Not familiar with BrightSource? It is the company developing "the biggest solar project" in the world, the one Google just dropped $168 million on and the U.S. Department of Energy dished out $1.6 billion in loan guarantees for. The project, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, will have a power capacity of 392 MW, enough to power approximately 140,000 homes according to BrightSource Energy’s utility power purchase agreement.

BrightSource Energy now intends to raise $250 million off the stock market to help implement several more utility-scale solar power projects. You can view BrightSource's S-1 document (submitted on Earth Day, April 22, with the SEC) for a ton more information (it's 148 pages long, plus Appendices).

Not many solar startups have gone public and it will be interesting to see how investors respond to it and how it does.

BrightSource's Promise

BrightSource's business model is focused around selling its equipment and solar projects that it constructs using its innovative concentrating solar thermal systems. It's solar project design is one of the most promising for utility-scale solar that could really cut into the world's fossil fuel addiction. The Oakland-based company reportedly has 14 power purchase agreements with a total worth of approximately 2.6 gigawatts of capacity signed with California utilities. It also owns 110,000 of land suitable for its concentrating solar thermal power plants in California and the Southwest.

BrightSource's Challenges & Risks

Of course, no company, especially a solar startup, is challenge- or risk-free. A few notable challenges BrightSource is facing (which it includes in its S-1) include:

• a dependency on government policies that support clean solar power (which should be a given, but you know what country we're in)
• large capital financing needs
• lengthy environmental reviews

Is BrightSource Going to be a Success?

If I were a stock market investor, I definitely think I'd put some money into BrightSource stock. It is providing a highly-needed power plant option that I think will only grow in its attractiveness and need. It has done a good job of improving the technology and design over the past few years. And, clearly, Google (which has invested more into Ivanpah than any other clean energy project), NRG Solar (another investor in this project), and the Department of Energy believe in it.

Your thoughts?

h/t CNET News

Image via BrightSource Energy/Ivanpah Solar

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The secret sauce in the Transphorm approach is a material known as Gallium Nitride that allows circuit switching at much higher frequencies than traditional silicon converters and inverters. The process produces up to 90 percent less wasted heat energy.

The investment by Google (NYSE: GOOG), the Mountainview, Calif.-based tech giant, represents another adventurous foray into what is now a broad collection of cleantech and sustainability projects; projects ranging from offshore wind energy transmission and its own electric utility, Google Energy, on one end of the spectrum, to electric vehicles and a human-powered monorail on the other. Exactly where Transphorm's potentially transformational technology will fit on that spectrum remains to be seen. The company hasn't led on too much about the technology or where it sees sees optimal market opportunities but says data centers, HVAC systems, solar farms and electric vehicles and chargers would be good candidates.

Read my entire piece about Google and Transphorm at Celsias.

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The finalist teams will now be competing at the national competition, which will be awarding a grand prize of $250,000 in investment and services on November 17, 2010.

It's always interesting to see the early stage companies and their products and services emerge at incubating contests like the Clean Tech Open. While there is a good chance you won't ever hear much from most of the companies below, there is also a chance the list contains the name of the next tech sleeper.

California Region

• FogBusters, Inc. - Revolutionary technology for removing fat, oil and grease (FOG) from wastewater
• Suntulit - Smart, multi-zone HVAC system enhancement for homeowners with central forced-air systems
• Stramit Strawboard - Converts low-cost agricultural waste into high-value building board
• Pure Solar - Laser-processing tool to produce an industry-standard c-Si wafer to increase efficiency for photo-voltaic cell manufacturers
• SmartSense - Real-time fault detection, fault prediction and performance monitoring for electrical grids
• Pressure Sentinel - Automatic tire inflation system that eliminates the problem of underinflated truck tires

North Central Region

• EarthClean - Creator of a biodegradable, non-toxic fire suppressant system that can be used in existing firefighting equipment
• Graphene Solutions, Inc. - Technologies that increase the practical application of nanomaterials in coatings, composites and energy generation and storage
• Silicon Solar Solutions - Improves energy output and lower cost of silicon-based solar power cells.

North East Region

• OnChip Power - Bringing integration to power electronics
• 7Solar - Energy Independence, one building at a time
• V Squared Wind - Wind technology

Pacific Northwest Region

• Arcimoto - Builder of a fun and cost-effective electric vehicle for the around-town drives that typify most vehicle use
• Nanocel Inc. - Revolutionizing the cooling of electronic devices with its microfluidic polymer cooling system that can cool specific areas that generate the heat
• Puralytics - Maker of unique water purification devices that remove all types of pollutants in a single step without using chemicals or producing waste water

Rocky Mountain Region

• infiniRel - Assures renewable energy service providers of maximum equipment uptime at the lowest service cost through predictive data analysis and maintenance scheduling support
• INOTEC - Distributes electrons to microbes in a manner that provides them with energy to more efficiently transform and remove contaminants found in waste and drinking waters
• pureSilicon - Addresses growing electrical use by computer servers

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A piece in the June issue of Fast Company magazine featured the 100 Most Creative People in Business.  Not surprisingly, several people making the list work in some sector of green business -- 10 percent according to my count. We've parsed those green business leaders into a listing of the 10 Most Creative Green People in Business. The numbers in parentheses represent the individual's ranking on Fast Company's list of 100, but the commentary is our own.

92. Annie Leonard - Environmental Activist, The story of Stuff Project

Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff very quickly became one of the most popular viral videos of the modern environmental movement. After the success of The Story of Stuff, Ms. Leonard, et al. took on the narrower but equally tricky issue of climate policy with follow-up, The Story of Cap and Trade.

59. Majora Carter - Founder, Majora Carter Group

Named by our sister-site, Ecopolitology, as one of the 10 Women Who Changed the Environmental Movement Forever, Majora Carter is a passionate advocate for urban gardens, green jobs and sustainable economic development. After leaving Sustainable South Bronx, Carter launched the Majora Carter Group, a consulting and communications firm focusing on economic revitalization strategies.

50. Natalia Allen - Surfer, Designer

Natalia Allen is a surfer, triathlete and linguist, and--oh, by the way--runs a fast growing design firm in her spare time. The recipient of the highly coveted Parsons “Designer of the Year Award,” Ms. Allen recently founded Design Futurist, which partners with big international firms to develop "innovative and sustainable fashion, accessories and textiles."

49. Mark Pinto - CTO, Applied Materials

Chief Technology Officer for Applied Materials, Mark Pinto recently became the first chief technologist of a major American tech firm to move to China, where he is heading-up Applied Materials' research center in Xi’an.

42. Cynthia Warner - President, Sapphire Energy

After 27 years as one of the most powerful women in the oil and gas industry, Cynthia "CJ" Warner made a particularly timely decision to leave her employer for greener pastures in 2009. Warner left her post at BP, where she was head of global refining, to join Sapphire Energy. Sapphire is one of several companies angling to be the first to commercialize a transportation fuel made from algae, sunlight, and carbon dioxide -- a product they are calling "Green Crude."

39. Byron Washom - Director of Strategic Energy Initiatives, Univ. of California San Diego

We always hear that renewables are unreliable because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. But Byron Washom and his team at UCSD are working on a way of getting around that--at least for solar--by predicting the availability of solar resource. A solar entrepreneur and long-time holder of the solar energy conversion record, Washom says: "We are developing the ability to predict one hour in advance the amount of sunlight that will be falling on every solar panel in 25 square miles." Obtaining this information on a large scale could become a critical component of building out an electric grid that will most efficiently make use of solar power.

20. KR Sridhar - CEO, Bloom Energy

In 2010, Sridhar's Bloom Energy unveiled its fuel cell known as the Bloom Box, a device capable of powering 100 homes while producing nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Sridhar, a long-time professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, as well as an accomplished member of NASA Mars Program, Sridhar was recognized by Fortune Magazine, as "one of the top five futurists inventing tomorrow, today."

8. Hannah Jones - VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation, Nike

Joining Nike in 2004, Hannah Jones leads a global team of over 100 employees at Nike whose role is to fuel sustainable innovation and embed sustainability into the core practices of the business. To facilitate this, Nike developed its Considered Design initiative to use less toxic and fewer materials overall in the manufacturing of its products. One example, the Air Jordan XX3 shoe, utilizes a water-based bonding process to attach a carbon fiber plate, rather than using a solvent-based cement. Another shoe, the Nike Pegasus 25 running shoe uses 1.4 ounces less material than previous iterations.

7. Chris Anderson - Curator, TED Conferences

The former journalist, publisher and media entrepreneur, Chris Anderson founded the Sapling Foundation in 1996, with the goal of finding "new ways of tackling tough global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and most of all, ideas." In 2001, Sapling acquired the TED Conference, where Anderson now focuses his professional efforts. And if you've even had a glimpse into the TED phenomenon, you know he's doing something right.

4. Shiro Nakamura - Chief Creative Officer, Nissan

With the launch of the zero-emission The Nissan LEAF approaching later this year, Nissan's design guru, , Shiro Nakamura, has been tasked with designing an electric vehicle (EV) for the masses -- a job that he has taken on with care and deliberateness. Said Nakamura of the LEAF design: "We did not want to make something very strange for just the niche buyer."

Know someone who should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments. You can also read about the 90 other most creative people in business at Fast Company.

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