For plug-in vehicle makers, “a radical new form of market segmentation” holds the key to reaching beyond wealthy, green-minded early adopters, according to a new report from McKinsey & Co. The common approach of trying to build a vehicle that can satisfy virtually all the driving needs for a large swath of consumers may hinder the success of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles if applied to this nascent market, the consulting firm finds.

Instead, automakers should tailor plug-in vehicles for the primary “driving missions” of specific consumer groups, McKinsey suggests — in other words, make a car that meets some of the needs of some customers.

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If you can efficiently separate tiny molecules of salt from seawater, you probably have the technology to filter out the larger bacteria, protozoan cysts, viruses and other contaminants floating around in much of the world’s freshwater. That’s part of what Richmond, Calif.-based NanOasis hopes will allow the company to not only provide tech for desalination projects in California, but also eventually sell into the market for water filtration systems in developing countries, the startup’s executives told me. “Water is a huge issue,” said NanOasis founder and President Christopher Kennedy. “Desalination is a starting point.”

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“Inventing disruptive manufacturing innovations is every bit as hard as inventing new materials,” says Frank van Mierlo, President and co-founder of 1366 Technologies. Solar power, if it’s going to compete on cost with coal and other fossil fuels, needs both. It’s on that premise that 1366, a developer of new machines and processes that can be easily integrated into solar companies’ existing manufacturing lines, has based its business model.

Based in Lexington, Mass., 1366 spun out of MIT in 2007 and raised $12.4 million from Polaris Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners the following year. It now has the distinction of being the sole photovoltaic company selected for the first round of grants under the Department of Energy’s high-risk energy tech fund, the highly competitive ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) program.

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Envia Systems, a battery materials startup based in Hayward, Calif., has just entered an elite group: the 1 percent of applicants awarded a first-round grant under the Department of Energy’s high-risk energy tech fund, ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy). Given that Envia, founded in 2007, had previously announced only $3.2 million in venture capital financing, scoring $4 million in government funds this week has shifted the playing field for the startup.

As recently as August, when we spoke with co-founder and director Michael Sinkula about Envia’s cathode (or positive electrode) technology, the company was still operating under the radar, with a placeholder web site (it’s since been fleshed out a bit) and reluctance to provide much detail on its scheme to significantly cut the cost of batteries for electric vehicles. But Sinkula told us at the time that Envia, with less than 50 people on staff, was developing low-cost cathode materials specifically for vehicle batteries and working to optimize other components around the cathode in order to pack more energy into each lithium-ion cell. So what’s the new game plan?

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Green building geeks now have a more powerful tool for developing next-gen building designs with minimal environmental impact. Software engineers at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory launched this week an update of their plug-in for SketchUp, Google’s open-source 3D building modeling tool. With a growing list of features, the latest version of the free OpenStudio plug-in, will enable architects to create more detailed simulations of their designs’ energy efficiency, and marks another step in the effort to make advanced green building design tools widely available at low or no cost.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu spoke earlier this year about the need to provide this kind of technology via open source. “We should be inventing a new way of designing buildings,” he said at an event in San Francisco, describing an idea for a program that would pinpoint things like the most efficient window orientation for a particular site, and help architects tweak their designs to maximize a building’s energy performance. Google SketchUp, with NREL’s ongoing work on the OpenStudio plug-in, is a step in that direction (see a video demo below the break).

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Slick, efficient and wireless — that’s the focus of an upcoming generation of greener gadget designs on display at this year’s CEATEC, the consumer electronics show in Japan. As Pedro Hernandez notes this morning over on GigaOM Pro (our subscription-only research service), exhibitors in the event’s Green IT Pavilion are showing off a range of prototypes for gadgets that do more with less electricity.

In an encouraging sign for the 22 percent of consumers who care enough about the environmental impact of their electronics purchases that they’re willing to pay a premium on greener gadgets, the Green IT section is three times larger at CEATEC than it was last year.

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With so much activity in Washington, D.C., these days — from funding opportunities to policies like cap and trade — that could affect cleantech industries, many startups have sent their executives to the capital or hired lobbyists in the hope of adding their voices to the debate. But cleantech startups need to be careful when it comes to dedicating their limited resources to these efforts. While spending time in D.C. can certainly bring rewards, once there it’s easy to spend tons of cash without much to show for it. Here’s our list of the top 5 things startups should know before hopping on a plane to Washington.

Don’t hire a lobbying firm first. Before ever stepping foot in D.C., identify which issues you think you can add value to, says John Stubbs, executive director of the Global Innovation Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to promote innovation for solutions to global problems. Those issues could be cap-and-trade legislation, renewable portfolio standards, tax credits, stimulus, patent reform or others.

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Energy management tools — software and gadgets to help curb energy consumption — are the unofficial must-launch product for greentech firms this summer. And they’ve been coming from everywhere: smaller startups like smart meter software maker eMeter, an international conglomerate like GE, and mammoth IT firms like Microsoft and Google. (Read about 10 energy management tools here.) But one New York-based startup called Efficiency 2.0, which has spent the past four years developing sophisticated energy management algorithms, says it’s the first to be able to offer truly targeted energy-efficiency recommendations to customers, which it believes will put it at the front of the pack.

Think about how Netflix and Amazon use your demographic and purchase information to recommend books and movies that you’ll actually like and possibly buy. That’s what Efficiency 2.0 is shooting for, company CEO and founder Tom Scaramellino explained in an interview this week. Efficiency 2.0’s software collects a whole bunch of information about the energy consumer — like location, age and demographic data, as well as some answers the consumer provides in response to prompted questions about lifestyle and residence — and churns out recommendations on ways to curb energy consumption that rings true for each individual. For example, if the user is 23 years old, Scaramellino said, then the engine would likely recommend more cost-effective energy-saving techniques that don’t require a lot of upfront expense.

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Two years ago — when biofuels were all the rage, energy efficiency technology couldn’t get any love, and Obama’s massive energy investments were just a glimmer in entrepreneurs’ eyes — we launched Earth2Tech as part of the GigaOM Network. That was back when the clean technology sector was still in the midst of a massive upswing (more than $6 billion in investments in 2007, followed by more than $8 billion in 2008), and Internet entrepreneurs and investors were just starting to try to figure out how they could use their knowledge and Rolodexes to jump in and make money in the sector. Our goal was to try to build a site and a community around innovators that are using technology to fight climate change.

Two years later, after more than 3,500 posts, 16,000 comments and thousands of (wo)man hours, we’re looking at a very different landscape for the cleantech sector. As the folks at Green Sheet recently put it, we’re in the midst of the best and the worst of times for cleantech.

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At first blush, the ways in which modeling vehicles after smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone could help usher in greener, more connected cars and trucks may not be obvious. But according to Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, the country’s largest car-sharing network, that’s where we’re headed.

Griffith believes cars should be designed to function more like the wildly popular devices — with GPS, an intuitive user interface, a web connection and a set of standard applications to help drivers, say, manage their fuel consumption, plus an open platform that would allow third-party developers to provide software that could be customized for each driver. Loading cars with driver-facing tech could be key to boosting automakers’ margins on smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles (in recent years many of them have relied on bigger vehicles to carry their bottom lines, while barely making a profit on smaller cars) and making them commercially viable on the U.S. market. As Griffith noted, pointing to Zipcar subscribers by way of example, “This demographic will pay up for features.”

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