While the options for clean energy are growing for U.S. consumers, it’s not always easy to see what your options are, which is something clean tech startup Choose Energy is focused on.

Today Choose Energy announced it’s closed a new $4 million round of funding to help advance its web service that enables consumers to compare prices for all the retail electricity plans available in the area, educate on each type of energy, and enroll them into a plan. The goal is for people to find more affordable power services while ensuring that your home or business is using a green source of energy. (And I’m sure some people would even be OK with getting a higher monthly bill if they knew the power was coming from a renewable source, such as like wind and solar energy.) The company said about 40 percent of its customers choose green energy plans.

“Ten years after deregulation, we’re still experiencing a huge communications gap between the consumers of energy and retail energy providers,” said Choose Energy CEO Jerry Dyess in a statement. “Our goal is to bring transparency to the complex decisions consumers face when choosing a new energy plan in deregulated states.”

The new round of funding, Choose Energy’s first, came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Stephens Capital Partners. The startup plans to use the new capital,  to further grow the company, advance its energy comparison service, and focus on building enterprise-level services for retail energy companies.

Founded in 2008, Plano, Tex.-based Choose Energy Inc. is currently available in Texas, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but the startup has plans to enter all 19 states that allow deregulated energy companies to operate as well as 22 states that have implemented deregulation of natural gas.

Energy diagram from Choose Energy

The Westly Group, however, is doing something right. The venture capital firm has closed a $160 million fund to invest in up-and-coming clean/green tech startups.

Former California state controller and chief financial officer Steve Westly founded The Westly Group in 2008 to accelerate innovation in clean energy. While many investors have seen little returns on investments in this sector, and funding in this space declined significantly in 2012, the Westly Group has fared well. Investments in Tesla Motors, biofuel company Amyris, and China Recycling Energy Corp have all gone public, and Westly sees this area growing in the future.

“We are more bullish than ever on clean tech,” said Westly in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News. “Costs are going down, revenues are going up, and we’re seeing better business models. People have gotten smarter. And corporate investors are replacing pension funds and university endowments — they understand how large this market.”

Electric vehicles and biofuel aside, the Westly Group has invested in startups that have a more broad interpretation of clean tech. For example, portfolio company Revolution Foods provides healthy meals to charter schools and school districts and is currently active in 12 states and 500 schools.

While clean tech has struggled a bit in recent years, major venture capital firms and corporations are still interested in it. Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Draper Fisher Jurveston, and companies like General Electric and Siemens are actively investing, and companies like Google are taking big steps to become more energy efficient.

Furthermore, during his recent state of the union address, President Barack Obama emphasized the need to drive new research and technology in this market to decrease reliance on foreign countries and fossil fuels, address climate change, and create jobs.

Clean tech has plenty of room for innovation and growth, and with this latest fund, The Westly Group stands to benefit when green tech becomes cool again.  The fund has 50 investors; the three largest are corporate investors Citi, the German utility E. ON, and the SK Group of Korea. The Westly Group previously raised a $127 milion in 2009 and paid back its limited partners, who invested $50 million of their own money.

Photo Credit: rocknroll_guitar/Flickr

SolarReserve, a U.S.-based solar energy developer has succeeded in closing a $586 million equity and debt round of financing for two South African clean-energy projects.

To raise the funds for the projects, SolarReserve joined forces with the Kensani Group, a South African financial advisory firm, and Intikon Energy, a South African developer of renewable energy.

The projects, Letsatsi and Lesedi, are based in the Free State and the Northern Cape respectively, and were selected in first round bidding by the South Africa Department of Energy as part of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Program (REIPPPP).

In a statement, the company revealed that the projects will kick off in mid 2014 and will provide electricity to Eskom Holdings, South Africa’s state-owned utility, for 20 years. Jointly, the projects will cost almost $600 million, making these two of the largest project finance transactions ever completed in South Africa, and among the largest renewable energy projects in Africa.

“Kensani applauds the South African government’s large scale commitment to clean energy, and celebrates the exciting opportunities for empowering our rural communities,” said Kelley Starke-Dow, CEO of Kensani in an emailed statement. Kensani participated in the equity portion of the funding round.

The hope is that the project will result in 600 construction jobs and 100 permanent operational jobs for South Africans. The project leads will set aside a percentage of total project revenues for enterprise and socio-economic development, amounting to a total of approximately $59 million, which will be invested back into the local community.

According to SolarReserve, a California-based company, FirstRand Bank led the debt funding for the projects.

Top image via Shutterstock

Fisker has already received $529 million in loans from the U.S. Department of Energy to make its plug-in extended-range vehicles. The majority of the loans are going toward the development of the Nina, a mid-priced family car, to be built in a former GM plant in Delaware. The manufacturing delay means that the creation of thousands of promised new jobs will also be postponed. Fisker now plans to start production in 2013.

“Yes there have been delays, but we have created a totally new car, based on a new technology and started a company and raised finance for it in less than 4 years since the company was formed — and all in an economic downturn,” Roger Ormisher, Fisker’s director of global communication told VentureBeat.

A $169 million chunk of the government’s loan has gone to development of Fisker’s Karma, a luxury sedan made in Finland that costs $96,000 (pictured above). However, even though the factory is in Finland, Fisker and the Department of Energy say the loan money is not being spent abroad, but rather in the U.S. on design, engineering and integration.

The Karma has just been cleared for sale in the U.S., two years late and without meeting its promised efficiency standards. Last week the EPA gave it a rating of 52 miles per gallon in electric mode, and a low 20 miles per gallon in gas mode. Only 40 of the cars have been shipped to the U.S. from Finland, but the company still plans on ramping up production to 15,000 cars a year.

The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion loan guarantee program for green-energy companies is part of a “green jobs” initiative that was supposed to create or keep 65,000 jobs. So far it has given out half its loans and created 3,545 full-time jobs, according to the Washington Post. The failure of solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra in September thrust the program into the spotlight, with many questioning the decision to tie investing in unproven and emerging green technology companies to job creation. It’s likely that all of the program’s loan recipients will be closely scrutinized.

The Department of Energy has adjusted the terms of its loan agreement with Fisker to accommodate the delays. Fisker Automotive’s founder, Henrik Fisker, told the Washington Post of comparisons to Solyndra, “This is completely different. You can’t compare at all.”

Fisker Automotive has raised over $600 million in private equity financing, the majority of which has been used to create jobs, including 650 in Calif. and 100 in Delaware, according to Fisker.

[via Washington Post]

He said entrepreneurs will catch a lot of criticism for ignoring the experts and yet they should plow forward anyway. Khosla, founder of venture firm Khosla Ventures, is one of the most successful venture capitalists of our time, having invested in companies such as Cerent, Juniper Networks, and Corvis. Yet his attitude is pretty anti-establishment when it comes to independent thinking, which he believes is essential for entrepreneurship.

“Trust in your instincts and trust in a lot of experimentation,” Khosla said in an interview.

Quoting George Bernard Shaw, Khosla said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.” And quoting Martin Luther King Jr., he said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”

In his speech, Khosla spent a lot of time showing how expert predictions have gone awry, like Lord Baron Kelvin, the head of the Royal Society who said that “heavier than air flight” was impossible just a few years before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. And he said that, even today, oil experts can’t accurately predict the price of oil.

McKinsey failed to predict the popularity of cell phones, estimated in 1986 that the number of cell phones in 2000 would be 1 million units. It was off by 108 million units. The forecast was wrong by 10,000 percent. On that basis, AT&T decided to divest itself of its cell phone business.

“It was an expensive study,” Khosla joked.

Philip Tetlock, a professor at the Haas Business School at the University of California at Berkeley, did a study on the accuracy of forecasts going back 25 years. When he finished the study, he had collected 82,000 forecasts against real-world outcomes from nearly 300 academics, economists, policymakers and journalists.

Nobody predicted that Twitter would be used by more than 100 million users. Nobody predicted that India would have more cell phones than toilets. Nobody predicted the Arab Spring. Nobody predicted that China would become a huge consumer of the world’s oil.

“Which reasonable expert would predict these things?” he said. “A tweet didn’t exist five years ago. Who would predict that it would play a role in Egypt and the Arab Spring? These things are not possible to predict because they are so exponential,” or reflect so much change they bear no resemblance to the current reality.

Khosla talked about what he calls the “Black Swan Thesis of Energy Transformation.” He is investing over $1 billion of his clients’ money in “black swans,” or ideas with the potential for huge jumps in environmental benefits, rapid payback, and easy scalability. But Khosla said he expects most of these investments to fail. He recalls how everyone thought that all swans were white until a black swan was spotted in Australia. That changed the definition of a swan. To find those black swans, you have to break out of the traditional thinking, and then you have to take “more shots on goal,” (a hockey analogy) where your chances of finding a black swan are best.

“Five billion people want to live like 500 million do today, with an energy-rich lifestyle,” he said. No amount of small energy savings, like using one sheet of toilet paper instead of two, as proposed by singer Sheryl Crow, will accomplish that aim, Khosla said. Too many efforts to save energy are turning out to be so small that they actually expend more energy than they save.

He said that incremental innovations won’t do, and that’s why the entrepreneurs at Singularity University are important, since the program is focused on technologies that could affect a the lives of a billion people.

“What matters are exponential innovations,” he said. “The only way to get there is radical innovation. There is no question you can compete with fossil fuels with renewables and be cheaper.”

Khosla Ventures is still investing in computer science and other traditional technology in addition to cleantech, Khosla said. Square, for instance, is one of the companies he invested in. Khosla Ventures hasn’t yet had its home run in cleantech, but his shots on goal in cleantech include nearly 50 investments in areas that include energy storage, distributed generation, agriculture, batteries, electrical efficiency among other categories.

As for a bubble in Silicon Valley investments, Khosla didn’t seem too worried.

“I don’t know if we are in a bubble or not,” he said. “We will find out after we crash, if we crash. But it doesn’t matter. What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.”

Khosla counts himself among the experts you should ignore.

“I’ve probably failed more often than anybody else in Silicon Valley,” Khosla said. “Those don’t matter. I don’t remember the failures. You remember the big successes.”