Spire Corp. has spent the last year successfully pushing its solar equipment manufacturing products. Thanks to that success, the Bedford, Mass. company has gained some wiggle room with its bankers. Earlier this week Spire said it had broken the loan covenants on a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, but was saved from default thanks to a bank-issued waiver.

In a 10-K containing its quarterly earnings, the company said it had to pull in a certain quarterly income or maintain a specific ratio of assets (minus inventory) to debt in order to avoid going into default. The company’s quarterly filing doesn’t state which one of the loan covenants Spire broke, but banks are conservative enough about their lending portfolios (especially in the wake of the sub-prime mess), that this technical trouble shouldn’t be read as a disaster for Spire. The firm believes it can continue meeting its financial obligations for at least another year.

Stated openly in a public filing, that’s not incredibly reassuring, but the company’s financials aren’t so grim. It did post a net loss of $508,000 on sales of $14.9 million in the latest three-month period, but it also made considerable sales gains from the same period last year. Its solar division, which has seen its sales rise 197 percent year-over-year, is its fastest-growing business and is now profitable, with its medical and optical electronics divisions hopefully to follow.

Most of the company’s sales come from selling the equipment to make solar panels, and Spire’s positive earnings pushed its stock up by about 25 percent to $17.50 as a high on Wednesday after the filing was issued. The stock has since settled and at last check, was changing hands for $16. The sun is definitely the rising star Spire is trying to bet its future on.

T. Boone Pickens, our favorite Texas-oil-baron-turned-wind-wildcatter, has placed an order for 667 wind turbines from GE for a total cost of $2 billion. The turbines will have a generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts, enough to power 300,000 homes. The order was made through Pickens’ Mesa Power for his Pampa Wind Project in the Texas Panhandle, which he aims to turn into the world’s largest wind farm, generating some 4,000 megawatts of power as early as 2014.

This has been a week of big wind announcements. The Department of Energy released a report optimistically predicting America’s ability to satisfy 20 percent of its electricity needs with wind power by 2030. Across the pond, Scottish & Southern Energy awarded $3 billion in contracts to Texas-based Fluor and Germany’s Siemens to create the world’s largest offshore wind farm. The Greater Gabbard project would produce 504 megawatts and SSE plans to have power generation start by 2011.

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If the market opportunity for non-food cellulosic biofuels is really in the tens of billions it’s no surprise that increasingly bigger companies are coming to play where the startups have been working. Today, DuPont and Genencor, a division of Danisco A/S, have announced the formation of a joint venture to develop and commercialize cellulosic ethanol production from non-food feedstocks. The JV, uncreatively named DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC, will be split 50/50 between the two companies who plan to invest an initial $140 million ($70 million each) over the next three years.

DuPont and Danisco have laid out an ambitious time line for their business. The JV plans to have its first pilot plant online by 2009 and its first full-scale commercial demonstration plant operational by 2012. The company says it will license its cellulosic production package as a “bolt-on” to existing ethanol production facilities but said it could also invest and own ethanol refineries. On a conference call today with investors, DuPont Chairman and CEO Charles O. Holliday, Jr. said he recognized that there are many other players in the space but claimed: “We’re gonna be the winner with the lowest cost. Ethanol is a commodity and the secret is the lowest cost.”

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This morning, Hoku Scientific posted its results for the March quarter and then saw its stock tumble. It followed a pattern set by shares of JA Solar on Monday and LDK today, as well as other solar companies in recent weeks.

Each company’s stock slid for a different reason, suggesting investors are looking for any excuse to move out of the speculative issues. Hoku abruptly shifted its plans for financing a crucial new silicon plant; LDK saw its profit margins deflate; and JA’s surprised the Street by saying it would raise $300 million.

Shares of Hoku opened Tuesday down 9 percent at $7.50 after it posted a loss of 11 cents a share, excluding certain items, well below the 5-cent loss that analysts, on average, were expecting. The company also said that it’s backing out of a plan with Merrill Lynch to borrow as much as $185 million to finance a polysilicon plant in Idaho. Instead, it wants to raise money through a stock-and-warrants offering on a U.S. exchange.

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Chinese solar cell wafer maker LDK Solar posted what appeared to be a pretty strong first quarter earnings report on Monday: a net income of $49.8 million, compared with $21.6 million from a year ago reports Reuters, and a raised revenue outlook for the year. But the company also said that the rising price of polysilicon meant a lower margin forecast and that sent the company’s stock down almost 6 percent.

Ah, the short polysilicon supply issue — the thorn in the side of solar manufacturers throughout the year. As Trader Mark put it: “the shortages of polysilicon continue to act as a dark cloud overhead.” LDK forecast its gross margins at 23 percent to 28 percent, which was down from its previous forecast of 26 percent to 31 percent.

To help combat high polysilicon costs, LDK is building a silicon plant, expanding its wafer production capacity and is raising hundred of millions to complete the task. While the polysilicon issue doesn’t seem to be easing soon, the industry is hoping 2009 will be better.

EnerNOC delivered first-quarter earnings Wednesday that were a mixed bag. The company beat Wall Street estimates, which is always nice; but its operating loss nearly tripled from the previous year to $11.7 million, which is not so nice. The net loss of 57 cents a share is down from 91 cents a year earlier, which sounds good. But it fell only because the number of shares used to calculate EPS (19 million shares vs. 4 million a year ago) grew faster than that loss.

Investors watching EnerNOC for a while know that there’s a reason for the losses. The company is spending heavily, especially on new employees, to gain a bigger foothold in a growing market opportunity. So while first-quarter revenue grew an impressive 87 percent on year, general and administrative costs (which include network operations workers) grew by 212 percent and R&D costs expanded by 343 percent.

EnerNOC’s business is helping utilities, grid operators and other companies like manufacturers use their existing energy more efficiently. With energy prices rising and blackouts likely to become more common, many companies are realizing energy efficiency is not only smart, but necessary.

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Those still hoping clean coal will become a reality can take comfort in the knowledge that tax dollars are still funding carbon capture and sequestration endeavors. Making good on its promise to fund a number of smaller, distributed projects to test the capture and storage of carbon following the nixing of the FutureGen project, the Department of Energy has awarded $126.6 million to two regional carbon capture projects.

Of the total, $61 million will go to the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership and $65 million to the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership for two large-scale projects that will test the ability of different geologic formations to “safely, permanently, and economically store more than one million tons of carbon dioxide.” The $126.6 million will be also complemented by $56.6 million from industry partners.

The projects will test the entire CO2 injection process for large-scale — one million tons — and permanent sequestration. The DOE claims these two sites, located in California and Ohio, “are the most promising” geologic basins in the country, with the ability to store more than 100 years’ worth of North American CO2 emissions. What will it mean, then, if the “most promising” projects, which don’t have any disclosed operation dates, don’t work out? How much more time and money will the DOE invest in sweeping our carbon problems under the carpet?

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While U.S. ethanol producers are like teenagers in the global biofuels market, Brazil is like a mature adult, approaching middle age. The Brazilian government began investing heavily in ethanol infrastructure and R&D more than 30 years ago. Now the country, which produces 45 percent of its own transportation fuel “on only 1 percent of its arable land,” is aggressively looking beyond both first-generation biofuels and its domestic market.

Brazil currently produces 4.7 billion gallons of ethanol every year; the Brazilian government estimates that number will double by 2015. And they are increasingly looking at the U.S. as potential buyers. Although President Bush did sign an ethanol technology-sharing agreement with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a 54 cent-a-gallon tariff prevents cheap Brazilian ethanol from competing with homegrown U.S. corn ethanol.

But the readily fermentable sugars found in sugarcane make it a far better ethanol feedstock than grain. Brazilian sugar ethanol gives an eightfold return on the fossil energy used to make it; American corn, on the other hand, only yields 1.3 times the fossil energy used. Brazil is now the No. 2 producer of ethanol, dethroned by the U.S. in 2005, but still leads in ethanol exports, sending some 900 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year, according to Reuters.

Brazil’s ethanol success and failures can teach the rest of the world a lot about biofuels. So who are the big Brazilian ethanol players? Who’s investing in the sector? And which biofuel startups are making Brazilian deals? Below, a primer:

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Demand management firm EnerNOC, following its successful IPO last year, has been buying up firms to help its growth. The Boston-headquartered company said Monday that it has acquired Baltimore-based energy procurement services provider South River Consulting, which serves as a clearinghouse for the increasingly complex and competitive deregulated energy supply market.

EnerNOC spent roughly $4.75 million on the deal — $3 million in cash and 120,000 shares of its common stock valued at $1.75 million. This is the second energy procurement acquisition EnerNOC has made in the last six months; back in September the firm bought MDEnergy for $7.9 million. Energy procurement firms allow their customer bases to shop for energy on the deregulated market; their services include offers from a variety of competing energy providers.

We chatted with EnerNOC’s CEO and founder Tim Healy about why the company is snapping up energy procurement services — and what its plans are for more growth:

E2T: How is this acquisition of South River similar to your acquisition of MDEnergy?

Tim Healy: Very similar, in fact. The success of the MDEnergy acquisition gave us the confidence to do this again. We did it again because MDEnergy specializes in the Northeast market and South River specializes in the Mid-Atlantic. These are small, strategic acquisitions. In both cases we acquired a small bit of technology as well. In this, case South River brings us some of the unsexy back office technology you really need to scale.

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Hey Israel’s green-leaning innovators, Israel Cleantech Ventures, a firm focused on funding green technology innovations in Israel, said this morning that it’s closed $75 million for its debut fund. The firm has been around since 2006 and has already made seven investments, many of which we’ve profiled on Earth2Tech. And it’s planning on making more — in alternative energy, water conservation and purification, emissions reduction, and energy-efficiency technologies in general.

While the fund is not as big as others raised recently, Israel Cleantech Ventures was one of the most active investors in the world during the first quarter of 2008, according to the Cleantech Group. The firm invested in four startups, making them the 5th most active cleantech venture investors in the first three months of the year.

Israel itself also saw a record quarter, according to the Cleantech Group, with $132 million invested into nine companies. That was the most deals the state has ever done in a single quarter, and dollar-wise it was a 75 percent jump over the fourth quarter of 2007. Although it should be noted that the high dollar figure was partly due to the $105 million invested into solar thermal company Solel.

If you’re wondering what kind of deals Israel Cleantech Ventures does, well, they pretty much cover it all: wastewater treatment startup Aqwise, fuel cell firm CellEra, landfill biogas company Citrine Renewable Energy, wastewater energy producer Emefcy, HID lighting company Metrolight, Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure startup Project Better Place, and solar company Pythagoras Solar.