VentureBeat

Taking a page from T. Boone Pickens, who made waves when he announced that he was building the world’s largest wind farm in Texas, Continental Wind Partners and CEZ Group have concluded a deal to create Europe’s largest onshore farm, with a total capacity of 600 megawatts (onshore farms tend to be in hilly areas 3 km or more inland from the shoreline while offshore farms are 10 km or more from land).

As part of the deal, Continental Wind Partners, a Wilmington, Delaware-based wind developer that funds projects in Romania and Poland, will sell two of its Romanian farms to CEZ, a large utility based in the Czech Republic, for €1.1 billion ($1.6 billion). The combined project will be twice as large as the next largest permitted onshore farm in Europe and three times the size of the largest farm that’s already operational — Spain’s Maranchon wind farm, which has a 208 megawatt capacity.

The farm will become operational in stages, with initial construction slated to begin this September and the first 139 turbines expected to be up and running between April 2009 and June 2010. CWP, which will manage the construction, plans on having 347.5 megawatts of total capacity up by the end of 2009, with the remaining 252.5 megawatts operational by the following year.

The turbines for the project will be procured by Good Energies, an investor in renewable energy that helped found CWP in 2007. CWP plans on having 600 megawatts of wind capacity permitted in Romania by the end of the year and 280 megawatts in Poland by 2009. Good Energies’ portfolio companies currently have a pipeline of wind and solar projects that add up to 3,000 megawatts.

While a far cry from Pickens’ ambitious 4,000 megawatts, this deal would supplant Scottish and Southern Energy’s recently unveiled 152-turbine onshore farm as Europe’s largest wind project. SSE’s £600 million ($1.1 billion) project will have a total capacity of 548 megawatts — enough to power up to 320,000 homes — when it is completed in 2011.

Two companies have been tapped as the first recipients of an investment from a program called RechargeIT, run by Google’s philanthropic arm: Aptera Motors, a Carlsbad, Calif. company that is gearing up to sell a futuristic three-wheeled car; and ActaCell, a battery company that hopes to help make electric cars both cheap and safe.

Each company is receiving $2.75 million from Google.org (although ActaCell also has other new investors). The announcement comes as RechargeIT is releasing the results of a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV) test showing that a modified Prius can get over 90 miles per gallon.

The 230+ miles-per-gallon Aptera has received plenty of attention over the past few months, and a post here on VentureBeat asking whether readers would drive the odd-looking vehicle continues to get responses indicating that yes, quite a few people are interested in the $30,000 car. The Google investment is also only part of a total $24 million round that should bring the company closer to its production goals.

However, ActaCell is appearing for the first time with this investment. The company, spun out of the University of Texas at Austin and based in the same city, is working on a lithium-ion battery technology that it thinks might be able to change the dynamics of the electric car market. At the moment, li-ion is by far the preferable battery type in terms of performance, but it is also far more expensive than competing technologies like nickel-metal hydride (NiMH).

Outside of the funding details, CEO Bill Ott didn’t want to say much about the technology when I spoke to him. However, he was willing to admit that there are a few broad problems that ActaCell wants to tackle. One of the top priorities is safety — li-ion batteries are famous for exploding or catching on fire in laptops. Cars, obviously, need to operate without either of those things happening.

Just as important is the cost. Ott suggested that a major component of cost is in the materials that go into li-ion batteries, which often include “precious commodities” like cobalt and nickel. “If you want to build a successful company,” he told me, “you have to have a low-cost material.” Also important is extending the life of the battery so that it needs to be replaced less often.

The company plans on releasing the details of initial tests of its batteries later this year, and Ott says that they should be commercializing the technology by 2010, around the time they’ll need another round of funding.

Major competitors to a technology like ActaCell include A123, a li-ion maker that is loaded with cash and appears to be contemplating an IPO, and secretive EEStor, a maker of so-called “hypercapacitors” that entered a partnership with defense giant Lockheed Martin this year. EEStor, by the way, hates talking to press, but a new mystery blogger has been talking about the company; if you’re curious about their progress, try checking it out.

The total investment taken by ActaCell was for $5.85 million. The round was actually led by DFJ Mercury, with participation from Google.org, Applied Ventures, and Good Energies.

One of the solar photovoltaic industry’s biggest problems right now is a lack of polysilicon needed to make their solar cells. Supply shortages aren’t expected to ease up for another couple years; meanwhile, those who do have solar-grade silicon to sell are making money hand-over-fist.

6N Silicon wants to join the fray with a proprietary manufacturing process of its own, which is capable of improving low-grade silicon enough to be of use in solar (but not enough for semiconductors). Its processes are derived from the metals industry, which works in much larger volumes than silicon manufacturers have ever needed to.

If 6N can live up to its promises, there could be some serious pain down the road for the other new silicon-manufacturing plants already being built to satisfy demand. An oversupply is projected within a couple years, which would only be aggravated by a lower-priced offering such as what 6N is promising.

That might sound like great news for the makers of solar cells, the excess supply could hurt in other ways: A sudden burst of low-cost silicon might produce an excess of cheap silicon-based cells. That will pull the carpet from beneath manufacturers that have so far relied on being able to charge a premium, and likely knock some players out of the game.

Other technologies might reduce the amount of silicon needed. Applied Materials is working on a thin-film silicon cell that uses a fraction of the silicon usually needed, while a host of competing non-silicon technologies based on various metals, inks and nanomaterials are also in development. Thin-film cell makers like First Solar and Nanosolar are already on the market, but regular silicon photovoltaics still capture the vast majority of sales.

As for 6N, it hasn’t yet lived up to its hopes of making solar-grade silicon without using the waste matter from semiconductor manufacturing. However, it’s likely to be making its silicon in quantity by 2010, the year projected for the beginning of the supply shift.

The $20 million funding was provided by Good Energies, along with Yaletown Venture Partners and Ventures West. The company, based in Missuaga, Ontario, also recently took on a new CEO from the metallurgical industry.

Konarka, yet another company experimenting with new-fangled technology to produce more efficient solar cells, hasn’t been able to articulate a clear business strategy in the six years since it started.

However, solar technology is hot, and the company has raised $45 million more in capital to give it more time to keep trying. It has now raised more than $100 million.

Like several other start-ups, the Lowell, Mass. company has been using non-silicon material to produce a more flexible thin-film solar cell to convert light into energy. However, it has continued to dabble on a number of solar projects, while its competitors have remained laser-focused on producing a producing a workable cell for the roofs of large buildings and other expansive areas. Even with focus, those other companies have been delayed.

The financing was led by Toronto investment firm, Mackenzie Financial, along with Good Energies. Other investors were Pegasus Capital and existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Asenqua Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and 3i.

Konarka is using a plastic, or “polymer” for its technology, and is testing it in a variety of areas, including portable and consumer products such as powering PDAs or recharging batteries on the battlefield, and in various parts of housing (windows, for example) other than rooftops. The products aren’t expected to hit the market until next year.

Other participating current investors include Vanguard Ventures, Chevron, Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, NGEN Partners, Angeleno Group and Asenqua Ventures.