MicroMedia Filtration, a developer of advanced water treatment systems, said today that it has closed its first round of funding (no word on how much) from SAIL Venture Partners. The Lake Forest, Calif.-based company was founded in 2003 and is already shipping its treatment systems to municipalities and commercial clients. With its technology in place, MicroMedia plans to use the funding to “significantly expand its growth objectives” by adding to its management team and marketing plans, Ken Stedman, founder and president of MicroMedia, said in a statement.

Stedman didn’t give more details about what those new growth objectives might be, but the company is clear about the value proposition of its wastewater treatment technology. The company says its system operates on 80 percent less power, has as little as half the capital costs and is physically smaller (important for space-constrained real estate developers) than competing technologies. The filtration system is also modular, with individual systems treating between 250,000 and 1 million gallons per day, offering flexibility and the ability for clients to scale up as demand changes.

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Carbon capture technology is like a half-baked web tool, according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: in need of some “debugging.” The chief of the search engine giant made the comments at Google’s headquarters this morning, where he interviewed Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Chu, who was visiting the Googleplex to talk about today’s ARPA-E funding announcements, responded by saying that while today’s carbon capture tech remains much too expensive for broad deployment, a relatively bug-free and affordable system — made up of dozens of different technologies — is not out of reach.

Chu has called for focus on (and investment in) carbon capture before, telling an audience of energy ministers at the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum earlier this month that an “aggressive timeline” for developing the technology is needed to address climate change. At that event, in London, he said the tech needs to be ready for “widespread, affordable deployment” within 8-10 years.

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Thanks to strong backing from the U.S. government, cleantech investing actually delivered a solid third quarter compared to the rest of the venture-backed sectors, including information technology and biotech. So what happens once the millions from the stimulus package dry up? The third-quarter wrap-up on Green IT from GigaOm Pro looks at what happened this quarter as stimulus funds rolled out, cleantech became the largest venture investment sector for the first time ever and talk of a bubble around the current darling of the space—smart grid—loomed large.

But the quarter wasn’t all about the smart grid. Battery companies — focused both on vehicles and consumer electronics — fared well, drawing attention from venture capitalists, the government and larger companies looking at batteries as a good business to be in. A123 Systems’ IPO was the big story in batteries this quarter, and it actually exceeded expectations. Lithium-ion batteries — the technology of choice for the upcoming generation of electric vehicles — have gained enough momentum to spark concerns about limited lithium resources.

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The technology behind the first “Green Revolution” in agriculture, during the 1960s and ’70s, focused on boosting crop yields, to help feed growing populations and spur economic growth in Latin America and Asia. But that revolution wasn’t all that green in the 2009 sense of the term, relying heavily on chemical fertilizers and increased irrigation. Now Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and uber philanthropist, wants to help accelerate a second green revolution in agriculture — again boosting yields, but this time paying more mind to the environment and turning to some technologies that could help deliver a truly sustainable movement.

At the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa today, Gates announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $120 million in nine new grants to organizations and research partners (including $15 million for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), to work on the effort, focusing primarily on small-scale farming in sub-Saharan Africa. In his speech Gates called for an end to the ideological division over the future of agriculture: “Productivity or sustainability — they say you have to choose. It’s a false choice,” he said. Rather, we need farming techniques that are both environmentally responsible and highly productive, and technology will help bridge the gap, he said.

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Green jobs have become a sort of mantra of late among the political left, with supporters looking to clean-energy sectors to produce companies hungry for new hires and help ease the pain of the economic downturn. Today research firm Clean Edge, known among other things for its annual Clean Energy Trends reports, weighed into the discussion with the release of its first report on employment titled “Clean-Tech Jobs Trends 2009.”

While some of the findings shouldn’t astonish — solar, smart grid and biofuels are three of the fastest expanding cleantech sectors — others like the 15 hottest U.S. metropolitan areas for clean-energy jobs and a listing of median salaries for a range of cleantech work provide interesting insight.  

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No fewer than 100 large-scale carbon capture and storage projects within about a decade, at a cost of some $56 billion — that’s what International Energy Agency chief Nobuo Tanaka said the world needs in order to help address climate change, Reuters reports. And it’s only the beginning of his vision for a massive carbon capture drive. At the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, a conference of energy ministers taking place this week in London, Tanaka called for 850 CCS projects by 2030 and 3,400 by 2050, with a total investment of more than $700 billion over the next three decades. Those are huge numbers for an experimental technology that has yet to be proven at industrial scale.

The next decade represents a “key ‘make or break’ period” for carbon capture and storage technology, according to a 52-page CCS “Technology Roadmap” out today from the International Energy Agency, and it could open significant opportunities for startups. While large established power companies will likely dominate industrial storage projects, startups with novel chemical conversion technologies like GreatPoint Energy, and startups that recycle the carbon, like algae fuel firms like Solazyme, will likely benefit from the intergovernmental agency’s call to arms.

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Apple wants no part in the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to EPA regulations of greenhouse gas emissions. The company has sent a letter to the lobbying behemoth today announcing its decision to resign its membership.

Apple’s departure makes is just the latest company trying to distance itself from chamber’s stance on climate policy — several utilities including California’s PG&E have said they will let their membership lapse at the end of this year and Nike has stepped down from the chamber’s board. But in a move that shows the high stakes of the climate policy debate for corporations, Apple has taken a bolder step and made its resignation from the chamber “effective immediately.”

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Nearly half of the electric car charging equipment installed worldwide by 2015 will be heading to China, according to a recent report from Pike Research. Today an announcement from Scottsdale, Ariz.-based charging infrastructure company ECOtality indicates that China’s role in the electric car charging boom will encompass not only installing the equipment domestically, but also building it for international deployment. Down the road, when you pull up to a charge point, there’s a good chance it could have been made in China.

ECOtality, whose subsidiary eTec snagged a nearly $100 million federal stimulus grant last month to support what the company describes as “the largest deployment of EV chargers and vehicles ever” (12,750 charging systems in five states for 5,000 Nissan LEAF electric vehicles), says this morning that it has formed two joint ventures with China’s Shenzhen Goch Investment, or SGI, in order to manufacture, assemble and sell EV charging equipment in China.

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More than 100 companies have been jockeying in recent months for billions of dollars in federal grants and state incentive packages designed to help spur the growth of a U.S. battery manufacturing industry for plug-in vehicles. At this point, firms based in China, Japan, South Korea dominate the market for lithium-ion batteries. But as demand grows beyond mobile devices and laptops for advanced battery technologies (lithium-ion and others) to increasing numbers of electric and hybrid vehicles, there’s an opportunity for players in the U.S. to either enter the game or expand their role.

View Battery Buildout in a larger map

With the Department of Energy opening a spigot of cash to support battery manufacturing projects over the next three years, we’re on the verge of a rapid buildout. We’ve put together this map to help keep track of who’s in the running — we’re at 35 battery projects and counting. Not all of these projects will necessarily get off the ground, and those that do hardly have commercial success guaranteed — we’ll keep updating the map as they evolve (let us know in the comments about other projects you’d like to see tracked). Think of it as an emerging batterywatch map to balance out our coal and biofuels deathwatch maps.

General Motors still has a lot of open questions about the best way to build out a comprehensive charging infrastructure for plug-in vehicles like the Chevy Volt, and it’s working with utilities, policy-makers and other stakeholders and “enablers” to answer them. But at least one thing is pretty clear at this early stage, according to GM’s Britta Gross, who heads up infrastructure commercialization: Automakers need more help setting up charging than GM had for the EV-1. In particular the industry can take a cue from the proliferation of cable and the Internet, by making it relatively affordable, timely and convenient for customers.

Speaking at a workshop Monday ahead of the Plug-in 2009 conference taking place this week in Long Beach, Calif., Gross said that with the EV-1, GM “held every customer’s hand,” walking them through the process of permitting and installing chargers for their vehicles. “We ended up footing a lot of the bill,” she said. “That can’t be sustained if you want to get to 10,000 or 100,000 vehicles.”

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