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There’s a bad moon on the rise for Imperium Renewables. The biodiesel maker has lost a major contract that was one of the lynchpins holding the company together, according to the Seattle PI’s John Cook, who has been chronicling the company’s rise and fall.

Imperium, as you may recall, is a biofuel startup founded in 2004. It hit a growth streak in 2006 and secured a massive $113 million investment the following year, as hype grew around the biofuel market. Imperium’s investors fast-tracked it to an IPO, which was announced three months later, even as losses at the company mounted. Another half-year later, Imperium had lost its CEO and put its IPO plans on ice.

The company’s rocket-ride to fame and fortune — followed by the attendant explosion — draws an interesting contrast with A123 Systems, an early entrant on the cleantech scene. In fact, it’s debatable as to whether A123 could have been classified as “cleantech” at all when it started. As Rob Day recounts, the company was founded in 2001 at MIT with the idea of making superior lithium-ion batteries. Not for cars, but for power tools.

That’s not necessarily a small market, but compared to A123’s newer ambition, supplying cells for electric vehicles, it certainly held less potential. Regardless of the end market, it was essentially a technology play: Could the company produce a high power, safe battery, better than existing ones? The company’s valuation rose slow and steadily as it reached milestones. By 2006, its fundings valued it at $125 million.

Contrast that with Imperium Renewables, which was hyped from its very first outside investments. Investments came fast and furious, and within a year or two of its first funding, Imperium was saying it was worth $1 billion, through the planned IPO.

A cynical observer might call Imperium’s sharp upward trajectory, and the massive hype surrounding the company in its early days, a cash grab by VCs hungry to capitalize on a booming new market. Of course, there are plenty of possible explanations for Imperium’s failure to shine, like the volatile markets for both fuel and feedstocks, not to mention the uncertainty of any new technology. But it’s certainly a very different story from A123, which limited its initial ambitions, and thereafter plodded, over a period of seven years, to its own current $1 billion valuation (no word on the value of the IPO yet, but chances of it failing to happen look low).

Count on seeing some of the other hyped entrants flaming out sooner than most of the successes come through. For instance, consider the developing story of Solyndra, which Green Light is tracking. Despite filing multiple patents, the secretive (but very heavily funded) company’s key scientists and early employees seem to be fleeing.

And in another hyped area, cellulosic ethanol, Robert Rapier has run the numbers on Coskata, the cellulosic ethanol startup that came out of nowhere earlier this year with plans to take over the world, and pronounces it a “Dead Man Walking”, based on the costs of its pilot plant. Coskata’s founders and investors, one of whom I recently met with, would strongly disagree, but it certainly fits the profile of a high-flying, fast-moving startup making a very large bet.

Meanwhile, at the single giant refinery Imperium operates, staff have continued to show up for work, but shipments have not been arriving for refining, according to Cook. For the moment, it’s one to keep on deathwatch.

[Photo: Imperium's opening day, by Flickr user skidrd]

Supreme Court gives supply chains protection from patents — In a notable ruling today, the Supreme Court has ruled that patent holders can’t demand royalties from supply chain customers who bought products from license-holders further up the chain. The decision should help reduce “patent exhaustion” in the system, not to mention the overall level of silliness.

Gas hits record $4 average, but cleantech may not always benefit — Average gas prices across the country have reached the psychological milestone of $4 per gallon, which might seem like a powerful growth signal for cleantech. Unfortunately, the world is not always so simple. High gas prices have contributed to pushing biodiesel to $6 per gallon, causing more pain to Seattle-area startup Imperium Biodiesel, as Earth2Tech reports. Other, equally unpredictable ripple-out effects are likely.

Microsoft gives up on classified ad site — Windows Live Expo, a classified ad posting site, will close on July 31. Perhaps not surprising, given the site’s rushed release and built-in stumbling blocks for users; but Expo’s failure to chip into the daunting lead held by Craigslist should also serve as a warning to eBay, Wal-Mart and others, who have started their own, similar sites.

Monster falls flat in social networking, closing Tickle — Job search site Monster.com is pulling out of the niche social networking market, letting go of a site it acquired in 2004. The network, Tickle, will close at the end of this month.

SanDisk shuts down TakeTV / Fanfare — An effort to break into the set-top box market, competing with the Apple TV, has been abandoned a mere half year after its start by memory maker SanDisk. The low-cost TakeTV was supposed to appeal to the lower-end market, but may have proved too clunky for less computer-savvy users. Meanwhile, the bargain-priced Netflix Roku has emerged, and looks like a much stronger offering.

Kaiser backs Microsoft’s HealthVault — The nation’s largest non-profit health group, Kaiser Permanente, is throwing its weight behind Microsoft’s patient data service, HealthVault, a service that we gave a tepid review to last year. Although Kaiser is starting with only a test group comprised of its 156,000 employees, it could eventually give a big boost to Health Vault, which competes with recently-launched Google Health.

Conway bets big on stealthy ex-felon — Famed investor Ron Conway has not only invested in Foomojo, the new stealth online gaming startup of convicted felon Ron Hornbaker, but listed it off to peHUB as one of the companies he’s most excited about. We wouldn’t bet against him — Hornbaker is also the founder of Alexaholic, a stats site famed for outdoing Alexa using the its own data (now called Statsaholic, and the target of a sour-grapes lawsuit from Alexa owner Amazon).

If, like us, you took some time off during the past week, you’ve missed a few cleantech news items. To help out, we’ve assembled a quick catch-me-up on a few interesting or significant stories:

1) Martin Tobias out at Imperium Renewables
2) The grand plan for solar in 2050
3) Companies prove cleantech can stand alone
4) Ethos plans ethanol production in South America
5) Asphalt used as a cheap solar cell
6) New Tesla CEO posts open letter

Martin Tobias out as CEO of Imperium Renewables — As one of the nation’s most heavily-funded privately-funded biofuels company, Imperium Renewables has gotten plenty of press — both positive and negative — for its plans to produce ethanol in a struggling coastal town in Washington. However, nobody was expecting the company to suddenly announce the departure iCEO Martin Tobias. No reason has been given (or ferreted out by reporters). Tobias, a veteran of Ignition Capital and dotcom-era company Loudeye, was replaced by John Plaza, the company’s founder. We spotted one small clue that the company didn’t plan ahead for the departure: It still lists Tobias as its CEO.

The grand plan for solar in 2050 — Scientific American has a sprawling feature piece on the potential future of solar energy in the United States. A few soundbites: 69 percent of all electricity in the US could be supplied by solar by 2050. For this, a new DC (direct current) transmission network may need to be built; both photovoltaics and solar thermal will need to be used; and finally, the government may need to subsidize more than $400 billion of construction to get such a network off the ground.

German companies prove renewable energy can stand alone — Researchers at the University of Kassel teamed with several German power companies to study the potential of renewable energy sources — hydro, solar, wind and others — to power an entire country. A grid of 36 plants was connected to show, in miniature, that such sources can effectively work together. Now the problem for Germany (and other companies) is scaling the output to meet demand. Much more detail on the study is available at Biopact.

Ethos will produce its ethanol in South America — An ethanol production company backed by venture capitalists in the United States plans to head south to make its margins. Ethos, a Cambridge, Mass. company, is considering both Latin America and the Carribean for establishing biofuel facilities, and plans to use sugar as its feedstock, according to VentureWire. The company is funded by Khosla Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures.

Power from roadways to heat and cool buildings — A Dutch company called Ooms Avenhorn Holding has worked out a method of piping water underneath roads, which tend to get hot from the sun, then storing it in caverns to warm buildings in cooler months — in effect, turning roads into a low-efficiency but very cheap solar thermal generator. The system, which uses a lattice of pipes beneath asphalt, can also be used to de-ice roads. More details at the San Jose Mercury.

Tesla’s new CEO sends open letter to customers — Ze’ev Drori, the new CEO at Tesla Motors, sent an open letter to customers over the holidays via the company blog. Not everything in the letter is reassuring: Drori admits that, due to Tesla’s production strategy, “We don’t yet know when each car will be built or how many cars will be completed in calendar year 2008.” Drori’s predecessor, Martin Eberhard, was likely forced out due to internal disagreements centering around delays in production. Tesla also recently announced that it would be using a less-effective transmission for its initial production run. [Update: The company says this transmission will be used for only a portion of the initial production. See below]

The excitement among green technology investors continues in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month on climate change, and Rob Day has a good summary of the latest chatter.

“People are comparing it to the Internet boom of 1999,” said one green entrepreneur to the Washington Post, about the ruling, which gives finally gives Congress the right to regulate climate change.

In the majority opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court said that the EPA’s steadfast refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions presents a risk of harm to Massachusetts that is both “actual” and “imminent,” and that “The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized.”

Rob points to recent conversations, including comments by venture capitalist Randy Komisar (of big-name Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins) that billion dollar IPOs are coming quickly. Indeed some are already filing for such IPOs, including former venture capitalist Martin Tobias’ Imperial Renewables. The Seattle biodiesel company plans an IPO that will value it at more than $1 billion.

Micah Charyn, of the Keiretsu Forum, also tells us about his group’s Angel Capital Expo on Wednesday at the Mission Bay Conference Center in SF, featuring green technology companies.