San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is in talks with electric vehicle startup Project Better Place about building the infrastructure for a fleet of plug-in cars in the city, including parking meter charging stations and battery replacement stations.

Newsom traveled to Israel last week to meet with representatives of the company. The mayor’s office tells us that during a luncheon with Moshe Kaplinsky, CEO of Project Better Place Israel (pictured after the jump with the mayor), and Aliza Peleg, a rep from the startup’s U.S. offices, Newsom offered to work with Project Better Place if it would consider doing a test project in San Francisco. Newsom also met with the company’s chairman, Idan Offer, at a reception earlier.

The city is already in early talks with private companies that could potentially work with Project Better Place to build an electric vehicle infrastructure, according to the mayor’s office. Newsom was also said to be “very impressed” with the Project Better Place’s team in Israel.

If San Francisco does do a deal with Project Better Place, it would be the first city in the U.S. to get on board with Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure plan (with three cars, San Francisco currently has one of the largest plug-in hybrid fleets in the country). This is the first we’ve heard of Project Better Place being in serious discussions stateside; we’ve tried to contact them for comment and when we hear back, will update the post.

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Silicon Valley’s green car fisticuffs is going into round two this week. According to CNET, electric vehicle company Fisker Automotive, maker of the Karma, plans to file for arbitration today in an attempt to derail the suit filed by competitor Tesla, which accuses Fisker of stealing trade secrets. The report says that Fisker will attempt to move the case to Orange County and alleges that filing the suit in San Mateo, Calif., was a breach of contract.

Tesla says that when it hired Henrik Fisker, founder of Fisker Automotive, last year to work on the body of Tesla’s sedan, both the company and its COO, Bernhard Koehler, walked away from the $875,000 contract with trade secrets and launched their own competing car.

While fights among competitors in the Valley’s very small world aren’t uncommon, this one is particularly interesting because each startup is backed by competing venture firms. Tesla is backed by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and individual investors, among them the firm’s own Elon Musk, Jeff Skoll, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Fisker, on the other hand, is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and has KP’s Ray Lane on its board.

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The future of biofuels belongs to biology, and startups are getting more and more funding to engineer alternative fuels. Synthetic biofuel startup Gevo has raised another $17 million in a Series C funding according to Pehub.com. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and Virgin Green Fund participated, as well as new investors Burrill & Co. and Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund.

Using technology developed at Caltech, the three-year-old Gevo is working on engineering enzymes that can convert waste and other cellulosic feedstocks into alternative fuels like butanol, which can be used in the existing petroleum supply chain. Butanol, when used as a fuel, is more similar to gasoline than ethanol. Like ethanol, butanol is an alcohol compound, but with four carbon atoms instead of two; the different chemical structure gives it characteristics that make it more compatible with existing infrastructure.

When Gevo raised its Series B last July, CEO Partick Gruber said those funds would be used to continue developing the technology. We’re waiting to hear back from Gevo’s execs on how these latest funds will be used.

Gevo competes with other synthetic biology firms like Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics. Synthetic Genomics Chief Financial Officer Chuck McBride told us back in April that the company was in the process of raising a round of funding in the “$100 million to $200 million range.”

The Silicon Valley electric car startup Project Better Place showed off a prototype for its electric vehicle in Israel this weekend, and said partner Renault-Nissan (Renault is building the cars while Nissan, via an agreement with NEC Corp., is supplying the swappable batteries) would likely spend between $500 million and $1 billion into building them. We contacted Project Better Place and are waiting to hear more on the partners’ investment.

Project Better Place’s car just looks like a regular sedan according to reports and images on the company’s website, but with an electrical socket and a screen showing the battery power, instead of a gas gauge. The cars are said to have a range of 100 km in city driving and up to 160 km on the highway before needing to be recharged or swapped. The aim is to have a pilot of several hundred cars in Israel next year. The first vehicles should be available to the public in late 2010.

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PowerGenix, an eight-year-old startup based in San Diego, Calif., will be showing off its nickel-zinc battery in a retrofitted Prius this week at the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference. Yeah, that’s nickel-zinc, not the nickel metal hydride battery that the Prius has already made famous. But the company says its nickel-zinc battery is 35 percent smaller than the Prius’ nickel metal hydride battery, has a better energy density and also costs less.

While the company has just started shipping its batteries for the power tool and scooter market, this is one of the first times the company is displaying its battery pack for vehicles, which it hopes to sell into the hybrid market. PowerGenix’s CEO Dan Squiller thinks the electric vehicle market will segment when it comes to battery technology: all-electric vehicles will go with lithium-ion battery technology, while parallel hybrid vehicles like the Prius will end up with a lower cost but high energy density technology like PowerGenix’s.

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While we’ve been waiting for HelioVolt, the Austin, Texas-based thin film solar company to start selling its product, the startup said on Monday that it has produced solar cells that are 12.2 percent efficient — and manufactured them in under 6 minutes. That’s one of the most efficient thin film solar cells out there made out of Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS). And not to mention a quick production!

Competitor Tucson, Arizona-based Global Solar Energy says its CIGS solar products have sustained around a 10-percent efficiency. Nanosolar’s CEO Martin Roscheisen is vague about the company’s efficiency but told us the startup’s panels can get similar or higher efficiencies to Global Solar’s 10 percent. The National Renewable Energy Laboratories has said it can get an efficiency of almost 20 percent from a CIGS solar cell.

HelioVolt’s CEO BJ Stanbery will present the 12.2 percent efficiency breakthrough at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference on Monday. The company plans to start selling product in late 2008 or early 2009 — we’ll see if the company can repeat those efficient results over sustained, commercial scale.

Update: SunPower, which produces more traditional silicon-based solar cells, said this morning that it has produced a five inch solar cell with an efficiency of 23.4 percent — SunPower calls this “a world-record for a large area solar cell.”

We talk a lot about new energy opportunities and technology breakthroughs here on Earth2Tech, and less about the high risks involved in developing new cleantech markets and commercializing unproven technologies. But at the Berkeley-Stanford CleanTech Conference this week, there was a lot of discussion over the tensions between venture capitalists backing new technologies and the utilities, regulatory and industry groups in charge of bringing the clean power to the people.

Sue Kateley, executive director of the solar industry group California Solar Energy Industries Association, said she was concerned about venture capitalists flushing money into companies that promise to offer and install solar for free (no up-front costs) to consumers. “The free reckless solar thing can kill the industry,” Kately said, explaining that she saw similar business models that went under in the energy boom decades ago.

Utilities’ motivations can come into conflict with those of venture capitalists when it comes to the price of contracts for utility-scale renewable deals like solar thermal power plants. Roy Kuga, VP in the energy supply division of California utility PG&E, said that while the company would like to deliver the most competitive price for customers, venture-backed startups are looking for higher-priced contracts in order to deliver the kind of financial returns that venture firms want (startups Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar and Infinia are all venture-backed).

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Although a public offering from a solar installer met a chilly response on the Street this week, one of cleantech’s most mature industries, wind energy, might have an IPO of its own soon. Riding high on record wind installations, Noble Environmental Power, a developer and operator of wind farms in the Northeast, has filed for a $375 million IPO on the Nasdaq under the ticker “NEPI.” (Hat tip PEHub)

The company says it currently operates 282 megawatts of wind power capacity across three wind parks in New York and plans to have 465 megawatts of capacity come online by the end of the year. With another 1,205 megawatts in development, the company says it will have nearly 2 gigawatts of capacity by 2010. All of this is part of America’s booming wind energy market, which grew 45 percent last year and is on track to set a new record this year with 1,400 megawatts of capacity installed in the first quarter, according to new figures from the American Wind Energy Association.

Headquartered in Essex, Conn., Noble will have its IPO underwritten by its majority owner JP Morgan, as well as Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse. Founded in 2004, Noble hasn’t set an IPO date but intends to debut sometime later this year.

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Following yesterday’s cloudy performance by solar stocks, this morning some solar players announced a deal that could help them weather the storm. Residential solar designer and installer Akeena is teaming up with residential solar financier Sun Run. The partnership will connect Akeena’s “LEGO-like” Andalay panel system with Sun Run’s power purchase agreement financing, maintenance and monitoring services.

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Akeena, one of the larger solar installers, has invested in creating an integrated racking and mounting system, and had previously not been using power purchase agreements to sell its systems. San Francisco-based Sun Run has developed a business selling fixed power rates amid rising energy costs, focusing on the residential market. Using PPAs to sell solar is popular in the commercial business — Tioga Energy, MMA Renewables and Sun Edison all use a PPA model — but not so in the residential space. Sun Run’s main competitor, SolarCity, offers solar lease agreements, allowing the startup to offer residential solar with no money down.

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As global food prices rise and food riots rock the developing world, grain-based biofuels are coming under heavy fire. But a new grain-based ethanol startup has just secured $300 million for barley-based fuel and it claims its methods won’t impact food supplies — one, because the company will produce locally, and two, because barley is a less energy-intensive crop than corn. Glen Allen, Va.-based Osage Bio Energy received the large private equity commitment from First Reserve Corp. and will use it to build four biorefineries.

Osage Bio Energy was founded in 2007 to pursue barley-based ethanol under parent company Osage Inc., which distributes some 100 million gallons of ethanol annually in the Southeast. There are nearly five million acres of fallow farmland in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast every winter, Osage estimates, and barley, as a winter crop that requires less fertilization than corn, could be grown locally on these millions of acres and used in their nearby biorefineries.

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