VentureBeat

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.

updated

Kleiner Perkins, the respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said it has finished raising its thirteenth fund (called KPCB XIII) for early-stage companies, totaling $700 million.

Separately, the firm announced the creation of a $500 million “Green Growth Fund,” which will be invested in somewhat more mature, green-focused companies. It said a new partner, Ben Kortlang, will join existing partner John Denniston to co-manage that effort.

Kortlang (pictured left) previously co-directed alternative energy investments at Goldman Sachs.

Kleiner has backed a string of major successful Silicon Valley companies over the years, from Genentech to Amazon and Google. More recently, however, it has poured more resources into non-traditional areas, including “green technologies,” designed to support companies what will help solve the world’s climate crisis.

In its statement, Kleiner said this fund is designed to help green products get to market. It is called “growth” because companies will have already built their product and will have entered their “growth phase.” Kleiner expects to invest between $10 million to $50 million into such companies. A lot of these companies need more to finance plants and distribution infrastructure through debt and project financing, too, making the investment structure different from typical IT investing, the firm said. {Update: Indeed, while Google took $25 million in capital to get started, a company like Bloom Energy, another Kleiner investment has already absorbed $250 million and hasn’t gotten close to going public.

The main fund, KPCB XIII, will be invested over roughly a three-year period, and will back companies in the green tech area, but also the more traditional information technology and life sciences areas, the firm said.

Kleiner also said it was a deepening partnership with a London investment group, Generation Investment Management, which invests in clean-tech companies. Al Gore, which Kleiner signed up last year to help invest in clean tech companies, is chairman of Generation Investment Management. Kleiner and Generation said they’d work together to review companies before investing, and share other resources, including Kleiner locating its European investment effort in Generation’s London office.

[Update: In an interview, Kleiner's Denniston said Generation is a limited partner in the Kleiner Growth Fund, but wouldn't provide the specific amount, saying only that it is "meaningful." Moreover, while Kleiner's fund is not a limited parter in Generation, some of Kleiner's partners have invested their personal money into Generation.]

News of Kleiner’s thirteenth fund and the new Kleiner green growth fund emerged over the past week.

Here’s more from the announcement:

The greentech coverage of KPCB XIII and the Green Growth Fund will extend the firms’ existing collaboration with London-based Generation Investment Management. Through their alliance, the firms actively work together to find, fund and accelerate green solutions with the greatest potential to help solve the climate crisis…

…KPCB XIII partners include KPCB XII partners Brook Byers, John Denniston, John Doerr, Juliet Flint, Bill Joy, Randy Komisar, Joe Lacob, Ray Lane, Aileen Lee, Dana Mead, Jr., Matt Murphy, Ajit Nazre, PhD, Ellen Pao, Ted Schlein, Beth Seidenberg, M.D., Risa Stack, PhD, and Trae Vassallo. New partners added since the KPCB XII fund closed include former Vice President of the United States and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Electronic Arts co-founder Bing Gordon, Chi-Hua Chien, Amol Deshpande, Wen Hsieh and Jordan Ormont.

…Ray Lane added, “We have come to a turning point and now, more than ever before, the world is ready and willing to tackle our energy and environmental problems, as individuals, corporations and governments. The entrepreneurs we support are the starting point to address these challenges, and we’re proud to help them transform their innovations into marketable solutions for our global climate crisis.”

…Green businesses are already booming in the United States and overseas, as environmental concerns and skyrocketing fossil fuel prices stimulate demand for renewable energy alternatives. At the same time, recent breakthroughs in a wide variety of scientific disciplines – biology, chemistry, and physics - are making revolutionary green technologies possible and affordable.

Here’s the latest action:

Kleiner Perkins preparing “big news” — Venerable venture fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has “big news” that it will be sharing tomorrow morning, we hear. We’ll be covering it first thing. One possibly related item is the recent registering of the firm’s 13th fund, found in a filing dug up by peHUB. The firm’s last raise was completed in February 2006, for $600 million. Data from Thomson Financial suggests the firm has invested a lot of that, or at least $556 in 107 startups over the past two years — though that does not include unannounced “stealth” deals.

Hewlett-Packard invents artificial intelligence circuit — Researchers at HP have come up with a circuit element for memory chips that will dramatically lower the power required and allow a range of values outside of binary code (zeros and ones), according to the New York Times. The device, a “memristor”, could revolutionize mobile devices, as well as easing the development of artificial intelligence functions like understanding speech.

Sims Online / EA-Land virtual world shutting down — EA-Land, the virtual world based off the popular Sims gaming franchise, will close its doors in two months. While Electronic Arts phrases the issue rather delicately, saying only “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end,” it’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t be closing the business if it were making money. And if a hot property like the Sims can’t succeed as a virtual world, other game developers should take note.

Generation Investment Management closes $683M cleantech fund – Headed by the infamous (and frighteningly named) duo of Al Gore and David Blood, Generation Investment Management is a London-based investor in both private and public cleantech companies. The new fund will invest in sectors including renewable energy, building efficiency, cleaner fossil energy (possibly meaning clean coal), sustainable agriculture and carbon markets, with an average investment size of $30 million. More details at the Financial Times. Gore, it should be noted, is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins.

Courts reject RIAA “making available” anti-piracy argument — A legal tactic used by the Recording Industry Association of America has been slapped down by a Federal judge, according to CNET. The RIAA’s argument was that simply making copyrighted files available over sharing networks constituted breaking the law, even if they were never downloaded by other users.

Radiohead won’t repeat free music experiment – A much-hailed experiment by Radiohead involving the public release of a new album on the Internet for optional donations by downloaders won’t be repeated, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The band still hasn’t said whether it considered the release a success. Radiohead is also working with MTV to highlight child slavery and sex trafficking, saying the opportunity is about “exploiting a situation while you have the chance.” Interesting wording…

Miasole just can’t get a break — Miasole, a thin-film solar cell maker that has raised a massive amount of cash, has run into quite a few problems over the last year, including delayed production, employee defections and disappointing cell performance. The latest blow: The loss of a $9 million contract from Dow Chemical, according to CNET. The money will go to a rival thin-film maker, Global Solar.