Electronics and liquids don’t mix, unless you’re Iceotope. At this week’s Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore., the 3-year-old startup from Sheffield, UK is demonstrating a liquid-cooled server setup that has the potential to cut data center cooling costs by up to 93 percent. The firm just came out of stealth mode, 18 months after a round of financing in early 2008 from EV Group. Plans call for Iceotope to begin manufacturing this year with an eye toward getting the system to early access participants by Q1 2010, general availability sometime in the second half of 2010.

Considering that cooling IT systems is responsible for 40-60 percent of a typical data center’s yearly spending on electricity, the company is clearly betting that the energy savings alone will be enough to drum up business. Instead of supplying rack doors with chilled water to cool servers like IBM, or affixing “water blocks” to processors and other heat-generating components of a server to siphon off heat, Iceotope dunks entire server motherboards into modules that are filled with an “inert liquid” that doesn’t short out the delicate electronics.

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“Aptera’s production and delivery will be tied directly to funding,” said Aptera Motors CEO Paul Wilbur in a release from the ultra high-efficiency vehicle startup late yesterday. That very mild assessment belies the reality that Aptera is peering across the Valley of Death, where many ventures die for lack of funding at the critical commercial development phase. According to the release, dwindling cash reserves are forcing the company to delay production of its inaugural vehicle, the three-wheeled electric 2e, until 2010 rather than the end of this year as previously announced.

Hitting the new 2010 target (or any future production goal for that matter), will require Aptera to bring in fresh capital, and it’s banking on either a federal loan or private investment to come through. At this point, the company is shifting its focus away from development, which “has been outpacing the rate of fundraising.” The company has laid off an undisclosed number of employees, co-founder Steve Fambro is taking an extended vacation (he’ll return in the new year), and Chris Anthony, the other co-founder, is “stepping aside from day-to-day activities” — all in an effort, Aptera says, to slow the burn rate and free up resources for top priorities: raising cash and starting volume production of the 2e.

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Danfoss IXA of Denmark has a simple idea for changing the way greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants are managed in industrial environments: measure them at the source. The startup, a spinoff of the Danfoss Group, is working on sensor technology packaged in a hermetically sealed box with a nano-coated sight glass that can withstand super-harsh environments — such as within a ship’s smokestacks, for example — to gather emissions data, which can then be used to activate mitigation systems.

According to CEO Henrik Gedde Moos, who made the case for Danfoss IXA in the Idea People’s Choice contest Tuesday at the Cleantech Open in San Francisco (algae biofuel developer Replenish Energy of Puerto Rico ended up snagging the award), no device currently on the market can “continuously monitor emissions inside the chimney with a sensor as small and robust as ours.” However, others are trying, like Picarro, which we profiled this week.

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For the entrepreneurs competing to win the $250,000 grand prize package in the Cleantech Open business plan competition — and join the ranks of past winners like Adura Technologies — the wait is over. Tonight in San Francisco, the organization announced finalists from each region (listed below the break). But the big kahuna goes to smart thermostat software developer EcoFactor.

The 3-year-old startup, which beat out runners up MicroMidas (working on bioplastics) and Alphabet Energy (working on waste-heat recovery), has developed a service based on smart algorithms (read all about it here) that can continuously manage a home’s connected thermostat throughout the day, tweaking the settings ever so slightly to shave off energy consumption, but maintain a comfortable temperature.

Of course, the race to win this prize is over, but the rest of the climb toward a sustainable, profitable business lies ahead. When we spoke with EcoFactor earlier this month, the angel-funded company was in negotiations for its Series A round, and the company’s Senior VP of Products, Scott Hublou told us tonight that those talks are ongoing with several venture firms. He’s hopeful the grand prize will help smooth the way for that financing. “At the end of the day,” he said, the benefit of this type of competition is to “help you get to your next funding event.” As Marc Gottschalk, co-chair of the competition, said to venture capitalists and investors in the audience tonight: “These teams could always use more love.”

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Carbon capture and water desalination couldn’t seem further apart. One seeks to grab large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and sequester them away from the planet’s atmosphere, and the other is a process for separating salt from seawater. Where’s the connection? It lies in the labs of Hayward, Calif.-based startup Porifera, a spinoff from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab that’s working to commercialize carbon nanotube membrane technology.

Since its founding last year, Porifera has been focusing on applications using carbon nanotube membranes — tiny, ultra-slippery, hollow arrangements of carbon atoms that allow gases and liquids to flow through at a rapid pace, while blocking larger molecules — for desalination. And just last week, the Livermore lab announced that Porifera has secured an exclusive license for the technology, which members of Porifera’s executive team helped develop.

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The co-founders of Aptera Motors, Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony, did not leave the three-wheeled electric car startup by choice, according to a report this morning over at Wired’s Autopia. Rather, unnamed sources tell the blog that Fambro and Anthony were pushed out in “a boardroom confrontation between the original founders and the auto industry veterans” brought onto the Aptera executive team last year.

Darryl Siry, former marketing chief for electric car startup Tesla Motors, writes that “the first sign of a rift” at the company may have been the design shift Aptera announced shortly after hiring Paul Wilbur as president and CEO in September 2008: Instead of bringing the futuristic-looking 2e (then called the Typ-1) to market by the end of that year, as previously planned, the startup said it would revise the design — and delay production as a result — in the interest of “satisfying the needs of real-world consumers,” according to a company statement at the time.

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Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup Coda Automotive, a spinoff from low-speed electric carmaker Miles Electric Vehicles, doesn’t want to play nice with the big guys. With an overhauled web site launched on Thursday, Coda now urges visitors to “flip gas prices the bird,” and writes in a blog post titled “Detroit Doesn’t Have the Answers,” that:

“It’s hard for us to believe that one of the industry giants will [get electric cars on the market quickly] –- especially considering their businesses were founded on and are still concretely rooted in the production of internal combustion, gas guzzling vehicles.”

Coda seems to be ramping up the aggression factor of its image and embracing the role of an underdog trying to shake up — and fight its way into — the auto industry. It will be interesting to see how that goes over with the EU and U.S. automakers, which Coda said in June it “may consider selling battery systems” to in the next couple years. The new site also includes images of the latest Coda Sedan designs, including small changes to the front, rear and exterior lighting (you can see the previous design here), and the first renderings of the interior. They’re small tweaks, but moving in the right direction (see images below).

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Louisiana offered up a hefty incentive package in order to bring the Kleiner Perkins and T. Boone Pickens-backed auto startup V-Vehicle Company to the state. And over the next few weeks, businesses in the state will be racing to secure some of the direct benefits of that move.

According to the latest report on the company from the local Monroe News-Star, V-Vehicle is now on the hunt for machine, service and auto component suppliers. It’s giving preference to Louisiana companies, which have until Nov. 23 to submit an application. Within a week of that deadline, V-Vehicle will make the first cut and invite a group of suppliers to interview. By then the startup expects to have word from the Department of Energy on its request for $250 million in low-interest loans.

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About 16 miles down the turnpike in Delaware from the old General Motors where startup Fisker Automotive plans to build an upcoming plug-in hybrid vehicle, Elon Musk, CEO of rival Tesla Motors, yesterday told an audience at the University of Delaware (and more joining via Second Life) that he has “some reservations about the feasibility of Fisker’s approach.”

According to the Delaware News Journal, Musk said, “It’s very tough to create a car company,” noting particularly high hurdles for engineering an electric car, adding, “Fisker is very far from overcoming those.”

Musk’s comments come at an interesting time for the two startups, which have each secured multimillion-dollar conditional loans from the Department of Energy to help accelerate them toward a new phase: higher volume production of more affordable vehicles.

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One thing is sure: The hybrid, tandem-seat 3-wheeler in the works at Oregon-based startup Green Lite Motors is no Prius. Less certain is whether there’s a market for the 4-feet-by-8-feet vehicle, which features “smart standup” technology that Green Lite President and CEO Tim Miller says will let the vehicle lean smoothly into turns and automatically right itself when it comes to a stop. But Green Lite just snagged one of the coveted regional finalist slots for the national Clean Tech Open business plan competition, and Miller sees a window of opportunity for this kind of vehicle.

The vehicle, now in third-generation prototype and able to get up to 100MPG, according to Miller, is the inaugural model from Green Lite. The design remains several steps away from commercial production, and faces high hurdles to win over consumers accustomed to having either four or two wheels on their rides.

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