The rumors that the thin film solar startup Miasolé had been out fund raising are confirmed this morning. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has raised another $50 million in series D funding that included six new but unnamed investors, according to VentureWire, (via PE Hub).

Miasole makes thin film solar out of copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), and these startups have been raising significant funds as of late. Miasolé competes with the likes of Nanosolar (with $100 million in funding so far, plus $20 million from the DOE), Heliovolt ($85 million in funding), and Solyndra (over $79 million). Now Miasole’s funding adds up to over $100 million.

Continue reading this story

MIT gets a Little BP: British Petroleum (BP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a research partnership to explore energy conversion technologies, including the conversion of coal to electricity while minimizing carbon dioxide emissions – release.

Nuclear in Texas: For the first time in three decades, energy companies are vying to take the lead in building new nuclear power plants in the U.S. – The New York Times.

Cheaper Solar: Everyone is trying to figure out how to bring down the high costs of solar, and the topic was the centerpiece of much discussion at the Solar Power conference on Monday – CNET.

Big Blue’s Big Green: Joel Makower takes a look at IBM’s eco initiatives in this detailed Q&A — Green Biz.

Water Management Gets $$$: HydroPoint Data Systems, a water-management company, raised more cash, adding on to its $19-million Series B round the company raised last January – release.

Like that date that kept you waiting while you nervously fixed your hair, the Tesla Roadster is officially late. Customers — among them San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom — will now have to wait until 2008 before the $98,000 electric hotrod is ready to leave the Tesla factory.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based company, which has raised around a $100 million in funding, says it now plans to ship 50 cars in the first quarter of 2008, followed by 600 more over the course of the year. A little better news is that during testing one of the roadsters ran for 245 miles on the combined EPA cycle on a single charge.

Continue reading this story

Expansion VC Expands for $$$: Expansion Capital Partners announced today that the firm exceeded $100 million in the final closing of their second Clean Technology Fund — release.

H20 Investment: Stonybrook Water Purification secured $500,000 of a $4.1 million Series A round, from Battery Ventures, TianDI Growth Partners, T2 Venture Partners and Modern Water PLC. — PE Hub.

Australian Energy Plan Problems: A day after the Australian government committed to new clean energy targets, the Tourism Minister claimed that wind power is not a good choice for the country — The Australian.

Landfill Gas to Energy: Houston, Texas-based Waste Management says it will open more landfill gas to energy facilities. The program will result in the creation of 60 more renewable energy facilities across the country — release.

Mohr Davidow’s $580M Fund: Mohr Davidow Ventures, which funded cleantech startups including fuel cell maker Jadoo Power and Nanosolar, says they’ve raised $580 million for a ninth fund — PE Week Wire.

Wal-Mart’s (WMT) eco initiatives are controversial, to say the least. Though the megachain continues to think up new ways to focus on green. Today, the company announced a partnership with nonprofit org the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) to measure the amount of energy used to make and distribute products.

By quantifying the energy used, Wal-Mart hopes to make its whole supply chain more energy efficient and is starting by focusing on energy usage in seven “ordinary products that people commonly use” – DVDs, toothpaste, soap, milk, beer, vacuum cleaners and soda.

Continue reading this story

Apparently $100 million in funding isn’t enough for thin film startup Nanosolar. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has been awarded $20 million from the Department of Energy, which includes $9.5 million through October 2008. Whoa, how much money does the company need?

Nanosolar says the funding is the “largest net amount” any company is receiving as part of the agency’s Solar America Initiative. CEO Martin Roscheisen, whom we previously interviewed, writes in his blog that “the competition was stiff and included every single significant solar company in this country, including SunPower (SPWR), First Solar (FSLR), [and] General Electric (GE).”

Continue reading this story

The key to cracking the code for cellulosic ethanol — biofuel made from non-food crops and plant byproducts — could be under development in a university lab near you. While researchers have spent years trying to figure out how to effectively produce the alt-fuel, universities across the country have recently been working on moving the ball forward.

Here’s our picks for 10 schools making significant strides in cellulosic ethanol research and production:

University of Tennessee (Knoxville, Tenn.): Last week, the executive committee of the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees approved a business partnership with Mascoma Corp. to jointly build and operate a five-million-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol biorefinery. The partnership is a result of the UT Biofuels Initiative, an effort to grow the biofuel industry in Tennessee.

University of Florida (Gainesville, Fla.): The University of Florida recently said it will build a cellulosic ethanol plant at a Florida Crystals Corp facility. The plant will be a research and development lab as well as a commercial facility and will produce between one and two million gallons of fuel each year. The plant is financed by a $20 million state grant. The school’s Bioprocess Engineering Research Laboratory also has a sustained research program on biogasification of biomass; additional work in cellulosic ethanol is being done through the Florida Center for Renewable Chemicals and Fuels.

Continue reading this story

Robert Fishman spent the last seven years managing power plants for natural gas company Calpine (CPNLQ). Now he’s stoked on solar — last week he became the new CEO for solar thermal start-up Ausra. Ausra builds solar thermal systems that use mirrors and lenses to focus sunlight onto liquid-filled tubes, which in turn power steam turbines, and recently raised a round of over $40 million in financing from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

We chatted with Fishman about why he made the switch to the solar industry and why cost of the system is so important.

Q: There’s a few different design models out there for solar thermal technology. Why is your technology better than the one designed by Solel or other solar thermal startups?

A: Our philosophy is that you need to drive down the cost of the system in order for it to be economically competitive. Rather than having sophisticated, hard-to-manufacture mirrors, our mirrors are slightly curved and cheaper to manufacture. We make this thing really simple and low cost.

Continue reading this story

New CEO for Ausra: Solar start-up hires Robert Fishman from traditional power-producer Calpine as CEO – San Jose Mercury News.

Intel’s Linux Energy Boost: An Intel open-source project called LessWatts.org wants to improve the power efficiency of the Linux operating system – PC World.

Solar Water Heater: China will increase solar water heater coverage by 50 percent by 2010, according to a new report – Chinaview.cn.

Ecotality Agrees to Acquire Innergy: We’re not sure we buy Ecotality’s plan to diversify (the public company seems a little disjointed), but today the renewable energy company announced plans to acquire Innergy, a solar charger and rechargeable, battery maker – Greentech Media.

Data Center Power Crisis?: A new survey finds that 63 percent of IT decision makers surveyed said their organizations had experience a shortage of power, space and/or cooling without warning – InfoWorld.

Leave it to Intel (INTC) to try to rain on AMD’s (AMD) parade. Less than two weeks after AMD sang out praises of its new chip’s power efficiency with the launch of its “Barcelona” quad-core processor, Intel is showing off its latest innovation in chip architecture — “Nehalem” — which will feature up to eight cores, and is set for a 2008 release. Intel didn’t announce how efficient the chips will be, but the company made sure to point out that it focused on power efficiency in the development of its new architecture as it demoed the chip line at the Intel’s Developer Forum this week in San Francisco.

“Nehalem is supposed to cover a wide range of systems and configurations, and to enable this we had a strong focus on power efficiency,” Glenn Hilton, Nehalem architect and Intel Fellow, told the audience at the developer’s forum. “For example, every feature we added to Nehalem had to pass very stringent power-efficiency guidelines, even more so than we’ve done in the past.”

Features like cache flushing and low-power state — where components of the chip can be turned off when they aren’t being used — will aid in Intel’s power efficiency metrics, Roger Kay, president of research firm EndPoint Technologies told us.

Continue reading this story