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American automakers have finally learned that fuel efficiency and environmental friendliness count, turning the yearly Detroit Auto Show, which started Sunday, into a lineup of cleantech exhibitions.

Among big-company prototypes like the Chevy Volt and Cadillac Provoq are a handful of smaller firms making significant headway. Following is a brief lineup of the ones we thought were most interesting:

Coskata
A mere two years old, ethanol producer Coskata has managed to attract an investment from General Motors, which it announced at the event.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill ethanol company. Like cellulosic ethanol companies, Coskata can convert wood and random organic debris into fuel. However, it uses its own proprietary gasification technology to turn this raw material into a synthesis gas, which is then cooled for “fermentation,” during which microorganisms convert the gas to ethanol.

The company says it can run this process very cheaply — for less than a dollar per gallon. The materials it can use include both regular biomass (such as wood chips) and municipal waste streams. To prove the concept, Coskata will initially build a 40,000 gallon per year pilot plant.

The specific amount of GM’s investment was not disclosed. Coskata’s previous investors include Khosla Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures, and Advanced Technology Ventures, who put $17 million into the company. It’s based in Warrenville, Illinois.

EcoMotors
A team with engineering experience at European automakers Volkswagen and Audi is working on a diesel engine that could be efficient enough to be competitive, on a miles-per-gallon basis, with plug-in hybrid technologies.

EcoMotors says its engines, due on the market in 2011, will get about 100 miles per gallon on fuel alone. It’s also planning its own hybrid adaptations that will be even more fuel-efficient.

Diesel engines are often overlooked in the clean-fuel furor. However, they deserve more attention: Not only are they used in virtually all trucks, they’ve also been growing in popularity in consumer vehicles over the last few years.

As with Coskata, Khosla Ventures is an investor in this company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif. As it happens, Khosla is also an investor in another diesel-cleantech company we recently reported on, called Nanostellar.

Fisker Automotive
When we recently mentioned Fisker Automotive, we had no idea that star VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had plowed more than $10 million into the company, an investment just disclosed at the auto show. The exact amount wasn’t revealed. Palo Alto Ventures has also invested in the company.

Fisker plans to significantly undercut potential rival Tesla Motors’ $98,000 all-electric Roadster by charging only $80,000 for its luxury plug-in hybrid. (For the overly rich: That’s sarcasm. $80,000 is a lot of money.)

The remaining details: A 0-60 mph acceleration time of 5.8 seconds (slow for an electric vehicle, but comparable to most combustion-engine sports cars), a sustainable speed of 125 miles per hour, and a 50-mile range if using only battery power. Perhaps most importantly, the car is gorgeous, as seen below.

Unfortunately, the car won’t be available until late in 2009. Fisker, which is based in Irvine, Calif., plans on manufacturing about 15,000 a year.

If, like us, you took some time off during the past week, you’ve missed a few cleantech news items. To help out, we’ve assembled a quick catch-me-up on a few interesting or significant stories:

1) Martin Tobias out at Imperium Renewables
2) The grand plan for solar in 2050
3) Companies prove cleantech can stand alone
4) Ethos plans ethanol production in South America
5) Asphalt used as a cheap solar cell
6) New Tesla CEO posts open letter

Martin Tobias out as CEO of Imperium Renewables — As one of the nation’s most heavily-funded privately-funded biofuels company, Imperium Renewables has gotten plenty of press — both positive and negative — for its plans to produce ethanol in a struggling coastal town in Washington. However, nobody was expecting the company to suddenly announce the departure iCEO Martin Tobias. No reason has been given (or ferreted out by reporters). Tobias, a veteran of Ignition Capital and dotcom-era company Loudeye, was replaced by John Plaza, the company’s founder. We spotted one small clue that the company didn’t plan ahead for the departure: It still lists Tobias as its CEO.

The grand plan for solar in 2050 — Scientific American has a sprawling feature piece on the potential future of solar energy in the United States. A few soundbites: 69 percent of all electricity in the US could be supplied by solar by 2050. For this, a new DC (direct current) transmission network may need to be built; both photovoltaics and solar thermal will need to be used; and finally, the government may need to subsidize more than $400 billion of construction to get such a network off the ground.

German companies prove renewable energy can stand alone — Researchers at the University of Kassel teamed with several German power companies to study the potential of renewable energy sources — hydro, solar, wind and others — to power an entire country. A grid of 36 plants was connected to show, in miniature, that such sources can effectively work together. Now the problem for Germany (and other companies) is scaling the output to meet demand. Much more detail on the study is available at Biopact.

Ethos will produce its ethanol in South America — An ethanol production company backed by venture capitalists in the United States plans to head south to make its margins. Ethos, a Cambridge, Mass. company, is considering both Latin America and the Carribean for establishing biofuel facilities, and plans to use sugar as its feedstock, according to VentureWire. The company is funded by Khosla Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures.

Power from roadways to heat and cool buildings — A Dutch company called Ooms Avenhorn Holding has worked out a method of piping water underneath roads, which tend to get hot from the sun, then storing it in caverns to warm buildings in cooler months — in effect, turning roads into a low-efficiency but very cheap solar thermal generator. The system, which uses a lattice of pipes beneath asphalt, can also be used to de-ice roads. More details at the San Jose Mercury.

Tesla’s new CEO sends open letter to customers — Ze’ev Drori, the new CEO at Tesla Motors, sent an open letter to customers over the holidays via the company blog. Not everything in the letter is reassuring: Drori admits that, due to Tesla’s production strategy, “We don’t yet know when each car will be built or how many cars will be completed in calendar year 2008.” Drori’s predecessor, Martin Eberhard, was likely forced out due to internal disagreements centering around delays in production. Tesla also recently announced that it would be using a less-effective transmission for its initial production run. [Update: The company says this transmission will be used for only a portion of the initial production. See below]

A secretive Seattle geothermal technology company called Altarock Energy has raised $4 million in a first round of venture backing from high-profile Silicon Valley investors, the latest in dash by investors to tap into the earth’s heat to generate electricity.

Geothermal has been largely overlooked as a source of alternative energy in recent years, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and so has become the latest darling of investors looking for areas not over-invested.

If 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over, according to that study. It is clean, quiet and is so abundant, it meet the world’s annual needs some 250,000 times over (see a summary of the MIT report by AP. For perspective, the study said, an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.

Several other companies are active in the area. Geopower Basel of Switzerland and an Australian firm are reportedly seeking to generate power commercially by boiling water on the rocks three miles underground. The water rises as steam, and drives a turbine to generate electricity. Chevron Corp. has used power plants in West Java, Indonesia for more than a decade and yesterday said it would expand production in that country by 110 megawatts. Last month, another company, Vancouver’s Western GeoPower Corp. raised $18.4 million to advance its geothermal efforts.

Meanwhile, Altarock isn’t saying much publicly, but is being led by Susan Petty (left), a consultant at Black Moutain Technology. It is backed by two well-known Silicon Valley venture firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures, both of which have focused strongly on alternative energy lately. GreatPoint Ventures also participated, according to a report first published by PE Wire.

Samir Kaul of Khosla Ventures, Joseph Lacob of Kleiner Perkins and Aaron Mandell of GreatPoint Ventures will join the board, according to a separate report by VentureWire (subscription only), citing a regulatory filing. VentureWire also mentions another geothermal company, Vulcan Power Co., of Bend, Ore., which received $35 million from Merrill Lynch Commodity Partners in April — the first stage of a $150 million total investment in an effort to generate up to 2,000 megawatts annually.