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Stealth startup Makani Power, an Alameda, Calif.-based wind energy company, has secured $5 million in second round funding from returning investor Google.org. The 24-member firm, which is playing its plans very close to the vest, has only revealed that it is building huge wing-shaped kites to harness the energy from high-altitude wind.

By some estimates, all the energy contained in wind could satisfy our needs 100-fold, with most coming from high-altitude wind. Tapping into just 1 percent of this energy could meet most of our current needs. In a recent demonstration, scientists from the Netherlands’ Delft University were able to produce 10 kilowatts of electricity by flying a 10-square meter kite attached to a generator.

A kite farm, consisting of multiple kites flying at altitudes of around 800 meters, could generate up to 100 megawatts — enough to power 100,000 homes — they say. Wubbo Ockels, the project’s leader, believes the technology could be commercially viable in as little as 5 years if the funding is there.

Makani also aims to capture that small slice of global high-altitude wind, which it says would be sufficient to supply the world’s current energy needs. The kites capturing the wind could fly as high as 10 kilometers into the sky (a touch over six miles).

As a competitor, Makani has Kite Gen, a Milan, Italy-based startup, has developed a theoretical design for a system that would fly 12 sets of lines with four 500-square meter kites on each. It says the system could produce up to 1 gigawatt of power, roughly equivalent to the amount generated by a coal-fired plant. There’s also Magenn, which has a lighter-than-air floating turbine, although it will only go up 600 to 1,000 feet.

Makani previously raised $10 million from Google.org in late 2006 and expects its current round to raise upwards of $20 million.

[Update: Lost in the press blitz about the Google.org investment was the fact that Altarock took $26.25 million in total. Advanced Technology Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Vulcan Capital all participated.] Here’s a fact: If you go outside, wherever you are, and start drilling a hole, once you get deep enough it will become very, very hot. Using that heat for electricity is the cornerstone of geothermal power, and it’s great if you can reach the hot spots — just ask Iceland. But much of that heat is difficult to reach or use, a detail that has inspired the latest investment by Google.org.

The type of geothermal power that has been used for over a century comes from underground reservoirs of water that are heated from below. Areas that are easy to access, like California’s Geysers geothermal development, are a valuable source of power. But in many other places, there are heated areas relatively close to the surface — in Google’s view, that means three to 10 kilometers down — that also don’t contain water.

To draw power from those locations, you’d need to not only drill down far enough, but also pump in water and retrieve it as steam to run turbines. That technology is called Enhanced Geothermal Systems. The Google.org funding, for $10.25 million, has been split two ways. Altarock Energy will get $6.25 million, and Potter Drilling will receive $4 million. Separately, the Southern Methodist University Geothermal Lab will get about half a million dollars for ongoing research.

Between the three, Google is tackling the various requirements for drilling and injecting water, as well as mapping out new resources. However, the amounts are small compared to other recent Google.org investments.

We speculated that Google.org would be making a geothermal bet back in May, right after it had helped plow over $200 million into solar thermal firms Brightsource and, separately, eSolar. Those amounts suggested that Google was ready to put serious weight behind any technology it thought could take off.

The investments announced today could indicate that EGS isn’t ready for prime-time, or that the companies Google funded are simply a bit earlier in the development cycle. Or it could mean that Google is nervous about some of the risk factors with EGS, like the possibility of losing large amounts of the water you pump in or destabilizing the ground beneath plants (not a small concern in California).

Another company we’ve written about, Australia’ Geodynamics, is planning thousands of megawatts of geothermal development using technology similar to Altarock’s, but has already had to abandon at least one well that it drilled. If successful, both it and the Google companies estimate that they can produce geothermal power for under 10 cents per kilowatt hour, the usual figure required for success.

We’ve also written about Altarock before, when it received at $4 million investment last year from Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures.

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.

Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, has taken a number of stakes in solar and wind startups over the past year, most recently joining a $115 million investment in solar thermal firm BrightSource Energy. It now seems to be focusing its attention on the bustling geothermal energy sector, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently expressing a strong interest in Ormat, a geothermal startup headquartered in Reno, Nevada.

During an interview with the Israeli newspaper, The Marker, Brin confirmed that his company was in discussions with Ormat to collaborate on several clean energy projects, calling the startup a “great company” and praising it for its potential to turn geothermal energy “into a big business.” Though he wouldn’t say whether Google was in talks to purchase any Israeli cleantech companies, he did say that the conditions were good for his firm to buy companies in 2009. He said there were a lot of interesting companies that worked in renewable energy and electric cars — perhaps a nod to Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place.

According to Haaretz, senior executives at Google have already met with their counterparts from Ormat twice, and Larry Page recently visited one of the company’s plants in Steamboat Hills, Nevada. Ormat chairman Lucien Bronicki said he and Google officials were pushing legislation in the U.S. advocating more R&D for advanced geothermal technology. Ormat announced in February that it would work with the DOE and several geothermal companies — GeothermEx and Pinnacle Technologies — to test Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) technology at its 11 megawatt Desert Peak facility.

The DOE has committed $1.6 million to support the project, which could eventually yield over 50 MW of power. The partnership will test hot fractured rock (HFR) technology to attempt to increase the output of its geothermal wells. Sydney, Australia-based Geodynamics, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, has been on the forefront with this technology and is nearing the completion of a 50 MW demonstration plant to supply up to 75,000 people by 2012.

Ormat has several existing projects in Guatemala, Kenya and Nicaragua is considered the world leader in geothermal energy.

In addition to making a series of high-profile investments in eSolar, BrightSource and Makani Power as part of its RE<C initiative, Google has also donated over $1 million in grants to support plug-in vehicle adoption. The foundation’s RechargeIT initiative recently gave $200,000 to CalCars.org. Page said Google.org’s goal is to produce 1 gigawatt of renewable energy capacity from wind, geothermal and solar thermal sources cheaper than coal, an objective he and Brin are optimistic will be met in years, rather than decades.

BrightSource Energy, an Oakland, Calif., solar thermal startup, has landed a hefty $115 million funding round from investors including Google to develop its solar power tower technology.

Solar thermal technology is one the leading hopes for alternative energy. It uses like mirrors and lenses to boil water, the steam of which is harnessed to generate electricity.

This third round was led by Google.org, VantagePoint Venture Partners, BP Alternative Energy, Statoil Hydro Venture and Black River; returning investors included DBL Investors, Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Chevron Technology Ventures. The company has now raised $160 million.

The company recently signed a massive contract with PG&E to supply it with up to 900 megawatts from its plants, whose construction will begin in 2009. Its Distributed Power Tower (DPT) technology is basically an array consisting of thousands of small mirrors, called heliostats, which concentrate sunlight on a single point — in this case, a boiler chamber mounted on top of the tower. Because its heliostats are able to follow the sun in two dimensions, BrightSource claims they are much more efficient than rival solar thermal technologies.

Each field of heliostats, dubbed a Solar Power Cluster (SPC), can produce 20 MW of solar power; a typical BrightSource power plant, made up of five SPCs, is therefore capable of generating up to 100 MW. To reach the 900 MW mark, the company plans on having one 100 MW plant up and running by 2011 and four 200 MW plants up by 2016.

Rivals Ausra, Solel and eSolar use similar technologies to produce electricity, though their specific designs differ. The latter, for example, uses flat mirrors in smaller groupings to produce up to 33 MW at a time –a practical strategy that allows the firm to plug directly into the existing grid and to eschew the burdensome process of obtaining permits. Costs will likely remain the biggest obstacle for these companies, but BrightSource, which is chaired by Arnold Goldman, a man with an extensive background in solar thermal, will be well positioned to handle them.

[See also: CNET Green Tech Blog

In the rapid rise of solar thermal power, a small handful of companies have grabbed the lion’s share of attention and funding: Ausra, Brightsource and Solel are the three most oft-heard names. Another company, eSolar, can now add its name to that shortlist, with one of the biggest cleantech venture fundings to date.

Notably, eSolar has plans to immediately funnel the money into construction projects that may see its plants going online ahead of its competitors’.

The solar thermal designs of all these companies involve using fields of mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight on contained water, which then boils and powers turbines. From that starting point everything can differ, from the size and shape of the mirrors to the type of receptacle containing the water and the location of the power plant.

ESolar’s trick is a minimalist design that uses small, flat mirrors in relatively modest deployments — the company is planning to build a series of plants producing 33 megawatts each, which is enough to power from 15,000 - 25,000 average Californian homes. Ausra, by contrast, is planning a 177MW plant in San Luis Obispo County, while Brightsource has a deal for five of about the same size.

Going smaller has several benefits for eSolar. The biggest is that the bureaucratic stumbling block of permitting is smoothed for plants under 50MW. Having smaller plants — they fit on about 160 acres of land — could also benefit eSolar by allowing it to nestle plants into areas that are closer to the regular transmission grid.

The size and speed with which they can be built means that eSolar could potentially have a plant up by the end of this year or early next. Most of its competitor’s earliest installations are scheduled for a year or so beyond that.

How far the $130 million investment will carry eSolar is another question. While the company boasts that it has a cheap manufacturing process and efficient designs, aided by software that intelligently aims the mirrors, building even small plants is still an expensive proposition. Despite the scale of Google.org (the search giant’s philanthropic arm) and Oak Investment Partners, eSolar will probably soon be shopping around for even larger amounts from banks and private equity.

Idealab, the third funder in the round, is also headed by eSolar’s chairman, Bill Gross. The company is based in Pasadena, Calif., and also took $10 million from Google.org in January.