The Scottish government believes the North Sea could become host to an underwater renewable energy grid, supplying power from wind, wave and tidal power across Europe, but England could be left out in the cold. A new study from Scotland looks at the possibility of a supergrid between Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, but doesn’t mention Scotland’s big neighbor to the south.

Yes, Scotland is still part of the UK, and most of England’s east coast is also on the North Sea, but the word “England” doesn’t even show up once in the 21-page study and “UK” is only used in a couple of footnotes. It might just be an oversight, but the possible snub comes during the same week in which the UK government made a filing with the Commission on Scottish Devolution questioning the Scottish government’s powers covering energy.

Political wrangling aside, there’s a big push for wind and marine power in the UK, not just in Scotland, so the area could become a hub for renewable energy in the region. In October, the UK government said it surpassed Denmark to take the top spot in offshore wind power in the world, boasting 590 megawatts of offshore wind vs. Denmark’s 423 megawatts.

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New Zealand-based Aquaflow Bionomic said today that it’s seeking to raise up to NZ$30 million ($16.6 million) from a new public offering. The three-year-old company, whose algae technology involves harvesting wild algae and squeezing it into green crude oil, plans to sell up to 60 million shares at 50 New Zealand cents each. The money will be used to finish commercialization of its technology, which Aquaflow expects to take up to 18 months.

Aquaflow says its free-range algae approach allows it to save money on facilities and maintenance. Aquaflow is working with new partner UOP, a subsidiary of Honeywell, to process algae harvested from open-air sludge ponds and waste streams into high-quality fuels. UOP has years of experience in the petro-chemical refining business but has been moving into biofuels in earnest recently with its own Renewable Energy & Chemicals business and collaborations with aircraft maker Boeing, bio-oil vet Ensyn and the DOE.

Aquaflow raised funding through a public offering at the end of the 2006; it’s also received a NZ$3 million investment from renewable energy business Pure Power Global of Singapore, the company’s largest shareholder, according to Aquaflow’s prospectus. The company built its first pilot plant in 2007 and in September this year said it produced the first samples of its “green crude.” The shares will be made available to Australian investors starting Nov. 18; the offering will close in December.

Image courtesy of Aquaflow Bionomics.

Silicon solar startup Solaria is looking to more than double its funding with a new $100 million financing round, CEO Suvi Sharma confirmed with us today, and first reported by VentureWire. The Series D round would be used to add an additional 50-100 megawatts of production capacity by 2010 to its 25-megawatt line currently operating in the Philippines. To date, the 9-year-old startup has raised $77 million in funding.

The Fremont, Calif.-based startup takes standard crystalline silicon solar cells and slices them into thin strips, a process the company calls “cell multiplication technology.” The 2-millimeter-wide silicon strips are reassembled in a stripe pattern and then an optical concentrator is laid on top to focus light away from the gaps and onto the strips. The company says its unique module design has the same form, function and — most importantly — efficiency as traditional solar modules but uses half the amount of silicon material. Update: Solaria has a 10-year, 1.3-gigawatt solar cell supply deal with one of its backers, Australian German solar firm Q-Cells, that ensures it has access to materials.

In addition to Q-Cells, the company has other big backers, including Sigma Partners, NGEN and Moser Baer. The company has been relatively quiet since closing its $50 million Series C round in July 2007. The company is older than many other solar startups and has built an expansive partner network that includes BP Solar and Spire. Sharma tells us the company’s current customers are large project developers but Solaria is developing a series of “specialty modules” for different market segments which it hopes to start bringing to market in 2010, and the company is looking to hire a number of engineers to finish R&D on these new products.

Image courtesy of Solaria.

We’re getting overwhelmed by all the options out there for what to do with your janky old cell phones and gadgets. Earlier this week it was startup Second Rotation, which raised $6 million for its gadget buyback program Gazelle. This morning Flipswap, a site targeting cell phone trade-in and recycling, said it is raising another $14 million. The funds will come from NGEN Partners and RRE Ventures.

The biggest hurdle for companies like Flipswap and Second Rotation is bringing in enough users. That problem is largely a marketing and business development issue — both getting the word out and also making strong deals with large members of the recycling and reselling value chain. Flipswap, founded in 2005, says it has traded in or recycled only around 700,000 mobile devices in its lifetime, though it has deals with 6,000 retail locations and Amazon. Competitor ReCellular says it is on track to recycle/resell more than 6 million phones in 2008.

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The strong smell of yeast and a palpable level of excitement were heavy in the air this morning at the opening of Amyris’s first pilot plant, located in Emeryville, Calif. Technicians in white lab coats were busy harvesting some of the first few gallons of the company’s “No Compromise” diesel fuel. The “No Compromise” branding, Amyris CEO John Melo said, is meant to communicate that this biobased diesel is “as good or better performing than petroleum diesel, without compromise to the environment or economics.”

The company, which crafts synthetic biological organisms to produce chemical compounds, will fine tune its process in Emeryville over the next year-and-a-half, and it aims to begin commercial production by June 2010 in Brazil. The initial feedstock for the plant will be sugar from sugarcane, but any sugar would work with the company’s genetically-modified yeast. Melo acknowledges that cellulosic feedstocks are coming up fast, and in 5 to 10 years he says Amyris might partner with or acquire a cellulosic biofuel company.

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Planet Metrics this morning said it has raised $2.3 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson for its carbon footprint modeling software. The Burlingame, Calif.-based company says it hopes to be the tool of choice for companies, from technology firms to grocery chains, that are ready to dig deeper into their business’s carbon footprint.

Andy Leventhal, CEO of Planet Metrics, says companies are increasingly keeping tabs on the basic carbon impacts of their business — via utility bills, transportation fuel use, and other easily tracked data. However, these initial areas, most of which belong to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 categories, aren’t always enough for companies seeking a strong competitive advantage from carbon accountability — and may not be enough to satisfy future regulations. Planet Metrics also allows motivated companies to track Scope 3 emissions — which AMD told us “is not for sissies,” earlier this year. That includes indirect emissions from suppliers, employees, and product over the course of their life from manufacturing to disposal.

Part of the software’s mojo is in the richness of the data that it has gathered and licensed from other vendors. “We have this massive data repository of publicly available economic data, scientific data, and carbon data to use to help a client model the carbon impacts of the goods they’re selling,” Leventhal says. The biggest chunk of that data comes from the GaBi tool, created by PE International, which provides detailed life-cycle analysis information from more than 4,500 data sets.

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For Colorado State University spinoff Solix Biofuels, the promise of its algae fuel has drawn the interest of some atypical investors: a massive oil refinery operator and the investment arm of a Native American tribe. This morning the three-year-old algae fuel producer said it has raised $10.5 million — with an additional commitment of $5 million — in its first round of outside funding from I2BF Venture Capital; Bohemian Investments; Infield Capital; Southern Ute Alternative Energy, which manages clean power investments for the Southern Ute Indian tribe; and Valero Energy, the largest U.S. oil refinery operator.

Solix Biofuels and Southern Ute Alternative Energy will jointly develop a pilot plant on a 10-acre site on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in Southwest Colorado, which will use algae to produce biofuels and feedstocks for the chemical industry. The first portion — four acres of photo-bioreactors and one acre of lab space — will be completed in the next 12 to 18 months; Solix will add on another five acres, which the company says will put it at commercial-scale.

Solix uses closed photobioreactors — often clear tanks — to produce its algae. Companies that use closed algae growing systems do so to control the environment in the tank and also to be able to distribute the tanks in a variety of locations. Open algae-growing systems are cheaper but need to be able to combat outside contaminants and are reliant on the environment.

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Second Rotation, a startup whose service Gazelle offers an online gadget buyback program, said today that it has raised $6 million in second-round funds. Gazelle buys old gizmos from consumers and then sells them on eBay. The round was led by RockPort Capital Partners and also included return investors Venrock and angel investors Austin Ligon, Ashton Peery and Henry Vogel formerly of eBay. The company says it will use the money to continue its branding and marketing campaign.

The Gazelle service accepts old phones, laptops, satellite radios, MP3 players, external hard drives, cameras and even old movie and video game discs.

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If you’ve been questioning the commitment of Tesla’s CEO and Chairman, Elon Musk, to keeping the electric car startup alive, this should reassure you: As part of a $40 million internal funding round that Tesla is raising from its seven original investors, Musk told the audience at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday afternoon that he will likely put down about half of that figure. So all in all, after that internal round closes, Musk will have invested around $75 million out of the roughly $185 million that Tesla will have raised to date. Which is no small change, by any measure.

Over the past month, Tesla has been rocked by the financial markets, which have left it unable to raise a large funding round on favorable terms — in other words, terms that would not involve giving up control of the company, Musk said. But he also said “It’s tough to carry it [the investment] all yourself.”

Despite the speed bumps, Musk remains confident in Tesla’s value. When moderator John Battelle asked him why GM doesn’t just buy the company, Musk said he wasn’t sure GM could afford it. The auto giant reported a $2.5 billion net loss last week and said it powered through $6.9 billion in cash during the third quarter, leaving it on the brink of going out of business.

An Obama victory has brought a global carbon market a step closer, and despite the recent financial turmoil investors are still funding technology innovations for carbon markets, too. This morning @Ventures says it has invested in carbon market software startup CarbonFlow, joining previous investors Clean Pacific Ventures, OVP Venture Partners and Meridian Energy. We heard from a source close to the company that @Ventures’ investment was around $1 million.

The two-year-old company develops software to bring transparency and efficiency to the carbon markets and was founded by Jane Capital partner (and cleantech blogger) Neal Dikeman and Australian green building pioneer Karla Bell. The software enables carbon market participants to collaborate on projects, keeps a record of the work completed, and helps with validating carbon-reducing projects.

Technologies like this are sorely needed in the current carbon markets, which have been hampered by inefficiencies, a lack of transparency and are still sort of a Wild West stage at this point. Critics question whether carbon offsets projects are actually facilitating new carbon abatement, and the World Wildlife Fund released a report last year calling 20 percent of the UN’s certified emissions reduction credits, as facilitated through the controversial clean development mechanism process, bogus.

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