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It’s safe to say that the cleantech investors who pumped tens of billions of dollars into cleantech over the past three years didn’t expect a serious recession any more than anyone else. Yet with one on the horizon, it looks as if heavily funded technologies like wind and solar power could get hit from more than one direction.

The obvious danger is a slowdown in venture funding, as pointed out in a leaked Sequoia Capital presentation and this contributor piece from Advanced Technology Ventures’ Todd Kimmel. Companies without large funding rounds to draw from will struggle to commercialize their products, especially mid-stage cleantech outfits, who need a lot of capital to move from pilot demonstrations to commercial installations.

More broadly, it’s questionable whether even the biggest companies will be able to tap into debt markets for ambitious projects like massive solar power plants in California’s Mojave Desert and San Luis Obispo County. Those look like safe investments that will be able to attract capital. But wind, which is a more proven technology than solar, is already having trouble getting enough capital, according to the WSJ Environmental Capital blog.

Another looming question is the price of oil. When oil was spiking upward, renewable energy looked like the obvious beneficiary. But a reaction was brewing in response to high pump prices: Falling demand. That promised to keep oil prices stable, but the fright in the markets appears to be causing a more serious contraction in oil prices. Today, oil fell below $80, marking a 13-month low.

As always, it’s impossible to predict with any certainty which way oil prices will head. But given a recession, continued low demand seems likely, and oil prices are set at the margin of supply and demand. While low prices are probably not permanent, consumers are notorious for their short memories. That means that in the interim, products like electric cars could lose some of their heroic aura. Biofuels like cellulosic ethanol, which look fine right now, could also suffer.

There are several other sectors that could be troubled, including green building materials — who would start construction now? — and water, which almost always requires a lot of money. But the final area that deserves special mention is carbon trading and emissions caps. The Associated Press reports that the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to limit emissions worldwide, could be ignored as developing countries move to protect their assets.

At home, that could also be true. Take the Chicago Climate Exchange, for instance, which recently started up. Prices were higher than expected for its initial round of carbon offsets, but such commodities are likely to be viewed as luxury items in a recession. And for those who need excuses not to buy offsets, there are plenty of good ones, as Grist points out.

OwnEnergy just brought in an undisclosed amount in first-round funding, but the 1-year-old wind and alternative energy company is already looking ahead to the full $100 million it needs to raise to develop its first project, a 51-megawatt wind farm in north Texas — and to have it up and running by the end of 2009.

It’s unclear how close the Brooklyn-based company is to this goal, and I haven’t been able to reach OwnEnergy executives yet. But they must be pretty confident, considering that they’ve already started negotiations with a major turbine manufacturer, and broadcasted their intentions to develop between 10 and 80 other wind farms of similar scale.

Clearly, this growth will require significant deals with local landowners. The strategy so far has been to agree to split energy sales revenue should the plants succeed. Landowners have been hungry to cash in on the cleantech boom while the gettings good, and OwnEnergy is along for the ride, forging 12 partnerships with communities and landowning groups across seven states in the last year.

The company’s leaders say communities benefit more from owning small-scale alternative energy plants themselves rather than leasing land to development companies for bigger projects. Chief executive Jacob Susman told VentureWire that the future of the business will be energy generation on a single community, and even home level. Even so, its competitors, like National Wind LLC, are going forward with large-scale plans. The Minneapolis-based company recently announced that it will build a 400 megawatt plant in Colorado.

After OwnEnergy’s wind operations have taken root, the company plans to expand into biomass power production. It has tapped new investor EnerTech Capital Partners and first-round investors Countour Venture Partners and the New York City Investment Fund to keep the ball rolling.

[Editor's note: This is an Op-Ed piece by Todd Kimmel, a principal at venture capital firm Advanced Technology Ventures. Kimmel was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at ATV, which led him to co-found Coskata, one of the most promising cellulosic ethanol startups on the market, in 2006. Early this year, he moved back to ATV to focus on cleantech investment.]

Traditionally, summer in Silicon Valley is a slower time, but this wasn’t the case with summer 2008. According to the Cleantech Group, during Q3 2008, $2.6 billion was invested in 158 companies across North America, Europe, India, and China, with $1.75 billion going to US-based startups and, more interestingly, $1.1 billion of that going to California-based companies.

It was a busy summer. And that was just what we needed, because it’s going to be a long winter. Some investors are warning of a bubble in the cleantech market, but the economic situation in the US will undoubtedly take care of this. The IPO window is closed and likely won’t re-open until 2010.

This is not good news for anyone, except early-stage companies that plan to have their heads down for the next year or more working on proofs of concept and reducing technology risk. Those companies will be in a better position than those in need of capital to scale.

We also may see the competitive gap between new startups and established players shrink over 2009 as early-stage companies are afforded the opportunity to catch up with later-stage companies that have no choice but to wait for the IPO and debt markets to re-open.

However, the top tier of late-stage companies may have some opportunities. While some of those companies may have hoped for a liquidity event in 2009, that won’t likely happen, but it’s not the end of the world for them.

Capital-efficient companies and sector winners that can attract follow-on capital in any environment, and thus weather the next 12 to 18 months, may be able to time their development to come out emerge stronger and tougher in a market that puts a premium on growth companies. Or if you’re a later-stage company that can get to break-even with a capital infusion, you can spend 2009 building out your customer base and growing share.

Either way, in these difficult times, many companies will turn to strategics, sovereign funds, and governments that have cash reserves set aside for outsourced R&D and next-generation technologies. We’ll definitely see these three groups playing a bigger role in cleantech financing through 2009 and into 2010. Ultimately it will be a long game of survival of the fittest.

Of course, there will be a number of companies that won’t endure this downtown, and there will be a natural balancing of an incredibly active and crowded market.

There Will Be Capital

Where will cleantech financings come from in 2009? I mentioned that we’d likely see dollars flow from strategics, sovereign funds, and governments, so that will help. Plus, according to the NVCA/Thomson Reuters, US venture capital firms have raised over $85 billion since 2006, so there’s plenty of capital out there. There’s also debt financing still available in the form of capital equipment financing, which is needed at the outset to fund key equipment for many cleantech companies.

Keep in mind that the bar will be raised significantly for new and follow-on funding milestones. Demonstrating that technology works in a lab may not be enough any longer. The companies that struggle most will be mid-stage startups are still in need of considerable capital to make a full demonstration of their technology. There will be little to no project finance to support growth in 2009.

Thus, companies will succeed by being capital efficient, or employing what I call a hybrid model. Hybrid plays are companies that have the flexibility and optionality to pursue a balanced commercialization model. For example, a hybrid company may have the potential to go to market with a product if project finance or strategic support is available. If not they can employ a licensing or partnership model to make it through.

And a few creative opportunities may remain for IPOs. We may see a couple US companies go public in Europe, where there’s a higher comfort level with alternative energy plays, or on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in an effort to be closer to the Chinese customer base. With regard to merger and acquisition activity, there may be some value buys by large US and global corporates and sovereign wealth funds, but the best companies will hold out and approach the IPO market in 2010, or at least wait for a better M&A market.

All hope is not lost, but this is definitely a time for business basics, capital efficiency, creative thinking, and strategic alliances. Entrepreneurs: batten down the hatches, weather the storm, and be ready for 2010.

For investors, there’s more room for error with the early-stage investment, and we can use the downturn to our advantage. Later-stage mistakes are much more difficult to recover from, so early can be the best antiseptic. Go early or go late, but don’t get stuck in between. And if you have to go late, be very selective with your later-stage investments.

For many years, giving large amounts of money to charity, or affecting the moral choices of major companies, has mainly been the province of elite donors and the corporations themselves. Changing this status quo seems difficult — there’s simply a huge divide between those who have money to give away and the power to make decisions, and those who do not.

But a new San Francisco startup called Virgance thinks there’s a way to use social networks to give the masses power over such decisions — with the willing participation of the business world, no less. If the company’s ideas take off, it could have a serious effect on the way both charity and corporations work, by directly reaching into companies’ coffers.

The idea behind Virgance isn’t just setting a bunch of people loose on a social networking application and hoping they’ll self-organize, which is often the pie-in-the-sky hopes held by the sort that talk about the “power” of social networks. People need ease of use and amusement, while companies want clearly defined, predictable returns. Virgance is gearing up to launch two activism campaigns that are structured to achieve those aims.

Those two are a social networking application called “Lend Me Some Sugar”, which will allow individuals to redistribute the money that big corporations give to charity, and CarrotMob, a sort of offline business competition that rewards corporations for making sustainable choices by organizing “buycotts”. Yes, that’s the opposite of a boycott.

CarrotMob has already had one success. Started by Brent Schulkin, who joined Virgance as a co-founder, the idea had its first run in San Francisco in April of this year. Schulkin asked over 20 local stores to bid on the business of his group, by promising to spend a portion of the profits on energy efficiency.

The store that won bid 22 percent, in return making over nine thousand dollars from the three-hour buying spree, or around four times the receipts from a normal day. A video about that first event is here.

Schulkin hopes to kick off similar events around the country, bringing them up to an ever-larger size to convince businesses to get into the game. And to prove it’s not just an idea for San Francisco liberals, an upcoming event is being planned for Kansas City.

“Lend Me Some Sugar” takes a rather different tack. Big corporations all have a philanthropy budget of some size, because a percentage of profit can be donated as a tax write-off. Really big companies face a challenge in figuring out where and how to distribute the millions of dollars they have for charity, and have internal bureaucracies that determine how to spread it around.

So for Lend, Virgance’s other founder, Steve Newcomb, wants to give companies a new way to benefit from their philanthropy. Say you’re on Facebook, and you go to the Lend application. You’ll be presented with a certain number of points, which represent corporate charity funds. You can then decide which of several hundred charitable organizations to send those funds to. And what’s more fun than giving away someone else’s money?

The trick is that the funds you’re distributing are branded, so you can see, for example, that Acme Inc. is the company that’s donating. Acme ends up looking great — after all, you’re getting to use its money. If you’re active in giving out funds, you’ll get access to more, and can also form groups or compete to distribute philanthropic money.

Newcomb, a former founder of semantic search company Powerset (we profiled Newcomb early this year) says finding interested donors is “kind of like shooting fish in a bowl”, because Lend would effectively give the companies access to a marketing channel they’ve never had before, as well as doing away with the difficulty of running their own internal philanthropic apparatus.

Both CarrotMob and Lend are slated for official launch later this year. And there’s also a plan for Virgance itself, a for-profit company, to make money in the process. The Lend application will have advertising — Virgance will not skim off any of the charity funds. CarrotMob will also avoid tapping the funds of users or companies, instead tapping the team event concept to sell merchandise like t-shirts, as groups start up around the country.

Another recent Facebook application to give users power over companies is Village Green Energy, which pushed several wineries to switch to renewable power. And there’s the grandaddy of philanthropic applications, Causes, a highly successful app that helps rally users to raise funds for non-profits.

Most of the heavily-funded solar panel makers out there have let the public know what they’re working on, if not all the specifics of their technology. So it’s somewhat remarkable that Solyndra has managed to stay stealthy for over three years, all while accumulating over half a billion dollars in funding.

Some details have emerged, to be sure. But the company has now opened up for the first time to give hard details on its product, a panel for commercial rooftop installation that it says drastically undercuts its competitors in price.

Solyndra is currently in the expansion stage for one large plant to make the panels and in planning stages for a second plant, both in the company’s hometown of Fremont, Calif., with a planned total capacity of over 500 megawatts. But its panels aren’t exactly the industry standard; where almost all others on the market look like a flat sheet of dark material, Solyndra’s panels resemble a row of long fluorescent light tubes, each an inch wide and an inch apart.

What’s inside the tubes is what makes the difference. Solyndra makes thin-film CIGS, a chemical composition similar to big startups like Miasole and Nanosolar. However, instead of laying it flat, it wraps it into the inside of the tube. Optics around that inner core then help focus about half again more sunlight onto the core than it would otherwise receive.

The design allows Solyndra to lay its panels flat against a rooftop, where just about every other company has to tilt its panels to receive sunlight at the best angle. That might seem like a niggling difference, but it’s actually a major change. Without all the racks and careful alignment required of a regular solar installation, Solyndra can take advantage of far more space on a single roof.

Another important difference is that the gaps in Solyndra’s panels and their flat alignment to the roof make it far less likely that strong winds will damage them, which allows for somewhat less rigorous precautions against storms. In all, the differences cut the cost of installation by about half.

Considering that installation is around half the total cost of a Solyndra solar deployment, that’s a major difference. A $400,000 commercial installation on a big box store, for example, might only be $300,000 with Solyndra, and it would allow for use of more of the rooftop.

That all helps explain how Solyndra has lined up over $600 million in funding, according to CEO Chris Gronet, and a $1.2 billion order log. The company began testing out its panels earlier this year, having finished development. Now, “the whole focus of the company is ramping production,” says Gronet.

However, all may not be as perfect as Solyndra is making it out to be. Also emerging this evening is a report by Greentech Media that a $350 million funding round Solyndra was seeking didn’t attract enough attention and remains incomplete.

Although I didn’t ask Gronet specifically about that round, he did tell me that if Solyndra can’t tap into more equity funding, it will have access to a Department of Energy guaranteed loan program, for which it was one of eight finalists. The company could also try to take out bank or private equity loans to continue scaling up, although this is likely a challenging time to do so.

The major investors that have poured money into Solyndra so far include Virgin Green Fund, Rockport Capital, Argonaut Ventures, RedPoint Ventures, CMEA Ventures, US Venture Partners and the Masdar Clean Tech Fund. Finally, there’s Madrone Capital, the Walton family fund that also funded First Solar, the thin-film solar industry’s biggest success to date.

Yesterday evening’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin was at times short on substance, but a few nuggets did give hints of what America’s political landscape might look like after November. One of the best exchanges of the debate came when the two were asked by the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS, about climate change.

Palin, responding, suggested that global warming is partially manmade, and partially natural. Biden countered that climate change is entirely manmade. But both candidates seemed in line with creating carbon caps, which will give a serious push to clean technology like solar, wind, geothermal power and electric cars by raising the cost of coal and other traditional energy sources.

This is important, because politicians to date have been somewhat shy about wholeheartedly supporting a carbon cap. And since it’s fairly easy (although not necessarily accurate) to argue that a cap could hurt the economy, it’s even more notable that the consensus is clear, given the current economic crisis. Here’s a small excerpt from the transcript (the whole thing is here), edited to show the statements together:

PALIN: … Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real … And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts? … even in dealing with climate change, it’s all the more reason that we have an “all of the above” approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.

IFILL: Senator, what is true and what is false about the causes?
BIDEN: Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.

IFILL: Let me clear something up, Sen. McCain has said he supports caps on carbon emissions. Sen. Obama has said he supports clean coal technology, which I don’t believe you’ve always supported.
BIDEN: I have always supported it. That’s a fact …

IFILL: We do need to keep within our two minutes. But I just wanted to ask you, do you support capping carbon emissions?
PALIN: I do. I do.

Some sparring occurred with a number of comments by Palin, not shown above, suggesting that more domestic drilling is needed. Biden, for his part, could have easily used the opportunity to push cleantech sources. However, it seems that the political hot issue is now clean coal, which was mentioned more than once. Biden was careful to show his support:

PALIN:I was surprised to hear you mention that because you had said that there isn’t anything — such a thing as clean coal. And I think you said it in a rope line, too, at one of your rallies.
BIDEN: …My record, just take a look at the record. My record for 25 years has supported clean coal technology. A comment made in a rope line was taken out of context. I was talking about exporting that technology to China so when they burn their dirty coal, it won’t be as dirty, it will be clean.

Biden is considered an intelligent, well-educated man, so it’s indeed likely that he has said, at least in private, that clean coal isn’t “real” — because, for the most part, it’s not. But at the moment, political support for it seems to be mandatory; clean coal now fills the role that corn ethanol did several years ago, before it was repeatedly debunked as a cure-all.

Biochar: Remember that word. While it may not be part of most investors’ vocabulary, biochar, a form of charcoal produced when organic matter is burned in the absence of oxygen, can store carbon and increase soil fertility — making it a more ideal alternative to some costly and complex carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Ecovolve has the idea of pairing the production of biochar with the development of small-scale distributed energy systems.

The New York City, NY-based company, founded a few months ago by a group of ambitious Princeton graduates, uses the above-described burning process, called pyrolysis, to produce energy from waste wood, agricultural residues and other non-food feedstocks. In addition to producing gases that are readily converted into electricity, Ecovolve’s systems also make biochar as a by-product.

To avoid the need for expensive equipment, the company first turns its raw biomass into bio-oil, a mixture of hydrocarbons produced during the flash pyrolysis, or rapid heating, of biomass. Though not a real substitute for oil, Ecovolve is working on improving its quality and stability to make it useful for stationary power generation applications, which could allow it to tap into the existing diesel fuel market.

The company claims its systems are simple, customizable and cheap enough to be deployed in both developed and developing countries. Unlike other renewable energies, such as solar and wind, which are sporadic, pyrolysis provides a continuous, on-demand source of power.

One more unique aspect of Ecovolve’s technology is its capacity to produce what is called “carbon-negative” energy. You’ve probably heard of “carbon-neutral” energy before — generating electricity without emitting carbon dioxide; the idea behind “carbon-negative” energy then is to make electricity while also sequestering carbon dioxide. This is accomplished by storing the carbon accreted in biomass as biochar, an inert form of carbon — which means it doesn’t release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Jason Aramburu, one of Ecovolve’s co-founders and its technology developer, told Biopact in an earlier interview that his firm’s systems typically convert around 20 percent of raw biomass by weight into the carbon-rich material, which is 85 - 95 percent pure carbon. Processing the biomass thus actually results in fewer emissions being produced than if it were left to combust naturally or decompose, Aramburu says. Because of its high carbon content, it also becomes a highly desirable fertilizer substitute.

Ecovolve’s real ace in the hole, Aramburu told me, is its reliance on distributed, or on-site, energy generation — the ability to produce electricity from many small energy sources very near to where it will be used. Right now, most countries generate their electricity in large centralized facilities — coal plants and nuclear plants, for example — which makes sense when you’re supplying the energy to large populations over long distances due to economies of scale. But what if you only need to supply power to a small village or community?

Read the rest of this entry »

As badly as the rest of the business world seems to be doing, renewable energy just keeps picking up steam. There has been a string of recent financings going to solar panel makers, financiers that help consumers and businesses buy solar installations, and now solar thermal company Ausra.

Ausra is one of several large, heavily funded startups that use arrays of mirrors to concentrate sunlight on a central receiver containing water, which quickly reaches the boiling point to produce steam and drive a turbine. It just took $60.6 million from KERN Partners, Generation Investment Management, Starfish Ventures and founding investors Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The company last year signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric for a 177-megawatt plant in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., and also began construction on a production facility near Las Vegas that is now churning out components like Ausra’s cheap, flat mirrors, which are called Fresnel reflectors.

Those mirrors are cheaper than the curved heliostats other companies use, as are some of Ausra’s other components. Chief executive Bob Fishman says those are some of the factors that will make Ausra the first solar thermal startup to plug a full-scale electricity generation plant into the grid (in the middle of next year), although Ausra’s plans are far outsized by Brightsource’s contract for 900 megawatts of thermal solar.

Given the current banking problems, I also interviewed Fishman to ask about how the credit crunch will impact large-scale renewable energy.

VB: You just took an equity funding. Will the credit crunch affect project financing — that is, bank and private equity loans to build large, utility-scale plants?

BF: In general, project debt is done on the merits of the individual project. That’s what determines whether you can get it. And you’re going to see people willing to put money into things they perceive as having a lot of long-term value.

As part of our market we also have the ability to just sell steam to industrial customers, who are looking at it as a way to save energy. There are a variety of ways we take our product to market, whether as electricity, steam or an augmentation to an existing power project.

VB: Your investors have pointed out rising materials costs, for steel, glass and so forth, as a challenge. How are those affecting Ausra’s plans?

BF: If steel goes up, the cost of our facilities go up. But the cost of a coal or gas plant goes up even more. If we’ve already signed a contract, we have to absorb the cost, but we take measures to accommodate that. But one of the few advantages to the crisis right now is that it’s actually weakening commodity prices.

VB: As a former natural gas plant operator, what do you predict happening to the costs of non-renewable fuels and energy?

BF: I think we’re already at parity with natural gas. There are other options, but if you want to talk about California, if you need power in four to five years, nuclear is 10 years off for the first plant. Clean coal doesn’t exist yet, so let’s also call that 10 years. What you have left to do, in the United States at least, is natural gas and renewables. Right now, we’re at par with natural gas, and as energy prices increase, I think it will pass us [in price]. I think what you’ll see getting built in California for the next 4-5 years is gas-fired plants and solar thermal.

VB: Are environmentalists still raising objections to the amount of land used by solar thermal plants? What about water?

BF: With respect to land use, we’re the most land-efficient solar technology there is. We use half the land that Brightsource uses, and a quarter of what solar PV uses. In terms of disturbing the land, if you look at our stuff, we have small foundations on the ground and the mirrors are about eight feet up. And this is a facility that uses almost nothing that’s remotely toxic. It’s glass, steel and water, and we recycle all the water. There are always people who oppose anything, but people have to get their mind around it. If you want energy, there are choices. Unless you want to sit in the dark.

A new solar technology that creates hydrogen as well as electricity is on the horizon. Sundrop Fuels, a stealthy New Mexico company with an innovative dish design, has licensed structural ideas from larger and better-known startup, eSolar, to create something unprecedented.

Sundrop has been secretive about its technology since its inception, but word of a $20 million investment from Kleiner Perkins slipped out earlier this year. With some digging, I turned up a few details on Sundrop’s “solarec” technology, which produces several byproducts using energy from sunlight.

Solarec, short for Solar Reduction of Carbon Dioxide, can not only produce hydrogen, but also desalinate water and create methanol, a useful fuel. With the disclosure of this information, Sundrop may finally be poking its head from its shell, but details on its actual process are few and far between.

We do know that eSolar’s contributions relate to the mirrors, or heliostats, that aim sunlight into a central receiver, as well as the tracking technology that keeps dishes at an optimal angle. Both are vital to the operation of the overall package, which must remain cost-competitive with solar thermal devices, solar panels and other renewable sources.

Google-backed eSolar, meanwhile, is on the path to build out utility-scale electrical plants, first across California and eventually the country. The fact that Sundrop is borrowing technology from the startup suggests that it has a non-competitive technology — likely intended for off-grid, government and institutional use — and is also rapidly approaching commercialization.

Would you base your next vacation on how environmentally friendly, economically beneficial, socially conscious or economically beneficial to the surrounding community a resort is? Do you ever want to plan a trip based on activities or atmosphere, rather than destination?

The idea of doing any of the above, admittedly, conjures up images of granola-crunching hippies, rather than the Bermuda short- and baseball cap-clad throngs of American tourists famous for spreading their lucre worldwide. But Whole Travel, a new site launching today, is betting that the pool of thoughtful travelers is growing rapidly.

While most people are familiar with the idea of searching for, say, plane tickets and a hotel in Las Vegas, Whole Travel presents a search box with a question prominently displayed above it: “What’s your grand adventure?” Entering a word — “mountains“, for instance — brings up results that can then be narrowed by metrics like rating, cost, amenities or the “Whole Ranking.”

That last, a measurement of various environmental and social considerations for each vacation destination, is the keystone of the site. CEO Matthew Davie says that 42 percent of online travelers consider themselves “green.” That’s a nebulous category if there ever was one, but the statement is at least somewhat accurate, based on the rapid growth of ecotourism over the past few years.

Whole Travel thus hopes to be the nexus of environmentally-conscious travel, a place that people come to find that special spot in West Africa or Peru where they can, perhaps, atone for the tons of carbon their jet spewed out while carrying them to their vacation paradise.

Sarcasm aside, Whole Travel seems like a good idea, and the site already has some 4,000 hotel and resort listings who will, in the future, pay referral fees to the company (it doesn’t directly sell anything). It’s the site’s bad luck to be launching during what looks like it may be the start of a global downturn, a negative handicap to a tourism site if there ever was one.

So far, Whole Travel has been funded by angel investors. The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

In case you’re tired of reading about the markets imploding, here’s some unrelated news:

Warren Buffet invests in Chinese battery maker — He’s called the Oracle of Omaha for his ability to spot long-term trends. Take note, then, that Warren Buffet has bought almost 10 percent of a Chinese battery maker whose cells go into electric cars, BYD Company, via one of his existing companies.

Web radio bill passes House — Companies like Pandora and Last.fm may survive after all, following the passage of a bill in the House allowing web radio companies to negotiate their own terms with copyright holders.

Is cloud computing a marketing hype campaign? — Free software campaigner Richard Stallman really hates the idea of cloud computing, warning of a future increase in fees for others to own your data.

One of private equity’s worst deals ever — TPG’s $1.35 billion investment in Washington Mutual, part of a $7 billion syndicate, was entirely wiped out late last week. It was one of the largest private equity deals in history, although representing less than 10 percent of TPG’s total capital, so it won’t (immediately) wipe the firm out.

ShuffleBrain readies photo game for Facebook — CNET has a good profile of ShuffleBrain, a game startup that will allow players to create their own photo-building game in a yet-to-be released Facebook app.

Apple TV update may be coming tomorrow — A mysterious message sent to Apple resellers, and picked up by The Unofficial Apple Weblog, suggests that an updated Apple TV may be coming Tuesday.

Nintendo may offer DS Lite follow-up by year’s end — The successful DS Lite may have a successor by the end of this year, according to Crave, with better wireless, a camera and music playback.

Multimedia chip maker NeoMagic dies — The Santa Clara, Calif. company’s shares were once listed for $125 on Nasdaq. Its remaining 52 employees are now being set free.

Privacy-protecting version of Google Chrome released — Iron, a German spinoff of Google’s new Chrome web browser, promises to protect people who are concerned about the browser’s data policies.

Etelos CEO Jeff Garon fired — Business application maker Etelos, which recently maneuvered itself onto the over-the-counter bulletin board (OTCBB) stock exchange, has fired CEO and president Jeff Garon. Valleywag, as usual, has the gritty details.

The new pathway of innovation — Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham ruminates on the new flow of innovation from consumers to business, versus the old, opposite way.

Another solar-as-a-service company, part of a growing industry that helps to install and operate solar panels, is ballooning in size. Solar Power Partners, a Mill Valley, Calif. startup that only had $6 million in funding a year ago, is announcing that it has reached $100 million in funding with some $60 million more available for project financing.

Solar Power Partners specializes in power purchase agreements (PPA), which mean that the beneficiary of the solar panels doesn’t pay for them. Instead, SPP buys and installs the panels where they’re needed — for instance, on a warehouse roof — and retains ownership, handling their maintenance and upkeep. They then sell power from the panels to the buyer for a fixed rate.

PPAs have become popular because both businesses and consumers are reluctant to dig into their own wallets to buy panels outright. With a PPA, they get the panels, while installers like SPP get a margin from the electricity they sell. In turn, the business that signed the PPA can expect to benefit from having a fixed electricity rate for a decade or more as utility power prices rise.

We’ve written about similar companies. SunRun, for example, just took $12 million to sell PPAs to consumers. SPP’s own model markets PPAs to agriculture, businesses and government, so it’s more competitive with companies like Recurrent Energy, which is building a 5-megawatt plant in San Francisco.

SPP has a number of investors, including Globespan Capital Partners, Dry Creek Ventures, Silicon Valley Technology Group, Energy Investors Fund, and the banks who lend money for construction of solar plants.