VentureBeat

Intel Capital has sunk money into three Chinese companies: Trony Solar Holdings, NP Holdings and Viewhigh.
Trony Solar Holdings, a manufacturer of thin-film solar cells, received $20 million. An undisclosed amount also went to NP Holdings, which works in the utility-scale energy storage space.
Intel made another undisclosed investment in Viewhigh, a software provider for the healthcare [...]

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AMEE, short for “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”, calls itself a platform to track “all the energy data on Earth.” That’s an ambitious goal, but the company is better known for simply tracking CO2 emissions and helping others to reduce their energy consumption.
Based in the United Kingdom, AMEE is working on standardizing the carbon tracking industry. [...]

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Usually when a startup classifies itself as a biofuel company, it makes one of two fuels: biodiesel or ethanol. However, there’s a range of alternatives that could be commercialized, one of which Cobalt Biofuels is after: biobutanol, a liquid fuel that is more similar to gasoline than ethanol.
Cobalt has just taken a third venture round [...]

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Craig Venter is famous for discovering and modifying microorganisms, but his biofuels company, Synthetic Genomics, plans to take the research a step further by sequencing the genome of the oil palm plant.
The company just raised $8 million from Genting Group, a Malaysian conglomerate, according to national newspaper The Star (credit to Earth2Tech for digging this [...]

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Transbiodiesel, an Israeli biodiesel startup that has a unique technology to produce the fuel, has taken $1.5 million and signed a cooperation agreement with an unnamed large United States biodiesel company, according to Globes.
The process Transbiodiesel uses can produce less glycerin in a more environmentally friendly manner, which in turn increases fuel yields and decreases [...]

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The Northeast has a new solar energy integrator, the type of company that designs, installs and operates solar systems, with the merger of Solar Works and SolarWrights by private equity firm Riverside Partners.

Riverside didn’t previously own the two companies, but instead simultaneously acquired and combined them into a single entity with 110 employees which will [...]

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ISE, a bus manufacturer located in Poway, Calif., has raised $5.5 million of a planned $25 million fourth round of funding, according to peHUB.
It’s easier to convert a bus into a hybrid electric vehicle. The vehicles already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars new, with much invested in the chassis and body, so the cost [...]

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In a sign investors may be warming up again to the residential and commercial photovoltaics market now that Congress has finally approved the extension of renewable tax credits, Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Standard Solar has secured $8.5 million in second round funding from Truecast Capital and a number of private and institutional investors.
The money will be used [...]

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In many ways, commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol production still seems a long way off. It’s still marked by high costs and low efficiencies. But these limitations haven’t dissuaded prominent investors from taking the plunge, with VCs like Khosla Ventures pouring over $400 million into startups like Verenium, Mascoma, Range Fuels and Coskata in recent months.
Even the [...]

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If you start looking for waste in industrial processes, it’s usually not hard to find. Industrial Origami got started by looking at items like boxes, bins, shipping equipment and server enclosures, and figured out a way to reduce material usage in those items.
The company’s process starts with large, contiguous pieces of sheet metal, which are [...]

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GangaGen is a biotech company that’s working on bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and destroy bacteria. The company raised $1.8 million to develop treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections like pneumonia and MRSA, a skin infection that plagues hospitals.
This is the San Francisco, Calif. company’s first funding round. ATEL Ventures made the investment.

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EcoMotors, a company that was unveiled earlier this year at the Detroit Auto Show, raised $5.25 million in its first round of funding, according to peHUB. The raise from Khosla Ventures was reported when the company launched, but the amount was not disclosed.
The diesel engines EcoMotors hopes to commercialize will be smaller, lighter and more [...]

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Redwood Systems, a Danville, Calif.-based firm that wants to help businesses conserve energy by converting to LED lighting, has raised $4 million in first round funding, according to PEHub.
While compact fluorescent lightbulbs (or CFLs, as they’re more commonly known) are a major improvement over incandescents, most analysts and building experts believe LEDs are the future [...]

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As the rest of the economy tanks, the cleantech sector has remained buoyant, with investors continuing to dump cash into wind, solar and other renewable energies. Banking on a recent wave of enthusiasm for wind power, Barre, Vt.-based Northern Power Systems announced that its parent company, Wind Power Holdings, has raised $37 million in first [...]

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Carrier ethernet company Turin Networks has taken a large investment from Millenium Private Equity, according to VentureWire, likely representing 20 to 25 percent of the company.
Turin makes carrier ethernet for wired and wireless networks, as well as backhaul networks. The additional money will help it expand in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
The Petaluma, Calif. [...]

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Vancouver, Canada-based Ostara Nutrient Recovery Systems is the latest in a series of companies to make its business converting waste into useful products — in this case by removing nutrients, like phosophorus, from wastewater and recycling them into fertilizer. The water treatment firm has just raised $10.5 million in private equity financing from VantagePoint Venture [...]

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The Department of Energy (DoE) has been conspicuously doling out grants left and right to support several clean energy initiatives in recent months. The latest beneficiary, to the tune of $1.7 million, is the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which will use the funds to develop and test advanced water power technologies.
EPRI [...]

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While the overall economy may be in a bad spot, investments in green funds and renewable energy startups are showing little sign of waning, with solar firms like SoloPower, Nanosolar and AVA Solar leading the way. Its financial prowess may not match that of its better established competitors, but Charlotte, North Carolina-based Sencera isn’t doing [...]

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