Author: Terrence Murray

Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are pushing ahead to get their bi-partisan climate change and energy bill on the Senate floor for a full vote.

Yesterday, the three Senators and 11 of their colleagues — many representing coal producing states — met at the White House to chart a path to get some sort of climate change legislation passed. The House passed its own legislation, with its cap-and-trade provision, this summer.

Ahead of yesterday’s White House meeting with President Barack Obama, Kerry, Lieberman and Graham met with the American Petroleum Institute (API) and other pro-carbon industry groups.

Oil and gas companies have been arguing that hydrocarbons are here to stay. This has not prevented some, including BP and Royal Dutch Shell, to back cap -and-trade.

Actually, many carbon-dependent industries would prefer a legislated cap-and-trade pricing scheme instead of a regulatory regime administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

That’s what Exelon CEO John Rowe said  over the weekend at the MIT Energy Conference where he urged for a full cap-and-trade system. Anything less, he said, would not work.

On the meeting yesterday on Capitol Hill, in a prepared statement, API CEO Jack Gerard said:

As a critical part of the nation’s economy, supporting over 9.2 million jobs, the oil and natural gas industry was pleased to participate in the senators’ briefing as they develop climate proposals. We look forward to seeing details of the senators’ proposal and hope to be a constructive participant as discussions move forward.

API did not support Waxman – Markey. The organization does  support some sort of carbon pricing measure, but has been lobbying to have transportation fuels left out of cap-and-trade.

To ensure its oil and gas agenda is heard, earlier this month the API hired green activist Deryck Spooner. At the API he’s expected to organize grassroots campaigns in support of offshore oil and gas development and other key oil and gas-friendly measures.

SunPower, the San Jose, Calif., solar panel maker, scored a big contract yesterday to supply up to 200 megawatts of solar panels to be installed on rooftops of commercial buildings across the service area of power utility, Southern California Edison (SCE).

SunPower panels will generate nearly half of the power of the project’s 500 megawatts  total capacity — see here for the full press release.

SCE will own, install, operate, and maintain half of the expected PV capacity — or about 250 megawatts — and solicit bids from independent developers to develop the remaining 250 megawatts. The selected independent power producers will sell power to SEC under long-term power purchase agreements.

SunPower did not provide financial details on the size of the contract but it’s estimated that just the first half of the project will cost about $875 million to develop.

SCE’s selection proved GER wrong. When the California Public Utilities Commission initially approved the project, we had predicted that thin-film PV maker First Solar would be a lead contender for the contract because of its ongoing work with the California utility.

Image: iStockphoto

Kansas City Power and Light (KC&L), the Kansas City, Mo.,  power utility is planning to use garbage as a feedstock to generate electricity at a plant it is developing in Saint Joseph, Mo., about 60 miles (96 kilometers) north of Kansas City.

Specifically, the plant will pipe methane gas created from decomposing garbage piled at the Saint Joseph landfill. Methane is a gas that if left to seep into the atmosphere can be more virulent than green house gases.

The Saint Joseph landfill has 3 million tons of garbage collected from 17 counties. The plant is expected to start operating next year.

Thin-film photovoltaic maker and plant developer First Solar  has sold the 550-megawatt output of its Desert Sunlight photovoltaic solar project to Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE) — See here for the full release.

PG&E will buy 300 megawatts of electricity generated by Desert Sunlight as part of a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA). SCE will buy the balance of the plant’s expected output –  250 megawatts — under a 20-year PPA.

First Solar’s power purchase agreements with PG&E and SCE are subject to the approval of the California Public Utilities Commission.

Construction on Desert Sunlight, which is located near Desert Center in eastern Riverside County, Calif., is expected to start at the end of the year and the plant is scheduled to begin operating in 2013.

The two PPAs will make it easier for First Solar to eventually sell the asset. A company spokeswoman tells GER: “We’ve made it quite clear that we are not a plant operator and so I would imagine that we will look to sell [Desert Sunlight] the plant,” she says.

Over the past year First Solar sold a 21-megawatt solar project — backed by a long-term PPA with SCE in Blythe, Calif. — to NRG Energy. It also sold a 20-megawatt solar farm in Ontario to natural gas pipeline operator Enbridge for about C$100 million ($93.14 million / €71.8 million /£65 million). The project is backed by a 20-year PPA with the Ontario Power Authority.

First Solar has 1,700 megawatts of utility-scale power projects with power purchase agreements in North America.

Image: iStockphoto

– By Mark Boslet, co-editor, TechPulse360

The United States risks losing the race to a clean-tech economy if it fails to get serious about global warming, Energy Department Secretary Steven Chu said Monday.

Taking five years or longer to pass energy legislation will limit the nation’s ability to be a leader in the green-energy technologies of tomorrow, Chu said during an address at Stanford University.

“I think we will lose (and) end up purchasing equipment from abroad,” he said. “The future prosperity of the United States is at risk.”

Chu used the midday speech to renew his call for an energy bill from Congress. But he also highlighted the danger more motivated countries, particularly China, pose to a complacent country.

China is spending $9 billion a month to diversify its energy production, he noted. One advanced power line project by itself will cost $88 billion over the next decade as high-efficiency high-tension wires are strung 1,200 miles from east to west. The wires will transport energy to the coastal population centers with miniscule energy losses of as little as 5 percent.

In 1996, the U.S. was the leading manufacturer of solar panels. Now its market share is below 10 percent, Chu added. “We are falling behind in the clean-energy race.”

Link to original post to read the rest of the story

Wind turbine maker Clipper Windpower has hired Mauricio Quintana, 42, a director at United Technologies (UTC), as chief executive officer and president, effective immediately — see here for the full press release.

Quintana, a native of Costa Rica, replaces Doug Pertz, who took over as the company’s CEO and president in September 2008.

Is Quintana’s appointment an initial first step that could pave the way to a large investment by UTC?

Reuters reports that last month, UTC said it was considering becoming a majority-owner of Clipper. The company already owns a 49.5  percent stake in Clipper, which it acquired for £166 million ($270 million / €183 million).

AIM-listed Clipper, Reuters reports, is expected to post a loss for the second half of this year because of order deferrals and the delayed commissioning of turbines.

Last month the company announced that it would build a factory, near the town Tyne, in the north of England, that initially will supply blades to the 10 megawatts Britannia offshore wind project.  At full capacity production at the plant is expected to average 1 gigawatt a year.

Image: iStockphoto

Greentech Capital Advisors, the alternative energy and cleantech-focused investment bank, has hired Deutsche Bank’s Heather Smith as a partner to launch the firm’s private placements group.

At Deutsche Bank,  as head of structured private placements, Smith raised over $9 billion in equity and mezzanine capital for domestic and international companies, including renewable energy and biofuel companies.

Smith has also worked with the private placement groups of Credit Suisse and Prudential Securities.

In a prepared statement Greentech Capital founder and managing director, Jeffrey McDermott said:

Many of our alternative energy and cleantech corporate clients need to raise private equity and mezzanine funding to continue to grow. Heather provides our clients with the private placement capabilities they need.

Smith starts work at Greentech Capital next month.

SAGE Electrochromics, a Minnesota energy efficiency technology company, says it expects to close on at least $50 million in new financing in the next three to four months. Talks with potential funders are ongoing, company Chief Executive Officer John Van Dine tells GER, declining to provide more details.

Last week SAGE, based in Faribault, Minn., scored a $72 million Department of Energy loan guarantee plus a $31 million manufacturing tax credit. It is the first energy efficiency company to secure a DOE loan guarantee.

In total, that’s $103 million in government funding that Van Dine says it will use, along with the expected $50 million capital infusion to expand SAGE’s manufacturing capacity.

The loan guarantee will back a portion of the financing needed for construction of a 250,000-square-foot (23,225 square meter) manufacturing facility in Faribault that will add 160 full-time jobs to the 100 jobs in SAGE’s current plant, Van Dine explains.

SAGE manufactures smart windows that use electronics to control the amount of solar heat and light that can pass through a window. A small electric current applied to the windows causes the window tinting to darken or lighten. The windows can be integrated with a building’s indoor climate control system to automatically adjust window tinting, or they can be connected to manually operated switches. Smart windows can reduce a building’s heating and cooling loads.

Last year, SAGE raised about $20 million as part of a Series C funding from Good Energies, Applied Ventures (the venture capital arm of Applied Materials), and Bekaert, a maker of advance metals and coatings based in Belgium. Since its inception in 1988, Sage has raised $100 million to support the development of its energy efficiency technology.

Opportunity abounds, even in this difficult credit environment. That’s at least what clean energy-focused investment fund US Renewables Group (USRG) thinks. Today the firm launched Westerly Wind, a new venture that will provide financing to wind developers that are having a hard time raising capital.

In a released posted on PeHUB Lee Bailey, managing director of USRG, said:

The recent financial crisis has led to a shortage of development capital and, as a result, many promising wind development projects are not being adequately funded.

To lead its new funding unit USRG has taped Joe Cofelice, the former CEO of American National Power. He was also president of Catamount Energy, the Vermont-based wind developer acquired in 2008 by Duke Energy for $240 million.

USRG has mobilized over $750 million of capital commitments to invest in renewable energy projects since it launched in 2003.

We’ve called USRG to get some more details on exactly how much capital it’s invested in Westerly.

Last week Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — and three other Senator — urged the Obama administration to cut stimulus funding for renewable energy projects that offshore their manufacturing.

This is the second time Schumer targets foreign renewable energy projects, in both instances he’s focused his criticism on a Chinese, 600 megawatts, $1.5 billion wind farm to be built in Texas by a joint venture between U.S.-based Cielo Wind Power and China’s Shenyang Power Group, a unit of A-Power Energy Group.

Well, it turns out that the Shenyang Texas wind facility was actually arranged by the Obama administration, which earlier this year brokered a deal with the Chinese government to allow more renewable energy investments to flow into both countries.

On Sunday Jeffrey Ryser at Platts’s Power Line blog wrote:

What should one make of the fact that the deal with the Chinese was arranged in the first place by the US Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, who, in a quid pro quo arrangement last fall, agreed to have the Chinese sell into the US market in exchange for US companies’ selling into the Chinese market, which has been expanding at the same annual rate as the US’s.

Not only is the Shenyang project backed by the Chinese government,  it also is supported, at least indirectly,  by the Obama administration. That’s some pretty stellar backing and explains why, so far the White House, and some Senate colleagues, have downplayed Schumer’s concerns, describing them as none-issues.

It’s got to be cap-and-trade, anything else won’t work. That’s, in essence, what John Rowe, CEO of Chicago-based power company Exelon, told attendees of the MIT Energy Conference on Saturday in Boston.

In a side interview with GER following his prepared remarks, Rowe said that he did not believe alternative proposals, including cap-and-dividend could work. He said that initiative, also dubbed “cap-and-trade light” would only be a halfway house to an eventual cap-and-trade system.

Rowe’s remarks are not surprising – they are a clear rebuke by one of the country’s most powerful energy executives against the proposal introduced in the Senate by Senators Maria Cantwell, (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins, (R-Maine) last December as part of the CLEAR act.

Rowe was also skeptical about the endangerment finding, recently issued by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson. Rowe said the looming regulation of carbon and other green house gases is well meaning but nearly impossible to implement because the technology necessary to control and cut CO2 emissions doesn’t exist.

Rowe has been at the forefront of the cap-and-trade fight, arguing that the trading scheme is the best incentive to get carbon-dependent industries to cut their emissions.  His criticism of cap-and-dividend and the EPA’s endangerment finding are a clear line in the sand on how far his industry is willing to go when it comes to the thorny issue of carbon pricing.

In Washington, which holds the key to a cap-and-trade future, things this week got a little more complicated for the clean energy business when Senator Chuck Schumer (D – NY) and three of his colleagues called for the Obama administration to cut stimulus funding for foreign-owned wind farms.  Specifically they were asking that the Treasury Department, which administers the very popular cash grant program, refrain from funding a $1.5 billion, 600 megawatt project developed by China’s A-Power Energy Group.

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D- N.M.), who was at the MIT Energy Conference, downplayed Schumer’s latest stance, telling GER that, much like the A-Power project itself, “so far the only thing we have are announcements.” He concedes that the U.S. “had been slow to develop domestic clean energy manufacturing capacity,” which is one reason the popular cash grants have ended supporting, mostly foreign companies.

One company that’s enjoyed the Obama administration green funding is Germany’s E.On. That’s one reason the company does not plan to sell its U.S. renewable energy business, Chicago-based E.On Climate & Renewables, a company spokesman told GER earlier this week as word got out that the German power and gas company wanted to offload its U.S. electric utility business.

In an email, the E.On spokesman wrote:

There are definitively no plans to divest the [U.S.] wind business. Quite the contrary, we are currently very bullish about the future of wind and solar in the U.S. given President Obama’s new energy policy…

Enel Green Power was also on the minds of investors this week as news leaked that its parent company, Enel, the Italian power company, was considering merging its green unit with the renewable energy business of Endesa, its Spanish subsidiary. The plan, according to a press report, would be to then spin-off a portion of the consolidated company to investors. We reported back in August that Enel was considering selling as much as 49 percent of Enel Green Power both to select institutional investors and via an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

We reached out to Enel in Rome which had not replied to our questions by the time we posted.

The impact of good, long-term government policy — something many say the U.S. still lacks – was again felt this week, north of us in Ontario. Bosch Solar, a unit of the Stuttgart-based industrial conglomerate, said it would build a thin-film solar plant with Calgary-based Sustainable Energy Technologies in the Toronto area to produce up to 70 megawatts of thin-film photovoltaic panels.

This is the second major renewable energy investment in as many months for Ontario. In January South Korea’s Samsung announced a $7 billion (€5.19 billion/ £4.68 billion) 2,500 megawatt wind and solar deal. In both cases, driving the investments are the province’s green-energy legislation and progressive feed-in-tariff program.

VC Watch

Prudent Energy, a Chinese developer of energy storage systems, raised approximately $22 million (€16.6 million / £14.51 million) in a third round of financing led by Northern Light Venture Capital. The Series C financing also included new investor Sequoia Capital China, the Chinese investment fund of Silicon Valley fund Sequoia Capital.

Konarka Technologies, a developer of organic solar cells, based in Lowell, Mass. has received a $20 million (€14.69 million / £13.19 million) strategic investment from Japan’s Konica Minolta, a maker of office printers, scanners and other technologies.

Also, according to a recent survey of 200 venture capitalists by tax and advisory firm KPMG, 77 percent of the surveyed venture capitalists said they  expected investments supporting renewable energy companies to grow. About 15 percent of the respondents said investments would grow by at least 20 percent.

Rambling

On Friday evening in Boston the MIT Energy Conference organizers held a showcase of often raw but promising clean energy projects, many developed by MIT students. These projects were literally still in the lab. One group of students demonstrated a floating wind turbine that, if scaled, could be quickly deployed in the wind-swept offshore. Another student, who just graduated from MIT and is about to start graduate school at Stanford University, was working on utility-scale geothermal research. A young startup had come to the exhibit hall with a prototype of a solar-powered trash compactor that could be deployed on city streets to replace traditional trashcans.

That beehive of creativity is a positive sign and an indication of the talent the U.S. and other countries can rely on to feed an ever-growing hunger for renewable energy solutions. It also underscores the need for the U.S. to adopt a long-term and sustainable energy policy that will ensure that many of these lab projects become viable, job-creating businesses.

Exelon Corp. Chief Executive John Rowe on Saturday slammed an alternative to cap-and-trade now being considered by Congress and said the EPA’s plan to regulate carbon emissions is a nonstarter.

Rowe, who runs one of the country’s largest utilities, said the so-called cap and dividend plan would “not work” and would act as “a halfway house to a full cap-and-trade system.”

Rowe was speaking at the MIT Energy Conference in Boston this morning.

While there is growing consensus, at least on Capitol Hill, that cap-and-trade legislation has little chance of passing the Senate this year, Rowe remains cautiously optimistic.

He tells GER:  “Cap-and-trade is not dead but it’s certainly been healthier.”

Rowe is passionate about cap-and-trade. Exelon was one of a number of Fortune 500 companies that did not renew its company’s membership with the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year because of the lobbying group’s opposition to cap-and-trade.

Exelon and other electric utilities prefer a legislated cap-and-trade system over a less flexible regulated option. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson recently issued an endangerment finding, which mean that the EPA can regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air act.

But can the EPA actually regulate carbon emissions?

Rowe says no. He points out that the carbon-cutting technology the EPA would need to actually regulate CO2 and other green house gases remains, at best, unproven.

On the endangerment finding Rowe says:

It’s an honest finding, but [Lisa Jackson] does not know where to go from there. How do you [use] carbon management technology when it does not even exist?

Back to cap and dividend: that provision is part of the CLEAR act authored by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Susan Collins, (R-Maine). It was introduced to the Senate last December as an alternative to cap-and-trade.

Under cap and dividend, the government would sell pollution allowances to carbon-dependent industries to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But unlike a standard cap-and-trade system, only polluting industries would be able to purchase the emissions and the entities could not trade the emissions once they are purchased. Most of the proceeds would go directly to consumers to offset increased energy costs.

Under cap and trade, emissions allowances would be given to regulated entities, but they would have to use most of the proceeds from the allowances to keep electricity prices low for consumers.

Venture capitalists expect investments in 2010 to rebound after two sluggish years hampered by the global financial crisis.  A majority says a lot of the early stage VC investments will support renewable energy startups.

In A recent survey of 200 venture capitalists conducted by tax and advisory firm KPMG, 77 percent of the surveyed venture capitalists expected investments supporting renewable energy companies to grow. About 15 percent of the respondents say investments will grow by at least 20 percent, the Boston Globe reports.

GER will actually be able to assess first hand the mood of the venture capital community at the MIT Energy Conference, which we’re attending today and tomorrow.

Across all industries, 67 percent of respondents expect venture investments across all industries to increase in 2010 from 2009 levels. Last year, only 23 percent of respondents predicted an increase in investments.

Where in cleantech will that money go? KPMG says there is a slight shift away from solar and wind companies, in favor of energy storage solutions.

The Globe reports:

Of the respondents, 38 percent said that the energy storage and efficiency sector would see the most investment – up from 33 percent in the 2009 survey. Meanwhile, 30 percent expect renewable energy to get the most investment money in the next two years – a drop of six percentage points compared with last year’s survey.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) posted this table on their Website tracking funding commitments by industrialized nations to support developing countries cut their CO2 and green house gas emissions. The funding pledge by the industrialized world was about the only firm commitment that came out of the Copenhagen conference last December.

The table is an organic process that’s going to be continually updated with new funding commitments, points out the WRI’s Maria Athena Ballesteros, who authored the document.

Ballesteros writes:

The commitments are clear, their delivery is uncertain. WRI has carried out a preliminary analysis based on available information on countries’ immediate and long term pledges announced thus far. The accompanying table sets out both the amounts and the mechanisms by which funding would be delivered. WRI has also looked at whether these pledges will provide “new and additional” funds compared to what developed countries already provide through official development assistance.

As part of the agreement forged in Copenhagen developed countries have collectively committed $30 billion (€22 billion /£19.9 billion) over the next three years to help poorer nations cut their own carbon and green house gas emissions.

Long term, by 2020, the industrialized world has set out an ambitious $100 billion a year funding in support of this “North – South” climate change cooperation.

Specifically, the WRI table shows, that the European Union (EU) states committed a combined $3.36 billion a year over the next two years in climate change subsidies for the developing world. That’s impressive but actually less than the $5 billion a year Japan has committed.  The U.S., according to the WRI, has committed $1.821 billion for the 2010 and 2011.

Endesa, Spain’s largest electric utility, responded to press reports that it was looking to merge its renewable energy unit with the green energy unit of Italy’s Enel, its parent company.

MarketWatch reports that Endesa, yesterday, issued statement confirming it was studying “strategic possibilities” for its renewable unit with Enel Green Power. The Spanish company used standard M&A language that basically confirms it’s at least seriously considering a merger with Enel.

Last Week Enel Chief Executive Officer Fulvio Conti announced that it would look to sell a minority stake in Enel Green Power as part of the company’s bid to slim its large debt load.

The Italian utility seeks to cut its debt to €45 billion ($61.5 billion / £40.72 billion) by the end of this year from €51 billion last December, Dow Jones News reports.

Last August GER reported that Enel Green Power was looking to sell up to 49 percent of the company.  We wrote that the Italian company was considering selling between 25 and 30 percent of its green subsidiary to institutional investors and the balance (24 – 19 percent) via an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Estimates then valued Enel Green Power at between €13 and €14 billion.

Just in its home market of Italy, Enel Green Power controls 2,513 megawatts of installed capacity of which 331 megawatts is in wind, 671 megawatts in geothermal, 4 megawatts in photovoltaic solar and 1,507 megawatts in hydroelectric. It operates about 600 megawatts of wind and hydroelectric power In the U.S. and Canada.

In Spain and Portugal Endesa’s renewable energy unit controls 2,791 megawatts of installed capacity, according to the company Website.

It turns out we were wrong. Last November Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) shook the renewable energy world when he demanded that the Obama administration cut stimulus funding to what could be the first Chinese-owned U.S. wind farm. Schumer argued that the $1.5 billion, 600 megawatts project developed by China’s A-Power Energy Group, should not get stimulus money because the turbines powering the facility would be manufactured in China.

The storm quickly died down with assurance by A-Power and its U.S. partners, including Austin, Texas-based Cielo Wind Power, that a minimum of 70 percent of each turbine powering the project would be U.S.-made.

In last month’s This Week in Green Energy, GER was even bullish, confident that A-Power’s Texas project could be the first Chinese-owned U.S. wind farm and that Schumer’s stand was a distant headline-grabbing memory. Well, we were wrong.

Yesterday, at a press conference in Washington, Senator Schumer and three other Senators — Senators Robert Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) — urged the Obama administration to cut stimulus funding to foreign-owned wind farms, at least until Congress can pass legislation to ensure that government money goes to projects that create long-term U.S. jobs, reports the Washington Post.

Schumer said the Obama administration had ignored the problem for too long. And it’s true that the Obama administration never seemed to take Schumer seriously. Back in November, on the side of an industry conference in Chicago, GER pressed Department of Energy Senior Adviser Matt Rogers, about Schumer’s concern.  He swiped them aside, describing them as a “a non-issue.”

On the A-Power Texas project, Schumer says:

It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas. These wind projects have a lot of merit, but the manufacturing should be happening here, not in China.

Since first coming out with his concerns about where stimulus cash  was ending up, Schumer has cited a report published last October by Russ Choma of the American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop that concluded that more than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in grants to wind energy companies went to foreign firms.

Last month GER published Choma’s latest installment in this ongoing investigative project.

All along the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) has disputed the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s findings.

In a statement released yesterday shortly after Schumer’s press conference, the AWEA said:

At a time when the construction unemployment rate is nearly 25% and the manufacturing unemployment rate is 13%, this proposal would cost 50,000 American workers their jobs.

The Washington trade group added:

This proposal would torpedo one of the most successful job creation efforts of the Recovery Act, which has already preserved half of the 85,000 American jobs in the U.S. wind industry.

The Schumer proposal could roadblock one of the Obama administration’s cornerstone policies. The White House not only wants to grow the country’s renewable energy production, it also wants lead the renewable energy race pitting it again China and has been willing to work with foreign companies to achieve these two goals.

Image: Drum Major Institute, Flickr

UPDATE: German power and gas utility E.On has no plans to sell its U.S. renewable energy business, E.On Climate & Renewables, which is headquartered in Chicago.

The market is too attractive to walk away from, says a company spokesman in an email to GER. He points out that E.On Climate & Renewables and E.On’s Midwest power business are two separate entities.

Below are highlights of the email we received from E.On:

There are definitively no plans to divest the [U.S.] wind business. Quite the contrary, we are currently very bullish about the future of wind and solar in the U.S. given  President Obama’s new energy policy…

The E.On spokesman declined to comment on the reported sale of the U.S. regulated business.

————————————–

GER understands that E.On’s U.S. wind portfolio is not for sale. It is a separate business that operates as part of the company’s Chicago-based E.ON Climate & Renewables business and is not part of the company’s Midwest power utility business. We’ve called E.On and will post when we get an update.

German utility E.On has hired Goldman Sachs to advise it on the sell of its U.S. power utility business. SparkSpread, a subscription-based industry news site, first reported the news.

E.On acquired its Midwest utilities as part of its 2002, $14.30 billion (€10.4 billion /£9.5 billion) acquisition of Powergen, UK power company, which owned these U.S. utilities.

According to the company Website E.ON Climate & Renewables is developing a 79.5 megawatts wind project in the towns of Hartsville and Hornellsville, NY.

In September GER reported that E.On scored a $121 million  Department of Energy cash grant, at the time the largest grant for a single project, to support construction of its 249-megawatt Pyron Wind Farm in Texas.

Chicago City Council could greenlight the development of an $80 million, second-generation ethanol refinery on city-owned land in the west side of Chicago, a source familiar with the project tells GER.

A vote on the resolution approving the project is scheduled for next Wednesday.

The project, which is in the early stages of development, will produce cellulosic ethanol from municipal waste and is expected to cost between $60 million and $80 million.

Our source tells us that developers  will likely finance the biorefinery with a combination of debt and equity and are in talks with a couple of Chicago-based institutional investors, which he declined to name. The project could also use Department of Energy loan guarantees.

Prudent Energy, a Chinese developer of energy storage systems, earlier this week announced that it had raised approximately $22million in a third round of financing led by Northern Light Venture Capital. The Series C financing also included new investor Sequoia Capital China, the Chinese investment fund of Silicon Valley fund Sequoia Capital and returning investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DT Capital.

Prudent’s VRB technology can store and then discharge renewable energy during periods of high demand. The company says it will use the new cash to scale production at its new Beijing plant and to grow U.S. sales.

Also, yesterday Konarka Technologies, a developer of organic solar cells, based in Lowell, Mass., has received a $20 million strategic investment from Japan’s Konica Minolta, a maker of office printers, scanners and other technologies.  The investment includes an R&D agreement for the two companies to develop and distribute organic thin-film photovoltaic.

Konarka’s organic solar cells are cheaper to make than the silicon-based cells that currently dominate the market. They also can be deployed anywhere, on clothes, for example and could even be used to power the office equipments manufactured by Konica…

PeHUB reports that Konarka previously raised around $175 million from 3i Group, Ardesta, Angeleno Group, Chevron Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, NGEN Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Presidio STX, Siemens Venture Capital, Total Gas & Power and Vanguard Ventures.

Green Energy Reporter’s ranking of the top ten players in green energy for the month of February is out! Our top-ten list is based on the players’ influence over green energy policy and their ability to move the debate.

1: Bloom Energy

Whoa! What a launch. The rollout of Bloom Energy’s Bloom Box will likely emerge as a case study of close-to perfect PR execution. One must admit anticipation was high considering that for the past eight years the Silicon Valley company had remained tight lipped about its fuel cell technology. But when the company, which since its inception has raised $400 million, was ready to talk, boy did it talk, culminating with a whole segment on 60 Minutes. All the way through, Bloom Energy’s CEO and backers stayed on message, describing the Bloom Box as a green, clean source of power. And for the most part the media bought the narrative. Although, by the end of the week-long media fest, questions emerged asking how green the Box really was, considering that it does emit C02 when producing energy. Albeit, at the end of the day, thanks to thorough fundamental research (and good strategic PR), Bloom has for the time being anchored itself as one of the “it” players in greentech. However, $400 million later, the question lingers: Will Bloom turn out to be a Google or a Segway? Segway is a losing investment of one Bloom backer, Kleiner Perkins.

2: BrightSource Energy

It’s not remarkable that this Oakland-based company is battling an array of land and wildlife conservation groups to build the 392-megawatt Ivanpah solar power complex in California’s Mojave desert. Lots of green energy companies, such as Cape Wind, are fighting “green on green” fights, which pit renewable energy interests against traditional environmental concerns.

What’s remarkable is that BrightSource appears to be winning.

Ten days after the company scaled back Ivanpah to reduce its impact on the habitat of the threatened desert tortoise and local flora, BrightSource won a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the Energy Department. State and federal regulatory hurdles remain, but it seems that BrightSource is hitting all the right notes. Company President John Woolard initially protested that the industry was being “overburdened” with too many requirements.

But, even while protesting, the company has tried to address critics’ concerns – though not hard enough, according to project opponents.

If BrightSource can make this project work,  it could provide a blueprint for hundreds of other green energy companies facing environmental challenges.

3: German Solar feed-in Tariffs

We’ve known for a while that the German solar feed-in tariffs (#2 in our January ranking), a crucial government subsidy that’s helped turn a country with long, dark winters into a solar powerhouse, were going to be cut.

Early on in her second term, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative coalition-government floated the idea of a subsidy cut, which quickly became a top policy priority. So, it wasn’t a surprise when this month, following weeks of debate and dead-on-arrival rumors, Berlin announced a 15 percent subsidy cut for solar parks built after July 1. This was less steep than the 25 percent cut first considered, but either way, Germany’s new regulatory regime will push solar companies like First Solar, which is largely dependent on the German market, to diversify their project pipeline.

4: Silver Spring

Will 2010 witness a flood of IPOs by cleantech companies? With the global financial crisis firmly in the rear view mirror, a number (or here) of renewable energy companies are looking at public markets as a source of capital. The latest to do that is smart-grid company Silver Spring, which last week lined up Morgan Stanley and  Jefferies & Co. to underwrite its expected IPO.

The news comes just a couple of months after the California company raised $100 million in new funding, from Google Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Northgate Capital. Next stop on the IPO route for Silver Spring will be its S1 filing, which will, for the first time, offer the public an insight on the company’s books and its worth.

5: Intel

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, investments poured into Silicon Valley to support young IT companies. The World Wide Web in the late ’90s  provided the valley’s second act. And now, a decade into the 21st century, cleantech is shaping Silicon Valley’s third act.

Underscoring the valley’s transformation as a cleantech hub was the announcement last week by Intel, one of the valley’s pioneer companies, that it would invest $3.5 billion to support U.S. tech companies, including early stage cleantech startups. Other Silicon Valley stalwarts backing cleantech companies include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the powerful fund behind some of Silicon Valley’s most profitable plays.

6: Areva

Areva, the French, government-owned maker of nuclear reactors, entered the solar business in a big way last month with its acquisition of Mountain View, Calif., -based solar-thermal equipment maker Ausra. The deal is interesting for  a couple of reasons:  (1) It’s a nuclear power company snatching a renewable energy company; (2) It underscores the funding bind the renewable energy industry finds itself in.

Despite its unique and largely proven technology, until the acquisition, Ausra was at a standstill, hampered by a thin balance sheet that left it unable to develop the utility-scale solar power plants it had set out to do. A year after Wall Street’s implosion, expect more old energy companies buying ambitious but cash-hungry new energy companies.

7: U.S. Chamber of Commerce

After a rough year in 2009, in which they lost high profile members and got into scraps with everyone from the Yes Men to the Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, the business lobbying group flashed its fangs in February and is going for the kill.

The Chamber announced that it will take the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to court over its finding that greenhouse gases are a public health danger in an effort to prevent the agency from regulating greenhouse gases. The Chamber’s lawyers have not yet released the specifics of their challenge, saying only that the EPA failed to follow proper procedures.

The Chamber and its pugnacious President, Tom Donohue, have always been hostile to The White House’s plans to curb emissions. But now, they’re not alone. There were 16 court challenges to the EPA’s endangerment finding as of Feb. 17.

In the private sector, ConocoPhillips, BP and Caterpillar have dropped out of the Climate Action Partnership, an industry group that advocates for climate legislation and public support for a climate bill seems to have withered in the cold winter. Touché Chamber.

8: Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Nothing says, “this multinational agency is going nowhere,” like the agency’s chief executive fleeing to the private sector. Alas, that is what Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, did earlier this month when he announced his intention to join the consultancy KPMG in July.

De Boer could scarcely muster a kind word for the international treaty movement on his way out the door. Instead, he said that the “sense of direction toward a low-emissions world” calls for partnerships with the business sector, which is where he will now go.

De Boer, a Dutchman who has led the agency since 2006, had always been clear-eyed about the dim prospects for a binding treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen last December.

Still, his departure from the UNFCCC justifies the pessimism that many people feel about the major parties agreeing to a successor to the Kyoto treaty anytime soon. Here is a man who knows the players and their negotiating positions effectively saying that a treaty isn’t going to happen. He’s even going to work up to the next climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, which means he thinks there won’t be a breakthrough there either.

Cancun attendees take note: you can abandon all hope.

9: The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

It’s been death by a thousand cuts for the IPCC. The scientific body tasked with evaluating global warming had to admit that its conclusions – notably, the erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 – were not always right. Then critics started going after IPCC leader Rajendra K. Pachauri for his consulting gigs for private companies, even though the money goes to his favorite charities.

Of course, the critics are a ragtag bunch of politicians like Republican Sen. John Barasso and fruitcakes like Lord Monckton, who says certain young people who believe in climate change are the “Hitler Youth”. That doesn’t seem to matter. The New York Times and other mainstream media are buying what they’re selling.

The attacks on the IPCC’s credibility have a ripple effect. Enemies of climate change legislation in the U.S. Congress, such as Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., pounce on every misstep, both real and perceived, and declare global warming a fraud. Legislation is not going anywhere as long as the chief scientific authority keeps floundering.

As they say in Washington these days, the IPCC needs a win.

10: Enerkem

Canada is celebrating its hockey team’s gold medal victory over the U.S. at the Vancouver Olympic Games. It’s also been a golden week for another Canadian entity of a different kind. Montreal-based  biofuel company Enerkem, which has developed a technology that turns waste materials into “syngas,” scored a CDN $53.8 million ($50.09 million / €37.5 million / £33.9 million) investment from garbage hauling company Waste Management. That private investment follows a $50 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to finance construction a waste-to-biofuels power facility in Pontotoc, Miss. Not bad, that’s more than $100 million raised by Enerkem in less than three months.