One of the unintended but still entertaining side effects of deflated market caps is the corporate catfight.

As of yesterday, we have a promising one being performed in the energy sector: After a few weeks of gentle pawing at smaller rival NRG Energy, industry giant Exelon has gone hostile. NRG rebuffed the $6.1 billion tender offer Exelon made last month, so Exelon CEO John Rowe responded with a polite letter that ended on an unvarnished threat:

We are fully prepared to negotiate with the new board following the 2009 NRG annual meeting of shareholders.

That’s corporate-speak for: It’s on.

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Neal Dikeman, CEO of Carbonflow and a partner at Jane Capital, offered up some impassioned words of wisdom for the optimistic cleantech VCs in Silicon Valley over at the Cleantech Blog yesterday: For all the talk of a green boom in the midst of the downturn, don’t expect just any cleantech investment to survive.

His advice was largely to heed the warning contained in the old tortoise-and-the-hare fable: When pitted against the foolish and fast, slow and steady wins the race. Most of today’s hottest cleantech categories are energy related, and Dikeman points out that energy is an old, complex, global business that few entrepreneurs are well-positioned to either understand or navigate:

Beware Silicon Valley, the great fortunes, wars, and economic crises of the world for 100 years are not technology ones, they were energy made. Half the schools you went to were built by oil money. And the entreprenuerial spirit in this industry was born in the hardscrabble oilfields of Pennsylvania and Texas, and grew up in the far reaches of the globe. And the oil companies those entrepreneurs founded have forgotten more about technology in energy than you even know existed.

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EnerNOC delivered first-quarter earnings Wednesday that were a mixed bag. The company beat Wall Street estimates, which is always nice; but its operating loss nearly tripled from the previous year to $11.7 million, which is not so nice. The net loss of 57 cents a share is down from 91 cents a year earlier, which sounds good. But it fell only because the number of shares used to calculate EPS (19 million shares vs. 4 million a year ago) grew faster than that loss.

Investors watching EnerNOC for a while know that there’s a reason for the losses. The company is spending heavily, especially on new employees, to gain a bigger foothold in a growing market opportunity. So while first-quarter revenue grew an impressive 87 percent on year, general and administrative costs (which include network operations workers) grew by 212 percent and R&D costs expanded by 343 percent.

EnerNOC’s business is helping utilities, grid operators and other companies like manufacturers use their existing energy more efficiently. With energy prices rising and blackouts likely to become more common, many companies are realizing energy efficiency is not only smart, but necessary.

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