Solyndra’s revenue ramp up last year was pretty mind boggling — the thin film solar maker went from generating $6 million in revenues in 2008 to $100 million in revenues in 2009. What will that mean when it finally plans to IPO later this year? According to a report from Next Up! Research posted on the marketplace run by startup SharesPost, Solyndra’s production and sales growth could lead to a market cap of between $1.76 and $2 billion.

Market capitalization is the size of a public company equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding, and changes every day for every public company. It’s basically a way to incorporate in public consensus of how much the company is worth. And Next Up! Research clearly thinks that Solyndra will be worth a whole lot.

Continue reading this story

The backlash against the smart meters installed in Texas by utility Oncor doesn’t seem to be dying down. Actually the protesters are getting more organized and turning to social media. A group called Smart UR Citizens — whose members describe themselves as “a group of Texas citizens that are fighting the unrealistic utility charges which we believe are caused by the Smart Meter” — has a new web site, an online petition, an intro video and an online survey, and is inviting community members to submit videos and comments about their experiences.

The small group is also holding rallies outside of Oncor’s headquarters and using social media to get the word out. Dallas Morning News reporter Elizabeth Souder reported in the newspaper’s blog Texas Energy and Environment yesterday that the group was supposed to hold a rally Thursday afternoon — as she put it: “The protesters will be the ones waving red shop flags.”

Continue reading this story

It’s a cloudy day for the solar photovoltaic maker SunPower. The company announced its fourth quarter and 2009 year results this afternoon and let loose a triple-whammy of bad news: a drop in fourth quarter profits, a lower-than-expected earnings guidance for 2010 and a restating of its earnings for 2008 and the first three quarters of 2009. Ouch.

SunPower says it brought in a net income of $8.67 million for the three months that ended Jan. 3, 2010, which was a drop from $29.5 million from the restated year earlier fourth quarter net income. Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 were $547 million, up from $398 million in revenues from the same period a year earlier.

Continue reading this story

Make it familiar and compelling — that’s the idea behind the design of energy management startup Tendril’s new gadget dubbed the Vision, which the company plans to unveil next week. The dashboard, designed by design firm IDEO, and based on the form of a digital clock, is intended to help consumers really engage with managing their energy consumption by using captivating design elements. Because, let’s face it, managing home energy consumption isn’t exactly the sexiest activity. (Read our interview with IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, subscription required).

Tendril’s Scott Ballantyne, Vice President of Marketing, told me that IDEO and Tendril spent eight months studying and researching human behavior in order to create the Vision. They found that by adding design elements like the familiarity of the clock design, they could keep users engaged enough to reduce their energy consumption by an average of 10-15 percent. The Vision is also able to provide real time data for pricing fluctuations (energy rates go up during peak demand times) if a utility is providing that to the customer, which helps a customer manage energy consumption.

Continue reading this story

The deadline to submit an application for our Green:Net launchpad is just around the corner — this Friday at 5PM! If you’re part of a new startup that leverages information technology — the Internet, computing and communication networks — to help remake the energy industry and fight climate change, submit an application to launch your company or product at our Green:Net conference. Green:Net 2010 will be held on April 29 in San Francisco and will focus on how IT can be used to fight climate change — from the smart grid, to connected cars, to carbon software.

During the Launchpad section of our Green:Net 2010 event 10 hot startups will show off their products on the main stage. The Launchpad winners will receive a lot of visibility — and likely interest from investors. Check out last year’s Judge’s Winner, Wattbot.

Continue reading this story

Updated: Finally a reason not to complain about AT&T. The phone company says it will start selling a smart charger in May — dubbed the AT&T ZERO charger and made by Super Communications — that eliminates vampire power (wasted standby power). The concept is so simple that only phone companies wouldn’t naturally design this into all chargers: the charger can automatically detect when the phone is plugged in and when its not, and can cut the power connection from the wall when the cell phone is unplugged. The good news is that it costs the same ($29.99) as a standard charger.

Smart chargers are becoming more widely used in Europe, but as Kevin Tofel, editor of JKontheRun (GigaOM’s mobile site) put it to me, most phone chargers in the U.S. are not smart. That’s expected to change over the coming years. According to The Smart2020 report from The Climate Group, the carbon footprint per cell phone (not including the network) is expected “to decrease over the 2020 timeframe because “smart chargers” are rapidly becoming commonplace.”

Continue reading this story

Solyndra, the thin film solar startup that filed for an IPO back in December has updated its latest financial figures for the fiscal year that ended January 2, 2010 in an amended S-1 filing on Tuesday. According to the document Solyndra brought in revenues of $100.47 million for the fiscal year that ended on January 2, 2010, up from $6.01 million for the fiscal year that ended on January 2, 2009.

Now that is some crazy revenue growth. Solyndra started commercial shipments back in July 2008 and produced 30.5 MW for the fiscal year that ended January 2010, compared to 1.8 MW for the fiscal year that ended January 2009. Solyndra is looking to boost capacity even more, and says in its filing that it is looking to “expand from our current annualized production run rate at Fab 1, which was 54 MW during our fiscal month ended January 2, 2010, to our estimated 110 MW annualized production run rate by the fourth fiscal quarter of 2010.”

Continue reading this story

Japan is the official leader when it comes to using its own sodium sulfur (NAS) batteries for energy storage on the power grid. There are close to 270 MW of NAS batteries on the grid in Japan and the country’s NGK Insulators is a NAS battery market king, according to the Electric Storage Association. That’s compared to just 9 MW of NAS batteries that U.S. utilities have deployed. But a project from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and battery and electrochemical company Eagle Picher Technologies plan to use an ARPA-E grant to develop a next-generation sodium battery here in the U.S. for the power grid.

David Lucero, director of alternative energy storage for EaglePicher Technologies, and Gary Yang, chief scientist of energy storage at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told me in a phone interview on Tuesday that their planar-shaped sodium beta-battery design will be less expensive and will have a 30 percent higher energy density than standard NAS batteries. Eventually the battery could cost $200 per kWh, said Lucero, compared to the current costs of NAS batteries that he said can range closer to $500-$600 per kWh.

Continue reading this story

Here’s two unconventional players that could make an influential but unusual team in terms of open standards and innovation for the smart grid: Google and software maker Grid Net. OK, hear me out.

As Grid Net’s new Chief Strategy Officer Andres Carvallo told me last week, Grid Net is looking to build an ecosystem around its vision of a real time, 100-percent Internet Protocol, secure, reliable, scalable, broadband-based smart grid platform. While the wireless standard is the backbone of Grid Net’s first product, Carvallo told me the startup plans to take the core software and explore other technologies as well, including possibly fiber and broadband-over powerline technology.

Continue reading this story

For all you broadband junkies, it’s here: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unveiled the first U.S. National Broadband Plan on Tuesday morning. And — what we’re particularly interested in — there’s an entire chapter on Energy and the Environment (Chapter 12, Page 245). The National Broadband Plan looks at how broadband can be used to build out a smarter power grid, make information technology more efficient and make transportation cleaner (the content is very much in line with the speakers and panels at our Green:Net conference in San Francisco on April 29).

Here’s some of the National Broadband Plan’s interesting recommendations on energy and the environment:

Continue reading this story