Pegasus Capital also joined in the deal, as well as existing backers Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Asenqua Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, 3i, Vanguard Ventures, Chevron, Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, NGEN Partners, and the Angeleno Group.

The funding round brings Konarka's total private and venture funding to $105 million.

Unlike traditional solar modules, which use glass as a base, Lowell, Massachusetts-based Konarka prints or coats its solar cells onto flexible plastic substrates. The photo-reactive material, Power Plastic, is lightweight, flexible, and relatively inexpensive, according to the company. It also converts indoor light as well as direct sunlight into energy.

Konarka is researching a variety of applications for the material, including rollable laptop and cell phone battery chargers, photovoltaic fabrics, and roofing materials. The company was founded in 2001. The United States Army originally funded research into polymer-based photovoltaic cells in 2000.

The round, which was led by Expansion Capital Partners and completed Monday, is the New York City-based company’s first since it launched in 2000 with more than $300,000 in angel funding.

“We [had] not raised another penny because we’ve been pretty consistently cash-flow positive,” said Mike Gordon, ConsumerPowerline’s president and acting chief executive.

The bulk of those revenues have come from the company’s core business, demand-response, a transaction in which large energy users reduce their energy consumption during impending power outages and sell that power, dubbed “negawatts,” back to utilities and other energy companies at peak electricity rates.

Demand-response is an increasingly competitive space. EnerNoc and Comverge, both of which went public this year, are also in the business, estimated by Mr. Gordon to soon be a $2 billion market in the United States alone. Despite the competition, there’s still a lot of elbow room. Mr. Gordon estimates, for example, the combined annual revenues for the three companies come to “shy of $100 million.”

ConsumerPowerline currently is involved in helping sell 200 megawatts of negawatts a year, according to Mr. Gordon, and that volume is expected to increase.

“The growth has been very rapid,” Mr. Gordon said. “It’s been a good solid 40 percent per year. We expect that to be ramped up further with this investment.”

The infusion will be used to expand the reach of the company’s demand-response business into New England; and states such as Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; and California.

ConsumerPowerline also plans to use the funds to bulk up its energy efficiency and renewable energy services, which operate on a similar model but are distinct from demand response.

“There are entirely new markets that are opening up around efficiency and renewables,” Mr. Gordon said. “Ultimately, demand response is not the biggest of those markets.” The entire market for energy management services, he estimates, is upwards of $17 billion in the U.S.

Much of that depends, in part, on regulations requiring power suppliers to buy from renewable sources or to adopt or otherwise support energy efficiency measures.

ConsumerPowerline’s efficiency services will focus on the market in New York, where sellers of power will be required to buy energy efficiency certificates sometime in the next year, Mr. Gordon said.

In June, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company bought FuelCellStore.com, a small online retailer of fuel cell kits and components. On Thursday, Ecotality said it would acquire Innergy Power Corporation, a solar panel and rechargeable lead-battery maker, for $3 million cash and stock.

San Diego, California-based Innergy, founded in 1989, makes thin, lightweight rechargeable batteries and solar modules for use in emergencies or outdoor recreation. The company is profitable and has a factory in Tijuana, Mexico, according to Ecotality.

The acquisition was expected to close in October, a spokesperson for Ecotality said.

For Ecotality, a public company that trades over-the-counter and aims to commercialize early-to-mid-stage renewable energy technologies, the buyout signals a move into the energy storage and solar markets.

Founded in 1999 as Alchemy Enterprises, a marketer of cleaning chemicals, Ecotality changed its name and focus last year. The company is developing a machine that makes hydrogen from magnesium and water for use in fuel cells, in conjunction with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, according to a company spokesperson.

Ecotality said it hopes to make use of Innergy’s Tijuana factory for its fuel cell product business. It paid nearly $540,000 for FuelCellStore.com, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

DAG Ventures is leading the round, joined by existing backers, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and TPG Ventures, the company said.

The Emeryville, California-based company has closed more than half of the expected $70 million and expects to complete the round by the end of the year, according to Ena Cratsenburg, VP of Business Development. If completed, the round would bring Amyris’ total funding to $90 million.

The funding will be used to commercialize and scale up production of the startup’s hydrocarbon biofuels, with the aim of bringing biodiesel to the market in 2010, Ms. Cratsenburg said.

The company is also working to develop a low-cost production process for a hydrocarbon gasoline substitute, or blended fuel, and a hydrocarbon bio-jet fuel.

Amyris inserts genes from several different organisms into microbes, altering their metabolic pathways and enabling them to produce useful compounds, according to the company’s web site. They do so through a fermentation process using sugar as a feedstock, according to the company.

Altering the metabolic pathways “allows us to take feedstocks and produce whatever molecules we want to produce that’s within the class of compounds that can be made through our engineered pathways …including hydrocarbon-based molecules that we think would make great transportation fuels,  ” Ms. Cratsenburg said.

Hydrocarbon biofuels are distinct from ethanol, which is alcohol-based. Amyris said its biofuels could be used in regular engines, are compatible with the existing fuel distribution infrastructure, and could be made in retrofitted ethanol plants.

The technology, which is still in the laboratory, is based on a microbe-based fermentation process Amyris is developing to more cheaply manufacture artemisinin, an anti-malarial compound.

Its partners in that endeavor are University of California, Berkeley and the Institute for OneWorld Health, a San Francisco-based non-profit drug company that landed a $42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2004.

The analysis, which was commissioned by the European Energy Venture Fair to take place this weekend in Zurich, looked at returns earned by 37 venture capital and private equity investors in 129 early stage companies dealing in low-carbon technologies such as renewable energy, fuel cells, power storage since 1998.

Of the 129 Europe-based portfolio companies that participated in the overall analysis, 15 IPO’d and 10 were sold to trade buyers, the research group said. Twenty-one companies raised more money with subsequent funding rounds.

At the same time, nearly an equal number of companies, 19, had been “written down” or raised smaller, subsequent funding rounds.

Over the same 10-year period, the 37 investors plowed €283.6 million ($396.1 million) into the portfolio companies and earned exit returns of 1.4-times funds invested. For non-exit companies, returns were 1.2-times total funds invested, according to New Energy Finance.

The 129 companies included in the analysis comprise about half of the clean energy companies in Europe and Israel, including non-European Union members, according to New Energy Finance.

The group included private equity investment in public companies by VC firms in its analysis. But it excluded buyouts, project financing by private equity investors, and general over-the-counter investment, said New Energy Finance CEO Michael Liebreich.

Energy management firm EnerNOC said Monday it had acquired energy procurement service provider MDEnergy for $7.9 million in cash and stock, the latest deal in an industry that has seen increased consolidation in recent months.

The deal marks EnerNOC’s first acquisition since its $97.5 million IPO in May. It also represents the Boston, Massachusetts-based company’s first foray into the energy procurement arena, in which businesses buy electricity more cheaply from competitive commodity suppliers, lowering their costs.

MDEnergy uses an online auction bidding system, now re-named EnerNOC Exchange, to enable some 400 customers to buy electricity at a lower cost than they would be able to through regular channels, said EnerNOC CEO and Chairman Tim Healy.

“The two companies are offering different services to different customers,” said Mr. Healy. “Now we can cross-sell.”

The acquisition, which closed on Friday, was comprised of 40 percent cash and 60 percent EnerNOC common stock, said Mr. Healy. Stamford, Connecticut-based MDEnergy could also receive up to $3 million in performance-based payments next year, depending on 2007 revenues, he said.

EnerNOC helps companies track their energy use in real-time and to reduce their electricity consumption, especially at peak times, or emergencies, when demand is highest. That service, known as demand-response, enables companies to reduce their electricity bills and helps utilities avoid blackouts, according to the company.

Now EnerNOC hopes to tap its 600-odd commercial and industrial customers to contract for low-cost electricity from the suppliers MDEnergy has cultivated, Mr. Healy said. It also wants to sell its demand-response services to MDEnergy’s customer base.

Both companies are active in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions, although EnerNOC has also branched out into Florida, California, and the Southwest. MDEnergy works with “all of the most obvious and all of the largest [suppliers] in the Northeast,” Mr. Healy said, although he wouldn’t disclose how many or which ones.  

Customers include data centers, hospitals, grocery store chains, office buildings, factories, and universities, he said.

The acquisition comes on the heels of energy management rival Comverge’s buyout of Enerwise Global Technologies in July. Meanwhile, online energy auction specialist World Energy bought EnergyGateway, a natural gas and electricity brokerage company in June.

EnerNOC itself was an active acquirer prior to its IPO. In 2005 it bought Pinpoint Power, a supplier of demand-response power in New England, and in May of 2006, it purchased Seattle-based Celerity Energy Partners for $3 million, Mr. Healy said.

MREnergy, a company that was founded in 2001 with capital from private investors and 10 employees, is its second technology acquisition. With its purchase of eBid in February 2006, EnerNOC acquired the technology it now uses to track electricity usage in real-time, according to Mr. Healy.

The two-seat Roadster, due out this year, has certainly raised the profile of all-electric cars to transform what was once the terrain of smug  savers of the Earth to something now remotely sexy.

Some mainstream environmental organizations have thrown their weight behind plug-in electric cars–of all shapes and sizes, not just hotrods–as an answer to America’s driving addiction rather than biofuels, which critics say are less environmentally desirable and require a lot of vegetation and energy to produce and transport.

But plugging electric vehicles into the grid to charge up or feed back electricity is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Utilities such as PG&E know they must eventually figure out how to do it without frying the system, causing blackouts, or worse.

“For it to actually be implemented there would have to be a very sophisticated communications system in place,” PG&E representative Jennifer Zerwer said. Developing a way for vehicles to “communicate” with the grid “presents the opportunity to turn each vehicle into a remotely controlled electricity storage system,” she said.

PG&E’s ideal would be to charge the cars at night when hydro, wind, and nuclear power are more prevalent in the energy mix than natural gas-generated power and to have the cars feed back power to the grid during the day at peak hours, Ms. Zerwer said.

The current project, slated to get underway in the fourth quarter, focuses on controlling when the cars would suck power from the grid so that they aren’t all powering up at once or at peak hours, presumably. PG&E would not disclose how much money they will commit to the project.

Although the company demonstrated that it could plug in a converted Toyota Prius last spring, it has only recently started working with makers of all-electric vehicles. PG&E had worked previously with Tesla on the installation of the Roadster’s charging station at homes and businesses, according to Ms. Zerwer.

The company also plans to research vehicle-to-grid connections with Ontario, California-based Phoenix Motorcars’ all-electric SUV, scheduled to be on the road next year, she said.

DFJ, also a backer of solar system finance startup, San Mateo's Tioga Energy, seems to be banking on anticipated pickup in the market for solar services (installing, operating, and financing solar energy systems).

Now that Chinese solar companies have hit the big-time, making conventional panels cheaper and more abundant, the hard part is getting them up on rooftops and making it easy for convenience-loving Americans.

But it was a less ostentatious money-making prospect that inspired him to launch Finavera Renewables, a Vancouver-based startup that sees a business opportunity in producing electricity from wind and ocean waves. Unlike gold, whose price can be extremely volatile, electricity generated by wind mills and offshore wave farms is a commodity whose future is always bright, argues CEO Mr. Bak.

“Electricity only gets more expensive,” he said. “It never gets cheaper. It’s a commodity that’s always growing in price.”

Finavera’s approach is to use wind projects to generate revenue, while the company works to develop its wave energy technology, according to Mr. Bak.

That fledgling technology took a couple of baby steps last week a few miles off the coast of Newport Beach, Oregon, where Finavera put the latest version of its wave energy converter device, dubbed AquaBuOY, into the Pacific.

The device floats atop the ocean and uses rubber hose-pumps to convert the vertical motion of the waves into pressurized seawater. That pressurized seawater, in turn, powers the turbines that drive an electrical generator. Previous versions, according to Mr. Bak, used metal rods, which were more costly and more trouble to maintain.

This stepping stone “allows us to prove the concept,” said Mr. Bak. “The next step is simply increasing the power output of our technology [which would] reduce our unit cost of energy.” AquaBuOY generates a maximum of 250 kilowatts at any instant in time, he said.

Finavera Renewables -- which was formed when Mr. Bak’s original company, Dublin, Ireland-based Finavera, split into two entities in 2005 -- raised capital on the TSX Venture Exchange, where it listed in January. The other company is natural gas firm, Finavera Gas.

Finavera’s system is moored, rather than mounted, to the ocean floor. That simple feature means less red tape and fewer headaches, as regulations for seafloor-mounted installations can be complicated, the company said.

Next year the company plans to develop and test the third-generation of AquaBuOY and, by 2009, it hopes to put four of the devices in the water and connect them to the grid via an undersea transmission line, Mr. Bak said.

In addition to the Newport Beach test site, Finavera has a demonstration site in Makah Bay, Washington, and is developing projects in Coos County, Oregon; Figueira da Foz, Portugal; Ucluelet, Canada; and South Africa.

Finavera, however, is further along in building wind projects, including a 20-megawatt wind farm in Germany that is scheduled to go online this fall and a 150-megawatt wind project in Canada that it expects to finish in 2009, Mr. Bak said.

Named after an ancient Indo-European goddess of the dawn, Palo Alto, California-based Ausra is a solar thermal technology company that, unlike many of its rivals, touts a means to produce electricity from sunlight that requires less fuss than conventional methods and could lower the cost of generating utility-scale power.

“You’d be mad to build a gas plant or a coal plant when there are technologies like this around,” said CEO Peter Le Lièvre, who helped form the company late last year. Solar thermal power plants capture heat from sunlight and use it to generate electricity.

Ausra uses relatively inexpensive 40-foot-long flat plate mirrors–called Fresnel reflectors–to concentrate the sun’s rays directly on water pipes, boiling the water to run steam turbines, which, in turn, generate electricity, according to a company representative.

The system, which the company says has the potential to generate electricity for two-thirds the cost of its competitors, has attracted more than $40 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ausra said Monday.

Concentrated solar power plants generally use trough-like structures whose curved mirrors focus sunlight onto tubes of oil. The heat from the oil is then used to create steam and to drive the electricity-generating turbine. But the mirrors must be precisely shaped and mounted on sun-tracking devices, requirements that make them more costly to make and repair, according to Ausra’s executive vice president, John O’Donnell.

Ausra says its system can bring down the cost of solar power-generated electricity to be competitive with conventionally generated electricity. Ausra’s Freshnel reflectors are flat, unlike the curved, finely tuned mirrors of the traditional trough design, according to the company.

“It’s a mindset that’s much more like Toyota than like NASA,” Mr. O’Donnell said.

Ausra also directly heats water to generate steam, rather than first heating oil to generate heat. But the system is less efficient at converting solar energy to electricity than trough systems because it generates lower-temperature steam, Mr. O'Donnell said.

Ausra was originally founded in 2002 as Solar Heat and Power in Australia by David Mills, who originated the technology in the early 1990s at Sydney University, and Graham Morrison, who helped him develop it from 1995 to 2001.

Solar Heat and Power built a one-megawatt pilot project in Australia for Macquarie Generation in New South Wales in 2004. The company, which changed its name to Ausra and moved to the United States in February, is also working on a second 38-megawatt capacity power plant it expects to have finished by 2009.

The company plans to build a 180-megawatt power plant at an undisclosed United States location, and is beginning construction on a 6.5-megawatt plant in Portugal, according to Messrs. Le Lièvre and O’Donnell. The company also plans to open offices in California, Colorado, and Arizona and to double its staff to 100 by the end of the year, they said.

“You’ll see us in action from coast to coast,” Mr. Le Lièvre said.

While energy generation technologies and startups continued to attract the lion's share of North American and European VC funds in the second quarter, investors increasingly turned to newer and less developed sectors, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based research group said.

VCs pumped $34.5 million into advanced materials in the second quarter, almost triple the amount invested in the first quarter. Investment in transportation more than doubled to $81.8 million in the same period, while the recycling and waste segment rose six-fold to more than $100 million.

In total, venture investment in North America and Europe rose to just under $1 billion in the second quarter, a 10 percent increase over the first quarter. Energy generation continued to lead all other sectors, pulling in $535 million, up 8 per cent over the first quarter of the year.

Some 60 out of 77 second-quarter deals included in the analysis were closed in North America, which absorbed $843 million in cleantech venture investment during the same period.

While that figure reflected a 15 percent increase over the previous quarter, it was on par with investment in second quarter of 2006, according to the Cleantech Network.

European investment fared less well. Second quarter investment in European cleantech totaled $154 million, a decline of more than 40 percent compared with the same period last year, and down 11 percent compared with the first quarter. Quarter-to-quarter, Canadian investment was also down to $12 million in Q2, about one-fourth that of the first quarter investment.

On the public markets, however, the cleantech sector saw 17 IPOs in the second quarter in North America and Europe, nearly double the number in the previous quarter, raising almost $1.7 billion, the Cleantech Network said.

Tioga's new backer was Nth Power, a spokesman for the company said. San Mateo, California-based Tioga launched in June with about $10 million, backed by NGEN Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and RockPort Capital. DFJ Frontier and Kirlan Ventures also joined in the round. 

Tioga also recently brought on board Michael Jolley, former project manager of Chevron Energy Solutions, as VP of project management. The company now has about 15 employees, but it has not yet announced any specific deals or projects, the spokesman said.

The company’s strategy is based on long-term power purchase agreements with commercial, government, and nonprofit entities for solar generated electricity. According to the business model, Tioga will be responsible for building, operating, and maintaining the solar power installations.

China’s energy czar, Chen Deming, said on Tuesday that China needs $265 billion in investments to meet its renewable energy goals by 2020, according to the English-language China Daily.

The private sector, including state-owned companies, will likely foot most of the bill to reach China’s goal of generating 15 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources within 13 years, according to the National Development and Reform Commission’s (NRDC) plan. Beijing and local governments will contribute only about one-fifth of that total investment, Mr. Chen said.

Mr. Chen promised tax incentives and subsidies to help companies switch to more sustainable forms of energy, the China Daily said. But Mr. Chen also sketched out specific requirements, such as renewable energy investment quotas for large, state-owned enterprises and the installation of solar power equipment in real estate development projects, according to the China Daily.

China is roughly halfway to its renewable energy goal, official sources said. It currently generates eight percent of its energy from renewable sources, which include hydropower. Critics, however, charge that large-scale hydropower projects are likely to make up a good proportion of China’s long-term renewable mix, despite their damaging impacts on the environment.

In the near future, China expects its hydropower capacity to dwarf that of wind, biomass, or solar power. By 2020, China aims to build 300 million kilowatts of installed hydropower capacity, compared with 30 million kilowatts capacity for wind and 1.8 million kilowatts capacity for solar, Xinhua News Agency reported.

The NRDC plan also calls for developing biogas as a main fuel source for China’s 300 million farmers and using renewable energy to connect remote regions to the grid.

On Wednesday Wuhan-based solar thermal equipment maker Linuo Solar Energy Company’s stock jumped 10 percent while Ronghua Industrial Group and Xiangtan Electric Manufacturing Group rose about five percent and two percent respectively, Xinhua reported.

A little less than half of the amount will be used to launch SolFocus Europe, the new Madrid-based subsidiary, while the remainder will go to the parent company as a second funding round. New Enterprise Associates was joined in the deal by Moser Baer India, Metasystem Group, NGEN Partners, Yellowstone Capital, David Gelbaum, and other investors, the company said. The infusion brings SolFocus’ total funding to date to $84 million.  

Europe has the “infrastructure and an employee talent base that has a lot of knowledge about solar,” said VP of Marketing Nancy Hartsoch. “In the U.S., there’s a limited amount of people that have a solar background because the business is not as developed here.” A possible second closing at the end of the month could bring the total amount of the infusion to $70 million, she said.

The Mountain View, California-based startup has taken aggressive steps in recent months to secure a foothold in Europe, particularly in Spain, which currently has one of the most attractive incentive programs in the world for solar energy.

Earlier this summer, SolFocus bought Madrid-based Inspira, a maker of devices that, by tracking the sun in two directions, can get up to 40 percent more power from conventional silicon-based panels over the course of a day in sunny climes than conventional trackers, Ms. Hartsoch said.

SolFocus is also at work on a 500-kilowatt installation of concentrated photovoltaic system for the Institute of Concentration Photovoltaic Systems program in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, the company said.

Solar concentration systems, which use optics to focus sunlight on photovoltaic cells, are the core of SolFocus’s technology, but they are only suitable for areas with a lot of intense sunlight, for example the Mojave Desert.

The company is also developing solar thermal technology, which creates steam heat from solar energy for industrial applications like food processing, agriculture, and oil removal, according to Ms. Hartsoch.

SolFocus Europe will focus on developing products using the parent company’s solar thermal technology and commercializing its tracker technology both for commercial, industrial, and power field conventional, silicon-based photovoltaic systems as well as for concentrator photovoltaic systems for the European market, Ms. Hartsoch said.

Parent company SolFocus expects to earn 60 percent of its sales worldwide from the European market next year, she said.

The annual report, released Thursday, takes stock of venture capital and private equity investment in clean energy in 2006 and the first half of this year. It documents continued off-the-charts growth for the ever-popular sector, with overall venture and private equity investment in the sector leaping 67 percent to $18.1 billion in 2006.

But clean energy venture capitalists invested only 73 percent of the total money available to them in 2006, leaving some $2 billion in their pockets, according to the London-based group.

“Our sense is that the supply/demand imbalance has gotten a little stronger this year than in the past, said Ethan Zindler, an analyst with New Energy Finance. “If you roll back the clock 18 months, you did not as often hear the complaint from VCs that they were having trouble finding opportunities.”

That’s not to say opportunities are lacking. Quite to the contrary, as the report shows.

The group found that the ranks of venture capital and private equity investors in clean energy technologies, firms, and projects have swelled nearly 30 percent since last year to more than 1,800. Meanwhile, more than 190 funds invested exclusively in cleantech, clean energy, or renewable power, according to the research firm.

Private equity drove much of that investment, particularly in biofuels in the U.S., Mr. Zindler said. And the U.S. saw stepped up investment, sucking up much of the $7.1 billion private equity and venture capital invested in North and South America in 2006, 83 percent more than in 2005.

This year, as Brazilian ethanol companies soak up more funds, “the focus might shift a little farther south,” Mr. Zindler said. Overall investment also grew 62 percent to $9.2 billion in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and 26 percent in Asia and Oceania to $1.8 billion, the report found.

The 57-page report encompasses everything from traditional VC-style investment in early stage technologies to private equity investments in pre-IPO, more mature firms and stakes in publicly listed companies.

Of the $18.1 billion invested in 2006, $8.6 billion funded companies while $9.5 billion financed projects, New Energy Finance said. Only $1.6 billion of that went toward traditional VC deals, nearly 80 percent of it to U.S.-based firms. Thin-film and non-polysilicon technologies absorbed the lion’s share, $428 million, followed by second generation biofuels technology, at $235 million.

Five of the top 10 investment firms, in terms of the number of disclosed deals, were located in California, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures, and Goldman Sachs, according to the report.

But, in dollars invested, 3i, Irish firm NTR, and the U.K.-based Ecofin topped the list, having poured $263 million, $178 million, and $158 million, respectively, into clean energy technologies and firms, New Energy Finance found.