Top executives from 13 companies including California utility Pacific Gas & Electric, Japanese automaker Nissan, smart grid startup GridPoint, battery maker A123Systems, battery giant Johnson Controls-Saft, and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, are joining forces this morning as the founding members of a new alliance called the Electrification Coalition with a shared vision for how to transition the vehicle fleet off of gasoline and onto the electric grid.

Are these the faces of the next EV influencers? The group certainly has some heavyweights, with a combined market cap of more than $100 billion, but hardly represents the entirety of the energy, utility, auto or energy storage industries — or even just the EV sector. But most of the 13 have bet big on the nascent electric vehicle market. With the stated mission to “promote government action to facilitate deployment of electric vehicles on a mass scale,” the Electrification Coalition has released a 91-page policy paper this morning, advocating government action to boost the industry.

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The Departments of Agriculture and Energy late yesterday announced they will be doling out a dozen grants — ranging from $1 million to $4 million each — to private sector and university research projects focused on alternative fuels and bio-based products. In total, the departments will give out $24.4 million in funding, part of their standard full-year 2009 budgets, with each project expected to contribute at least 20 percent in matching funds. The projects were selected based on their potential to increase the availability of alternative fuels and bio-based products. Here’s a snapshot of five of the most interesting recipients:

Gevo: The Englewood, Colo.-based startup will receive up to $1.7 million to develop a yeast fermentation organism that can cost-effectively convert cellulosic-derived sugars into isobutanol. This liquid could then be used as a biofuel or as a chemical precursor for certain “high-value” products like PET plastic. Despite the economic downturn, Gevo hasn’t had much trouble raising funding. The startup got a $40 million investment led by French oil company Total SA in April after raising $17 million from Khosla Ventures Virgin Green Fund and others the year before.

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The findings you’re most likely to hear this morning from a new report by the European lobby group Transport & Environment include these three hot-button points: electric cars could increase carbon emissions, could “speed climate change,” and may not reduce oil dependency.

But a closer read of the report reveals its basic premise shouldn’t actually be that controversial. Electric cars have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, the group argues. But the electricity supply will have to be cleaned up by adding renewables (like solar and wind) to the power grid (with a push from government), and the cars “must be more energy-efficient than state-of-the-art conventional vehicles on a ‘tank to wheel’ basis” (which they already are) in order to realize significant environmental benefits.

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The idea of modeling government funds after venture capital has swirled, in various forms, around the Obama administration since back in the campaign days. Now comes the latest twist: The Obama administration has named a former VC, Jonathan Silver, to head up the Department of Energy’s highly competitive loan guarantee program and green car loan program, which have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in direct loans and guarantees to venture-backed companies including Tesla Motors, Fisker Automotive and Solyndra.

Silver’s appointment to the role of executive director of the loan programs comes as part of an effort, the DOE says, to “strengthen and streamline” the agency’s operations. Having left the Washington, D.C.-based firm Core Capital Partners (where he was the managing general partner) last year, Silver will now oversee the application process, analysis and negotiation for loans and guarantees under the two programs, as well as staffing. According to a release from the DOE, he will also manage “the full range of the Department’s alternative energy investments.”

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Think of it as a phone plan, but instead of minutes to gab each month, you get insurance coverage for a certain number of miles driven in a set period of time. That’s the basic idea behind pay-as-you-drive auto insurance policies. The concept has been tossed around for years as a way to discourage extra car trips and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

Now California Insurance Commissioner Steven Poizner has given the green light for regulations permitting and authorizing insurance companies to verify mileage, the Sacramanto Bee reports. These final regulations, originally proposed last year, open the door for insurers to consider pay-by-the-mile plans in the state who previously rejected the option because they didn’t have the authority to double check drivers’ mileage estimates.

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The $10 million in winnings for the Automotive X Prize competition can provide a welcome influx of cash for the DIY garage-based team, startup or even a more established automaker that builds the best 100 MPG car with a minimum 200-mile range, based on a number of tests and road trials. Today the competition itself has scored some funding of its own, in the form of an up to $5.5 million award from the Department of Energy.

According to the DOE’s announcement this morning, the $5.5 million for the X Prize Foundation comes from the agency’s pot of stimulus funds, and will help expand education and outreach efforts for the competition nationwide. The DOE also plans to provide technical expertise “to ensure that each of the competition designs is reviewed correctly and consistently.”

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Climate change, corporate carbon footprints and policies in the works to address them present real risk for businesses and their investors. But can shareholders demand disclosure of that risk? As of this week, thanks to a new ruling from the Securities and Exchange Commission, now they can.

Prior to this decision, handed down on Tuesday, the SEC allowed companies to reject the growing number of shareholder requests for disclosure of financial risks related to environmental and social issues (including climate change) as “no-action requests.” The org reasoned that such risks were part of ordinary business operations, and therefore not open to a shareholder vote, according to a legal bulletin from the SEC.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no stranger to controversy. The environmental lawyer and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance served jail time in 2001 for trespassing after joining a protest at a U.S. Navy training facility in Puerto Rico, and wrote an article in Rolling Stone claiming the 2004 U.S. presidential election might have been “stolen” as eligible voters were prevented from casting ballots. But at the Solar Power International conference in Anaheim, Calif., on Wednesday, Kennedy called his support of greentech “the most subversive thing I’ve ever done.”

He underlined the power of the coal and oil lobbies in Washington and urged solar and other renewable-energy advocates to start showing their strength on Capitol Hill. The most important thing people can do is get involved in the government, he said. “It’s much more important to change your politician than it is to change your lightbulb,” he said to laughter from the audience. “We need to show our muscle and get tough, aggressive people on Capitol Hill, flying around in solar-power Lear jets or whatever it is. We need to be demanding, ‘Hey, we are patriotic, we are saving this country…and we need to fight these enemies.’ If a foreign enemy poisoned 600,000 children every year, we’d consider that an act of war. We shouldn’t put up with this, and we can’t put up with this.”

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Of the $151 million in grants announced this week under ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), the Department of Energy’s highly competitive program for high-risk, early-stage energy technologies, more than a fifth — some $33 million — has been allocated for green vehicle projects. Since the program is meant to support work on tech that other investors consider too risky, each of the projects — from boosting the fuel economy of gas-powered cars to replacing lithium-ion batteries as the technology of choice for electric vehicles — represent something of a gamble. So when it comes to choosing ideas for transforming the auto industry and cleaning up transportation, how wisely is the DOE placing its chips?

According to Lux Research analyst Jacob Grose, who headed up the firm’s recent report on electric vehicle adoption, this first round of funding (there’s nearly $250 million left in the pot for later rounds) offers support for a strong balance of innovations. “Overall, I think the ARPA-E guys hit all the key areas for vehicle technologies,” by investing in the motors, batteries and electronics for today’s electric vehicles, as well as “some future technologies which are higher risk but may play a role in novel vehicles down the road,” and others that could help boost the MPGs of cars with the ol’ internal combustion engine.

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It’s not often that the Department of Energy gets to go far out on a limb with its investments. But that’s exactly the point of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) — a program funded under the stimulus package to support moonshot technologies that might be too risky for other investors. Today the DOE has announced the first round of ARPA-E grants, awarding a total of $151 million for 37 projects.

The winners in this first round include General Motors ($2.7 million), battery materials startup Envia Systems ($4 million), ultracapacitor developer FastCAP Systems ($5.3 million), auto supplier Delphi Automotive Systems ($6.7 million), solar tech developer 1366 Technologies ($4 million), efficient designers PAX Streamline ($3 million), and several universities (for a complete list see here). In all, the funding will cover work across the spectrum of green technologies, including building efficiency, carbon capture, energy storage, fuel-efficient vehicle technologies, renewable energy, waste heat capture and water desalination.

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