Cleantech investment is on the rise again, according to two reports released this week, hitting $1.2 billion in the second quarter. “Cleantech venture investment has rebounded moderately after free-falling for two consecutive quarters,” said Brian Fan, senior director of research for the Cleantech Group, in a press release. Other signs of recovery include more mergers and acquisitions, as well as increased solar tax equity, he said.

The Cleantech Group, which tracks deals in North America, Europe, China and India, said Wednesday that cash was distributed among more companies, too: 94 compared with 82 in the first quarter. Meanwhile, Greentech Media put the number of deals in the second quarter at 85 vs. 59 in the first.

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When Tesla Motors founder Martin Eberhard’s lawsuit against the electric vehicle startup and its current CEO, Elon Musk, surfaced earlier this month, Tesla called the allegations of libel, slander and breach of contract “an unfair personal attack,” and said it “will likely be filing counterclaims.” Now Tesla has filed its first official response in the San Mateo County Court, seeking to have the whole shebang dismissed.

Rather than a counterclaim, Tesla filed what’s called an anti-SLAPP motion (SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) yesterday morning, arguing that Eberhard’s lawsuit represents:

[N]othing more than an attempt to curb open discourse on matters of importance to the public and to extract money from Tesla in the bargain. He [Eberhard] also takes the extraordinary (and hypocritical) step of seeking an injunction that would prevent Musk from exercising his free speech rights in public or private.”

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Algenol Biofuels, with its just-announced plans to build an algae fuel demo plant in partnership with Dow Chemical, isn’t the only startup taking the demise of a well-funded algae fuel company — GreenFuel Technologies — in stride.

Today 3-year-old Solix Biofuels, which has some similarities with GreenFuel (it uses closed photobioreactors to grow algae, then turns it into biofuels and feedstocks for the chemical industry), shows it, too, is bucking up in the downturn — adding another $1.3 million to its Series A financing round, and announcing plans to start a commercial-scale demonstration of its technology within two months (”late summer”) in southwestern Colorado.

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Much has changed for battery maker A123Systems since it first filed to go public nearly a year ago. In the fourth and latest revision to its SEC registration statement, filed last week, the company has laid out some of the opportunities — and potential pitfalls — that it faces as a result of new government incentives and ongoing tumult in the auto industry. The company filed its last amendment to this statement back in November 2008, so this revision offers an interesting survey of how the landscape has changed in 2009 — and how the company’s prospects look for what venture capitalist Steve Westly recently told fellow cleantech investors could be a blockbuster year for cleantech IPOs.

The key point in the new amendment is this: With government aid, we can expect a massive effort to build out a U.S. battery industry, and A123 aims to take the lead. But without it, companies like A123, which now does manufacturing primarily in Korea and Changzhou, China, just might stick with the sector’s existing hot spots overseas. As the company writes in its latest filing:

If we receive sufficient federal and state incentive funding, we plan to aggressively expand our domestic battery manufacturing capacity. This expansion would complement our existing manufacturing facilities in Asia.

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How do you sell $109,000 electric sports cars in a recession? Slowly, according to a Green Fuels Forecast analysis this week of the sales and backlog numbers for the Tesla Roadster. Green Fuels Forecast crunched the numbers Tesla has revealed so far — the company delivered Roadster No. 500 earlier this month, and as of this week 700-800 customers still await delivery — to put total sales (fulfilled plus unfulfilled orders) in the range of 1,200-1,300 units.

Problem is, that’s about how many orders Tesla had for the Roadster when it started production last year — suggesting that new orders may not be keeping pace with cancellations, Green Fuels Forecast writes. Earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company had seen some cancellations as customers dealt with the economic downturn. Other factors also may have come into play, such as the price hike for previously standard options on pre-ordered Roadsters, which the company announced in January of this year.

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Updated with comment from Tesla: Tomorrow could be a big day for Tesla Motors and the would-be customers who have logged more than 1,000 orders for the startup’s planned electric sedan, the Model S. The San Carlos, Calif.-based company’s request for $350 million in loans under a long-delayed government program has lingered in limbo for months at the Department of Energy. But if the anonymous sources cited this evening in the Detroit Free Press are right, the waiting ends tomorrow morning with the announcement of loans for Tesla, as well as Ford and Nissan. We haven’t confirmed this with Tesla, and we’re waiting to hear back from them.

Update: Tesla spokesperson Rachel Konrad tells us, “Tesla remains very confident about our two applications for low-interest loans through the DOE,” and says the company is leaving it to the DOE to answer questions about approvals and timing.

The announcement would be right on time, based on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statement in early February that “the Department of Energy informed Tesla last week that they expect to disburse funds from our $350M Model S loan application within 4-5 months.” (Tesla spokesperson Rachel Konrad clarified with us at the time that the company’s application was actually still being evaluated for financial and technical viability.)

As we’ve written before, Tesla has had good reason to be confident that DOE funds would come through, but there’s a lot riding on the loan approval. Late last year, Tesla’s VP of corporate development, Diarmuid O’Connell, explained in an interview that Tesla would use direct loans from the DOE program for two projects, including a new battery manufacturing operation and the Model S project. It’s unclear at this point how much, if any, funding Tesla has been awarded for these projects. We’ll keep you updated as the details come in tomorrow.

Model S photo credit Tesla Motors

Industry watchers continue to fawn over solar panel maker First Solar because of its low-cost technology and ballooning sales contracts. But with mounting competition, analysts attending an important presentation by First Solar executives later this week want to hear the company’s plans for cutting production costs. The measures would allow First Solar to drop the price of its panels while still protecting its bottom line. Analysts also will be interested in any comments about production expansion, though some believe the company should wait in this current economic environment.

First, the cost cutting. Even though First Solar can produce its thin-film solar panels for less than $1 per watt, manufacturing costs for many of its competitors have been plunging in recent months because of the declining price of polysilicon. While First Solar uses a thin layer of cadmium telluride semiconductor material to convert sunlight into electricity, most solar panel makers today rely on polysilicon, which has dropped to about $55-$60 per kilogram from nearly $400 per kilogram in 2008. Satya Kumar, an analyst for Credit Suisse, wrote in a research note published today that in the face of this pressure, he believes First Solar will have to lower its prices. If not, competitors like China’s Suntech Power will be in a strong position to steal key First Solar customers.

The question for analysts is, can First Solar reduce prices while protecting its profits? Many believe that the company can. First Solar has said that it aims to reach production costs of 65 cents per watt by 2012, from 98 cents per watt in the fourth quarter of last year.

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Welcome to Round 2 of the latest Tesla Motors feud. The electric car startup’s CEO, Elon Musk, has just written a post on the official company blog countering the claims of founder Martin Eberhard, who alleges that Musk has libeled and slandered him, and that Tesla has breached several agreements over severance, stock options and his Roadster purchase — and Musk makes a few claims of his own about Eberhard’s role in founding Tesla. Musk stops short of a countersuit, but he says Tesla will respond “fully in court soon.”

In addition to announcing that Tesla’s Roadster material costs have dropped to $80,000 per vehicle this month and that the company expects production of the Roadster to “cross over into profitability next month,” Musk has plenty to say about the specific allegations in Eberhard’s lawsuit — mostly centered on his belief that Eberhard “had no technology of his own…and he owned no intellectual property relating to electric cars” when Musk first became involved with Tesla. “Three years later,” Musk writes, “when Martin was asked to leave Tesla, most of the work that he had been paid to do had to be redone.”

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We’ve seen no shortage of hand-wringing in recent months over what the climate treaty set to be negotiated this December in Copenhagen will mean for technology developers. In their efforts to foster innovation and mass deployment of clean energy technologies at relatively low cost, might envoys miss the mark and make it harder for companies to profit from their innovations? That’s what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sees looming in the treaty — last month the business group said the negotiations represent the “IP battle of the year.”

But wherever negotiators end up striking a balance between IP protections and the need to transfer technology to developing countries, the companies that take a collaborative approach to innovation — such as with cross-licensing and open-source platforms — may end up seeing some of the biggest rewards, and as such will be the ones to herald in what Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called the “revolution” in science and technology needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb fossil fuel use.

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Launching a vehicle on the mass market doesn’t come cheap. As legacy players like General Motors work to resolve their own funding issues, startups are racing to finance production of fuel efficient and plug-in vehicles that just might gain a foothold among mainstream consumers before the incumbents have a chance to reinvent themselves. Many green car startups in the U.S. are on the hunt for government aid — Department of Energy programs are flush with stimulus funds at a time when venture capital plays have taken a nosedive — but one of the latest ventures to come out of the woodwork, Santa Monica, Calif.-based Coda Automotive, is also trying its hand with private investors.

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