Israeli fuel-cell startup CellEra has kept its activities under wraps since it raised $2 million from Israel Cleantech Ventures last year. But a German press release from angel investor group BrainsToVentures has revealed the company has raised another $2 million, from BrainsToVentures and Israel Cleantech Ventures, and has developed its first prototype. CEO Ziv Gottesfeld confirmed the news, telling us the cash represents part of a larger round.

Gottesfeld also told us CellEra already is working with a major manufacturer and is integrating its fuel cells into backup power systems. CellEra plans to use its new cash to turn its working prototype into its first commercial product, he said, adding that the company aims to have products ready for the market in two years.

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Solar startup 1366 Technologies has closed $5.15 million in a second round of funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners and plans to announce the funding this morning. Xconomy first reported the story yesterday, and according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing yesterday, the cash is part of a round expected to total $6.2 million.

The new cash comes after 1366 raised $4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, becoming the first (and so far, the only) photovoltaic startup to be selected. The MIT spinoff, founded in 2007, also previously raised $12.4 million back in March.

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One of the most commonly cited problems about solar power is that it’s intermittent, meaning that it’s not always sunny when electricity is needed. That means customers can’t count on being able to generate exactly as much solar power as they need to meet electricity demand at any given time, and utilities must rely on conventional power plants to ensure that electricity is always available.

Screen-printed solar-cell manufacturer Suniva and battery maker GS Battery are teaming up to help solve that problem by pairing solar projects with batteries. It’s a common pairing for off-grid systems, which need batteries to have electricity at night, for example, or on cloudy days. But the companies also want to add batteries to systems that are connected to the grid.

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Morgan Solar, a Toronto-based startup developing acrylic solar concentrators, told us today it has raised $8.2 million in its first round of venture-capital funding from Spanish utility Iberdrola, plastics manufacturer Nypro, and Turnstone Capital Management, which led the round. Back in October, when Morgan Solar announced it had closed $4.7 million in the first phase of the round, it said it was aiming for a round of “up to $8.5 million.”

The news could bode well for the sector this year after the Cleantech Group announced earlier today that solar investments fell a whopping 64 percent in 2009 from the previous year, with fourth-quarter deals reaching a new 3-year low. Dallas Kachan, a managing director at the Cleantech Group, said the most chilling factor has been an oversupply of solar panels compared with demand, and added that solar’s capital intensity may have led investors to pull back and wait for better market conditions.

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As solar panel prices fall, installers’ valuations appear to be climbing. A report from NeXt Up Research that was released Monday on SharesPost, an online marketplace for trading shares of private companies, estimates that solar developer SolarCity’s exit valuation would be between $375 million and $443.8 million, or $15.49 to $18.36 a share. That’s up from a per-share estimate of $12.43 to $13.90 back in July.

Solar panel prices, which have fallen by more than half from their peak last year, are helping to drive demand for solar power systems, and as such should help boost SolarCity’s revenue, according to the report, written by NextUp research analyst Suresh Balaraman and downloadable for free here. Since panel prices make up more than a third of SolarCity’s cost of goods sold, the lower cost should also help lift SolarCity’s profit, he wrote.

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It looks like utilities are poised to drive the U.S. solar market in coming years, based on a new report from Emerging Energy Research that predicts utilities will add 21.5 GW of photovoltaic capacity by 2020, up from only 77 MW of utility-driven PV projects in operation today. The report released Thursday confirms the trend we noted back in October, and the projections are huge considering that the United States made up only 360 MW of demand last year, according to Solarbuzz.

U.S. utilities already have announced more than 4.8 GW of large PV projects in the works, according to the Emerging Energy Research report. The firm forecasts that utilities will play a key role in shaping the changing landscape of solar power and estimates the U.S. PV market – led by utility activity – will grow from 2 GW in 2011 to a whopping 12 GW in 2015. That compares to a worldwide solar market of 5.8 GW in 2008, according to Photon Consulting’s Solar Annual 2009. Photon projects the global PV market will reach 8.6 GW this year and 44.9 GW in 2011, meaning that the U.S. would make up more than a quarter of the world market in 2011 if Emerging Energy Research’s forecasts are on target, up from about 6 percent last year.

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Concentrating photovoltaic technologies, which magnify sunlight and direct it onto solar cells, hold potential to increase the efficiency of a solar-power system. But several analysts — including Jenny Chase, head of solar research at New Energy Finance — say that CPV is likely to be more expensive than conventional solar-panel systems, which have been rapidly falling in price. And because CPV systems have a shorter track record and include moving parts to track the sun, some industry insiders are concerned about reliability. Spokane, Wash.-based startup Solarmation thinks it has come up with a technology that can help solve these issues.

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As utilities start to build large solar projects and solar power makes up an increasingly larger portion of the electricity mix, integrating this energy into the grid will be a challenge. Solar, like wind, is intermittent — power from the sun fluctuates when clouds pass overhead and wind doesn’t blow consistently. Now General Electric, which has been a major player in helping to integrate wind into the world’s power grids, wants to do the same for solar.

The company has turned a 1.5 MW wind converter into a new, 600 kW solar inverter for utility projects, Rick Robertson, an inverter program manager at GE, told us at this week’s Solar Power International. The inverter, pictured above, is targeted at multimegawatt solar projects with multiple installations on a single site, he said. GE is now taking orders for the inverter, which was introduced at the conference, and plans to ship its first units by the end of this year, he added.

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Think of rooftop solar and you likely envision photovoltaic panels. But a group of solar startups are working to put concentrating solar-thermal systems – more commonly seen in large solar projects in the desert – on roofs too. One such startup, San Jose, Calif.-based Chromasun, unveiled its first collector at the Solar Power International conference in Anaheim, Calif., this week.

The 4-by-10-foot collector, called the Chromasun Micro-Concentrator, is intended for commercial roofs. It includes strips of shiny aluminum, made by Alanod Solar, that look like window blinds and use sensors to automatically track the sun. These strips concentrate light 25 times and reflect it upon two pipes to generate temperatures of up to 428 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Companies like Applied Materials and Oerlikon are building businesses out of selling so-called “turnkey” (ready to use) thin-film solar manufacturing equipment to would-be solar developers. The idea is that instead of developing the technology itself, a solar maker can just buy the gear and start churning out panels with relative ease. But the reality is, it’s not always that easy.

Masdar PV, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy initiative, delivered its first thin-film panels from its factory in Ichtershausen, Germany, this week using an Applied Materials SunFab line, but according to CEO Rainer Gegenwart, the line wasn’t exactly plug and play. Instead — at least initially — Masdar PV ended up with a lot of broken glass.

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