Clean Tech Roundup: New Funding for SolarReserve, SoloPower, Poet

(MoneyWatch)  [Via StrategyEye]: SolarReserve, a heliostatic solar thermal provider based in Santa Monica, Calif., has raised $140 million in a second funding round by Citi Alternative Investments, Sustainable Development Investments, Good Energies, US Renewables Group, PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund, Nimes Capital and Credit Suisse. SolarReserve says it will use the funding to finance solar thermal plants across the world, which will range from 30 to 500 megawatts each for a total of 5 gigawatts. SolarReserve's technology uses mirrors, called heliostats, to focus sunlight on a receiver where it heats salt to over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. The white-hot salt is eventually pumped into a steam generator to produce electricity.

SoloPower, which makes copper-indium-galium-selenide (CIGS) "thin film" solar cells, has raised $200 million from a group of mystery donors. SoloPower says the money will be used to finance a new factory with a production capacity of 100 megawatts per year. Thin film technology is considered cutting edge in photovoltaic cost reduction. According to StretegyEye Cleantech, a report by Greentech Media and the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development predicts that thin-film cells could make up more than 40 percent of the market for solar photovoltaics by 2012. And the thin film industry has seen a recent spate of investment, including Nanosolar receiving $300 million, AVA Solar receiving $140 million, Sulfurcell Solartechnik raising $134 million and OptiSolar reportedly drawing down $210 million.

Accenture's report on biofuels says that ethanol and other biofuels could make up from between 10 and 15 percent of the world's fuel mix within two decades, provided that distribution and infrastructure problems can be overcome. The Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Iowa Power Fund Board must have read the report, as they recently ponied-up a total of $20 million for the cellulosic ethanol firm, Poet Energy, to build a refinery in Emmetsburg, Iowa. (The company last year got a $80 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.) Cellulosic ethanol is a second generation ethanol technology that makes fuel not from food sources, such as corn kernels, but from other organic feedstock such as inedible corn silk, corn cobs, switch grass and wood chips, so it should have less impact on food prices.

India will not be left behind Iowa on cellulosic ethanol, however. The Indian government yesterday mandated that by 2017 the country's gasoline and diesel must consist of 20 percent biofuel "derived from non-food sources." That beats the European Union, which last week decided to uphold a mandate for 5 percent biofuel in gasoline and diesel by 2015, raising that to comparatively measly 10 percent by 2020, with no more than 4 percent coming from food-derived biofuel.