VentureBeat

[Update: The specifics are in on the round of funding referenced below. It was for $9 million, from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's fund Ohana Holdings, as well as Bethel Tech Holdings, Energy Industries Holdings, Kolohala Holdings, Black River Asset Management, according to New Energy Finance.]

The latest quiet (if not stealthy) firm to come onto my radar is an odd, miniaturized version of solar thermal generation called Sopogy, that has just won a round of venture funding and is pondering a future offering on the stock markets.

Solar thermal is the catch-all term for technology from well-known firms like Ausra, Brightsource and Solel that reflects light from many mirrors onto a contained liquid, heating it up to drive a turbine. It’s usually done on a giant scale, and competes with coal generation plants. Sopogy drastically reduced the size of the generator to make it useful for much smaller applications.

Picture a parabolic (curved) mirror aimed at the sun, with a thin pipe drawn across its middle, and you’ll have the basic idea for Sopogy’s “SopoNova.” Inside the pipe is water, and the mirror is designed so as to perfectly aim sunlight at it. The water, as in a standard solar thermal process, turns to steam to drive a generator. However, it can also be used for highly efficient heating and cooling in buildings (more on this in a moment).

The downside to miniaturizing solar thermal is that it becomes far less efficient than the large-scale projects mentioned above, so the SopoNova has to be put to different uses. At 12 by 5 feet, it’s not cut out for your house’s rooftop, either. That means the best market is in between consumers and utilites — that is, with businesses, campuses, industry and the military. At least five Soponovas have to be deployed in order to be cost-effective, in part because a single sun-tracker runs several at once. However, once a decently-sized installation is up, they make electricity for about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to CEO Darren Kimura.

For reference, that’s a pretty good number if you’re not trying to do utility-scale generation. Solar panels, by contrast, cost much more,and are less efficient. The SopoNova units themselves don’t cost a great deal, and don’t require specialized technicians to maintain them, so their payback period can be well under five years.

Part of the payback calculation depends on what the Soponovas are doing. As alluded to above, the units are multi-functional — the steam they produce can go to other uses. One is air conditioning that makes use of an absorbent heat exchanger, which, oddly enough, can use steam to produce cool air much more efficiently than electrically driven air conditioners. That configuration can save large building owners like universities lots of money very quickly.

As cumbersome, even clunky, as the Soponova looks, I was struck by the cleverness of its design. The units don’t even require large manufacturing facilities to make — they can be cheaply assembled in local machining shops, using retrofitted machines like CNC cutters. Kimura is responsible for much of this innovation; he entered the cleantech field at the tender age of 19 with his first startup. Now in his thirties, he has worked through a string of other startups, and provided the seed funding for Sopogy himself.

Those other startups, as well as Sopogy, are based in Hawaii, and the company was just granted bonds from that state totaling $45 million to develop solar. However, the company just opened an office in Silicon Valley, even while continuing work in Hawaii. Having a presence on the mainland is important, because many of the company’s business leads and projects are now on the West Coast.

In fact, Sopogy has gotten enough interest, and already sold enough SopoNovas, that Kimura says he’s looking toward an IPO in the not-too-distant future. The company just completed an over-subscribed round of venture investment, although Kimura wasn’t willing to disclose the amount yet, and it’s busy finalizing more contracts and churning out its product. Previously, it had taken only $2.3 million from local firms TradeWind and Kolohala, plus about a million of Kimura’s own money.

Sopogy has gotten very little media attention to date (I received an inside tip), but unlike companies like thin-film solar company Optisolar that are truly in stealth mode, Sopogy is just keeping its head down; most of the information I’ve outlined is available on its website. Kimura says he hasn’t even bothered to get a PR agency yet. “We’ve got so many projects going on, we’ve chosen to focus on the execution rather than the hype,” he explains.

Sopogy competes with companies like SolFocus, which makes concentrating solar (a term Sopogy also used for itself) technology for use at a similar scale, as well as solar panels.

A host of new alternative energy companies have emerged and raised funding.

Here’s a roundup of the latest action, including news at Zeachem, a cellulosic ethanol company; Catilin, a biodiesel company, Range Fuels, another cellulosic company; Sopogy, a solar thermal company; and finally, a note on Greenvolts, a solar company, and a setback at Greenfuel, an algae-biofuel company.

Zeachem — The company, of Menlo Park, Calif. has developed new way to create cellulosic ethanol, which is one of the more promising alternative fuels for reducing harmful greenhouse emissions. Its claim to fame is to process materials that are used for the cellulosic process in a way that reduces the amount of corn and other valuable sources needed for it. It is still in the lab, however each of the individual steps of the process have been adequately tested, so that the company will see a testing plant in 2008 and delivery to market in 2009, says Erik Straser, investor at Mohr Davidow. His firm led a $4 million investment into the company. Firelake Capital participated.

No company has reached full production phase. Iogen in Canada is furthest along; it is building a 40 million gallon plant. Next is Range Fuels, which we’ll get to below.

Zeachem claims it is more efficient, however, by combining two processes together that avoid any carbon being lost. (Other processes lose up to a third of the carbon in the conversion process.) The first step is to convert the sugars of biomass into a chemical intermediate called acetic acid. By taking the intermediate step, there’s no CO2 produced in the process — which saves greenhouse emissions being produced as a byproduct. It then takes the lignen left in the biomass, and uses gassification to covert it into hydrogen. This is combined with the acetic acid, and then converted into ethanol. Chief executive Dan Verser said he was “surprised but pleased” that no other company had come up with the idea. The process is patented. Wood chips other non-food sources of biomass can be used.

Catilin — The Ames, Iowa company, is a biodiesel company that also uses a more efficient method, which avoids some of the toxic processes used by other biodiesel companies that require substantial cleanup. It has raised $3 million in a first round of funding, also led by venture firm Mohr Davidow.

It works on a broad range of feedstocks – from soybean oil to animal fats. The company is building a pilot production facility. It uses a nano-technology catalyst that essentially functions as a teabag, allowing undesirable products to be kept in the bag and avoiding them having to be washed out in a cleaning process, which wastes water. It is run by Larry Leinhart, a former “Entrepreneur in Residence” at Mohr Davidow. The company is a spin out of the Iowa State University, and needed an operator like Leinhart to run the business, said MDV’s Straser.

Sopogy — The Honolulu solar thermal concentrator company had already raised $3 million in financing. The company has now just received $10 million more in a revenue bond from Hawaii’s governor to help construct a thermal plant there.

Range Fuels — The Broomfield, Colo. company, says it has received a permit to construct the nation’s first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant, in Georgia – with groundbreaking to happen this summer. It received a $76 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. It will produce 100 million gallons per year of cellulosic ethanol — using wood waste from Georgia’s forests. A first phase will be completed next year with limited production.

http://venturebeat.com/2006/10/10/greenvolts-raises-250000-for-solar-concentration/

Greenvolts — The San Francisco company recently raised $1.5 million from undisclosed investors (we did not previously cover), said Wednesday it will build a 2-megawatt solar electric power plant for PG&E based on its “concentrator” photovoltaic technology. The facility’s ultimate purpose will be to deliver power to customers during peak energy times, but at a lower cost to PG&E.

According to GreenVolts, its “photovoltaic system concentrates 625 suns of energy onto a highly efficient solar cell and can deliver energy at a competitive cost. The size and flexibility of the company’s system allow it to be placed nearer to the demand than other alternatives, helping utility companies avoid constructing costly transmission lines or having to upgrade existing power grids.” GreenVolts’ facility will be on a farm outside Tracy, Calif., and will be finished in 2009. (PG&E signed another, larger deal with Cleantech America, also based in San Francisco. As part of their agreement, Cleantech America will build a 5-megawatt solar plant near Fresno, Calif. The company said that when the facility is finished in 2009, it will be California’s largest solar plant.) GreenVolts also recently signed a deal with Spokane, Wash.-based utility company Avista to build a prototype power plant.

Greenfuel — Unanticipated setbacks with GreenFuel Technologies, a bioreactor system company, has led to layoffs of half the Cambridge, Mass. company’s 50-person staff. Bob Buderi has the scoop at his new blog, Xconomy. The company seeks to use algae to convert carbon dioxide emissions into biofuel, but it turns out to be twice as expensive as expected. Bob Metcalfe has been appointed interim CEO, and he’s frantically raising some cash — to last six months, and from current investors.