So much for the “rapid restart” that Department of Energy Chief Steven Chu had in mind for the FutureGen project, a controversial public-private initiative to test experimental carbon capture and storage technology at a new 275 MW coal plant. Less than two weeks after Chu announced plans to contribute more than $1 billion to the project, which had stalled since the Bush administration pulled funding last year, two coal-burning utility partners have backed out of the deal — signaling a still-cloudy future for the project and increasing pressure for private-sector partners to expand their ranks.

Secretary Chu — who envisioned FutureGen as a vehicle for the $1 billion allocated in the stimulus package for “fossil energy research and development” and part of a larger collaboration with foreign energy ministers to create an international surge of research into carbon-management technologies — now sees high hurdles ahead for FutureGen. Late yesterday at the Edison Electric Institute’s conference in San Francisco, he said that while the DOE has put FutureGen “back on the table,” the Alliance still has to get a partner or two, especially a utility partner. “I’m hopeful that they can do this, but it’s not a guarantee,” he said, emphasizing that his agency’s support for the project was conditional to begin with.

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A century ago, Michigan gave us the Model T. Now General Electric hopes scientists, engineers and technologists in the state will also be able to deliver key pieces of the smart grid. The company — already a heavyweight among smart meter developers — has just announced plans to research and develop manufacturing technology and software, including tech for the smart grid and renewable energy, at a new center in Wayne County, about 25 miles outside of Detroit.

According to a release from the company this morning, the new $100 million facility will employ as many as 1,100 people over the next few years working on “next-generation manufacturing technologies” for GE products, as well as new composites, machining, inspection, casting and coating technologies for the company’s aviation and energy units.

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In the international race to build out infrastructure for electric vehicles, the U.S. government’s recent push for networks of charging stations and the work of Silicon Valley startups on their home turf represent no match for China. According to a new report released today by Pike Research, more than 5 million charge points will be installed worldwide by 2015 — bringing in nearly $6.5 billion in revenue — and nearly half of the equipment will be heading to China.

Largely that’s the result of a strong push by the Chinese government to achieve countrywide mass adoption of electric vehicles. As we’ve written before, there’s a strategic reason for Chinese automakers to go electric: Legacy car companies haven’t yet mastered the technology. By moving early and fast, China — which had the world’s highest vehicle sales last quarter — could dominate the growing EV market.

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IBM’s “smarter planet initiative” seeks to connect everything from railways to the power grid to buildings with sensors, software and communications gear. And to accomplish such a feat (to basically act as a platform to connect various infrastructure), the computing company needs friends — a whole lot of them. On Tuesday at the company’s Green and Beyond Summit for Industry in San Francisco, Big Blue announced a slew of smart systems-focused partnerships with fellow tech giants, regulators and research institutes.

One of IBM’s most far-reaching new partnerships is called the Green Sigma Coalition, and it’s starting out with eight charter members, including Johnson Controls, Honeywell Building Solutions, Cisco, Siemens and others. According to IBM, each of the allied companies plans to integrate their tech with a set of products and services it has designed to help firms meter, monitor and analyze energy and water use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste (the company’s so-called “Green Sigma solution”). The idea is to offer customers a single, comprehensive view of their resource use, efficiency and overall environmental impact.

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The Renault-Nissan Alliance has been striking one deal after another with utilities and governments in recent months, revving up for the launch of its first electric vehicle in 2011. Today, with the announcement of a new agreement with French utility EDF to deploy a charge management system, we’re getting a glimpse of how at least one of the auto alliance’s planned car-charging networks will actually work. According to releases from EDF and the Renault-Nissan Alliance this morning, the state-owned utility has developed a secure system for transmitting sensitive data between vehicles and charging terminals — including vehicle identification and billing information — using power line communication.

Last year, when Renault and EDF first announced plans for massive EV infrastructure buildout, starting in France, the partners said they would jointly develop a commercial charging network — but kept the project open to third parties and eventually created an “Electric Mobility Operator” to manage the system. If all goes well in Renault’s trials with integrating the power line communication system with its vehicles (built with batteries produced by Nissan’s joint venture with NEC), it could be a key tool for other companies, such as Better Place and IBM, hoping to provide software for handling EV charging data. EDF and Renault aren’t providing many details about plans for the technology, but from the release it sounds like EDF plans to provide a system for sending sensitive data over its power lines securely. The idea is to allow companies to send and receive “digital signals via the power cable without the need for additional wires,” as Green Car Congress explained last fall when infrastructure startup Elektromotive started integrating EDF power line communication technology into its charging stations the UK.

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When it comes to defending its green cred, Dell is not exactly a wallflower. The Texas-based computer manufacturer, which has been making one of the most substantial efforts in the industry to produce more environmentally sound products and shrink its carbon footprint, has taken to task competitor Apple’s latest claims about having “the world’s greenest family of notebooks” — first in a smackdown post on its company blog, and now with a complaint filed with the advertising industry’s self-regulator, a forum for reviewing the truthfulness of claims in ads and marketing .

The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, or NAD, delivered a bittersweet decision on Dell’s complaint yesterday. As the New York Times Green Inc. blog reports this morning, NAD concluded that Apple can legitimately market its latest generation of MacBooks as being greener than some product lines from a given competitor (the new MacBooks earn high Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, or EPEAT ratings), but that “world’s greenest” has “potential for overstatement.”

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Data centers are energy hogs, but the country’s most prominent green building standard, LEED, doesn’t adequately address their special design considerations. That looks set to change, however, as the U.S. Green Building Council, which develops LEED, is considering tailoring existing LEED rating systems to evaluate green data centers. Brendan Owens, the Green Building Council’s vice president of technical development for LEED, tells us that as part of that effort the nonprofit organization is also evaluating which tools would be best for assessing green data centers.

Owens said that he is actively working with The Green Grid and other groups that have been doing detailed technical work on establishing benchmarks for green data centers. Any provisions added to LEED regarding data centers would draw from this technical work. But he would not give a timeline, stressing that a final decision has not yet been made. “It will be decided based on our interaction with market leaders we are talking with,” Owens said. “We want to serve the best needs of the market.”

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A growing number of political leaders — from mayors on up to presidents and prime ministers — are taking up the electric vehicle torch, working on policies and incentives to spur widespread adoption of plug-in cars. In parts of the U.S., UK, Japan and elsewhere, initiatives to quickly develop networks of charging stations for the plug-in vehicles slated to roll out in 2011 and beyond are already taking form, and running up against a key question on the road to a competitive green car marketplace: How do you accelerate deployment of today’s technology while remaining open to future innovations?

On some level, this question is about the familiar issue of how (and how much) government should play a role in free markets. But it’s also another example of how lessons from the history of computing can apply to cleantech innovations. According to the finance chief for London’s climate change program, Padmesh Shukla, Sun Microsystems’ Java platform — an ubiquitous system for software development for mobile devices, enterprise servers and the web — offers a model for governments now trying to craft guidelines for companies to bid on government-backed EV infrastructure projects.

Bottom line, Shukla said at a recent panel hosted by Think London, which works to attract direct investment in the city and help foreign companies set up business there, London wants to have EV infrastructure that looks more like Java, which software developers can use for free, than Microsoft’s proprietary technology. “It has to be an open platform,” Shukla said.

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Development of the public-private “cleaner coal” demo project known as FutureGen has been anything but smooth sailing. Plans for a 275 MW coal-fired power plant equipped with experimental carbon capture technology ran hugely over budget in the early stages, and hit a dead end when the Bush administration pulled funding. Then back in March Energy Secretary Steven Chu came to the rescue and said he wanted to take a “fresh look” at the project and implement a modified version.

Today we have the results of that fresh look: Chu has just announced plans to complete key planning and funding steps for FutureGen by early next year, and ultimately contribute an estimated $1.073 billion to the project (including $1 billion in stimulus funds allocated for carbon capture research).

According to a release from the Department of Energy this morning, the agency has made a provisional agreement with the FutureGen Alliance — the group of coal and utility companies that had previously partnered with the feds on the project — to pursue five benchmarks between the end of next month and early 2010:

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Concentrating solar-thermal company eSolar hasn’t been shy about taking on new projects. The Pasadena, Calif.-based company on Thursday announced another one: an agreement to develop a 92-megawatt plant in southern New Mexico with Princeton, N.J.-based energy company NRG Energy. The companies say they are ready to begin construction on the project, calling it “shovel-ready,” and expect it to be fully operational in the summer of 2011.

The announcement is part of the companies’ previously announced goal of developing up to 500 megawatts of solar-thermal power in the United States. This latest project is expected to be the first commercial solar-thermal plant in New Mexico, according to the companies, and will feed electricity to the El Paso Electric utility.

It also will be eSolar’s first project outside of California, although the company in March signed a deal for Gurgaon, India-based Acme Group to use eSolar technology to build up to 1 gigawatt of solar-thermal plants in India.

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