Aptera co-founder Chris Anthony has bowed out of day-to-day business activities at the three-wheeled vehicle developer as it seeks to put the brakes on its cash burn. But one of his other startups, Flux Power, has just hit the gas, with the launch of its first product last week.

Based in Vista, Calif., Flux plans to market modular systems for a range of energy storage applications, including electric vehicles and backup power supplies, as Chief Technology Officer Joseph Gottlieb told us last month. It’s starting with a charger and a lithium ion battery module. In the second quarter of next year, Flux also plans to introduce a drive system, according to the company’s web site.

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Taxi2, a new cab-sharing service unveiled today by Virgin Atlantic, represents a new spin on an old idea for the age of Car 2.0, in which vehicles, communication networks and information technology increasingly intersect. The free, web-based service, just launched in beta testing for Virgin’s New York and London routes, matches passengers based on their flight info and destinations.

Founded by Ed Maklouf, who also created a text messaging startup called Siine, Taxi2 is partnering with Virgin as part of the airline’s UK government-backed VJAM program. It’s not a total solution, but Taxi2 could provide a piece of the puzzle for reducing emissions from transportation by offering an alternative to airport shuttles, personal vehicles and solo cab rides for travelers.

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State law requires the California Energy Commission (CEC) to assemble a report every other year with recommendations for policies to “conserve resources; protect the environment; ensure reliable, secure, and diverse energy supplies; enhance the state’s economy; and protect public health and safety.”

That’s a massive task, particularly during a time of flux for how we generate, manage and consume energy, and according to Jeff Byron, the presiding member of the committee that put together the Draft Integrated Energy Policy Report (IEPR) released this week, a few factors made the challenge even greater: the state financial crisis, staff furloughs and the stimulus package, which created new funds and programs for the commission to manage.

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The international auto show in Frankfurt, Germany, which kicks off next Thursday, is one of the biggest events of the year for car companies to make an impression with high-tech concepts and upcoming models. Car shows earlier this year in Detroit and Geneva proved to be exercises in restraint for automakers: Flaunt the shiniest, greenest, fastest and most futuristic vehicles in their lineups, all while appearing frugal in a way befitting the gloomy state of both the industry and the global economy. Frankfurt is likely to hit a similar note — but with continuing pressure for automakers to beef up their green lineups, a number of hybrid and all-electric vehicles are set to roll out on the showroom floor. Here are 13 models to watch.

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A dozen wind and solar projects have just snagged hefty grants from the Department of Energy — not enough to cover the entirety of their projects, but enough, the agency hopes, to get investors to pony up more capital. Among today’s big winners is Spain’s Iberdrola Renewables, snagging close to $300 million of the nearly $503 million announced today. Iberdrola’s Peñascal Wind Farm in Sarita, Tex. won the largest single grant in today’s group, for more than $114 million.

The idea of these grants, provided under the stimulus package, is to award cash up front in lieu of tax credits, helping to spur private investment and keep clean energy developers from getting stuck in the chicken-and-egg funding dilemma of having to bring a project online before tax credits kick in.

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Most solar panels are strung together like Christmas tree lights, so that if one panel stops working, performs poorly or ends up in the shade, the whole string is affected. To address this problem, 2-year-old startup eIQ Energy came out of stealth mode Monday night and announced it has raised $10 million in funding from NGEN Partners and Robert Bosch Venture Capital, for a system that helps connect solar panels in parallel instead of in a series. The San Jose, Calif.-based company says its Parallux system can make solar systems both cheaper to install and more efficient.

The system connects each individual panel to a high-voltage DC-to-DC power converter, which harvests the electricity from each panel and turns it into the ideal voltage for the inverter. An inverter (used for all solar systems) then converts the DC power into AC power used by household appliances more efficiently and more reliably. CEO Oliver Janssen tells us that this architecture can maximize the power from each panel and boost the total energy harvested by 5-30 percent.

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Venrock, the venture capital firm that was originally established as the venture arm of the Rockefeller family, is bulking up its cleantech team. On Monday, it announced that Matthew Nordan, co-founder and former president of Lux Research, will join as vice president with a focus on energy, environmental and material technologies.

In recent years, Venrock –- like so many other VC shops -– focused primarily on IT, investing in such stars as Apple and American Semiconductor. But recently the firm has been steadily ramping up its energy portfolio with investments in battery developer Boston Power, renewable gasoline maker Sapphire Energy, and Transonic Combustion, which builds technologies to make conventional automobiles run more efficiently.

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It’s official: Long-awaited clean-energy manufacturing tax credits are really happening, finally. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday announced a program awarding $2.3 billion in tax credits for clean-energy equipment manufacturers.

While there are already some tax credits for renewable-energy generation projects, these new credits are focused on the manufacturing equipment that will be used to make gear for such projects and are intended to make the U.S. a manufacturing hub for clean power equipment. That could mean more jobs — always a good thing in the face of hundreds of thousands of layoffs per month, and an unemployment rate near 9.4 percent. That is, as long as these manufacturers also prove sustainable after the credits.

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How does the U.S. spur 50 million energy retrofits (40 percent of homes) from the current low level of hundreds of thousands per year? The Obama administration could meet that goal with two major policy initiatives plus a hefty investment from the public and private sectors of about $500 billion, according to a report released this week from the think tank Center for American Progress and the public policy initiative Energy Future Coalition, which focuses on market barriers to the home retrofit industry’s growth.

Here’s some background: Buildings account for 40 percent of total energy use, but much of the housing and building stock is old, inefficient and wasteful. Half of the buildings that will be standing in 30 years are already built, so any successful strategy to increase the efficiency of the built environment must include retrofits, the report says. Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 percent to 40 percent with “off-the-shelf technologies” and pay for themselves from the energy they save. Besides reducing energy demand and lowering carbon emissions, these investments create local jobs.

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As more and more vehicles start plugging into the electric grid, utilities will need to manage the plug-in connections, or risk overloading the system. Seeing an opportunity to address that basic challenge, last year smart grid company GridPoint acquired startup V2Green, which had developed smart charging software for electric vehicles. Now less than a year after that acquisition GridPoint is set to launch its most advanced tool yet for utilities looking to track and predict loads from plug-in vehicles. GridPoint’s customers won’t be able to get the upgrade until September 4, but we saw a preview of the software this afternoon at the Plug-In 2009 conference in Long Beach, Calif.

Called “Smart Charging 3.0,” the new software is coming out just in time for the charging infrastructure buildout from ECOtality subsidiary eTec and several strategic partners, which won $99.8 million in grants from the Department of Energy last week. According to a release from GridPoint this week, the company has been working with the Idaho National Lab and eTec for more than a year on “electric vehicle performance and fast-charge systems.”

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