Week in Renewables: Risky IPOs, Solar Gasoline and the Nuclear Renaissance

(MoneyWatch)  Will electric car companies, as the Economist suggusts, repeat the beginning of the internet era, in which Netscape triumphantly held a massive IPO? Tesla Motors' upcoming IPO, along with the rise of cleantech as an alternative to the traditional world of energy, suggests parallels.

But if the comparison is welcome for one reason -- the huge cash reserves and investor payback Netscape enjoyed -- it's unwelcome for another. Rob Day, a venture capitalist with a column, points out that a set of four cleantech companies who either recently held or are preparing their IPOs are underweight in terms of revenue, but carry massive private investments with them.

Nevertheless, there seems to be an opportunity with investors, and the expectation of boom times ahead. Electric cars have had little chance to prove their viability on the market (another unfornate internet-bubble parallel), but the solar industry, to take a slightly different example, may double over just the next year.

And if the IPO market doesn't take off for cleantech in the United States, there's little doubt that it will in China, where China Huaneng, a massive wind power company, has just made a filing underwritten Goldman Sachs, among others. China's activity in renewables, in fact, is fostering a healthy competitive urge toward job creation through cleantech at home in the U.S.

As always, I've broken out the more industry-specific news below:

Transportation In addition to the commentary on electric cars above, there were a couple of notable deals. In one, the Chinese company BYD (in which Warren Buffet is invested) has reportedly supplied 100 of its first-run electric vehicles to a cab company in Shenzhen. However, Autoblog Green also points out that there are some unpleasant rumors about BYD's build quality floating about.

Toyota's recall of its popular Prius model is spreading worries that the hybrid market could be damaged by bad press. Also, Israel's Haaretz points out the downsides to the battery-exchanging company Better Place, which is going ahead with construction in the country; and the all-electric Nissan Leaf gets pretty good reviews.

Solar Recurrent Energy has signed on with Southern California Edison to supply it another 50 megawatts of power from small solar plants scattered around the area. Such deals are becoming more common as utilities and solar companies work out the details of financing and placement to make small-scale solar profitable.

There's an interesting new technology in town, too: a startup called Sundrop Fuels is planning to make synthetic gasoline from sunlight. When I first wrote about the company a couple years ago they were planning to produce hydrogen; that likely hasn't changed, as hydrogen can be further processed to produce a variety of fuels.

Also, it's not quite news, but the Green Patent Blog has more details on the technology that eSolar, a solar thermal company (the type that produces power with focused mirrors, not solar panels) is licensing out for its massive two gigawatt project in China.

Nuclear As slow-moving an industry as nuclear power is, I rarely have reason to give it a section of its own. But the industry is coming to life in the bustle to secure new energy sources for the future.

There's a boom on in uranium mining, for starters. Much of it is taking place in out-of-the-way places -- the Central African Republic, Kazakhstan, and Niger being just a few. Still, there's worry that supplies could run short once the U.S. and Russia run out of nuclear missiles to decommission.

Much of the demand run-up is due to nuclear plants being built in developing countries like China and India. So there's also a danger to developed-world companies like Areva and General Electric: new competitors have sprung up, and actually have building underway, while Western firms have historically struggled to build new plants. (In just one example of developing-world synergy, China's Guangdong Nuclear is now cooperating with Ukraine's Energoatom.)

That also puts a new twist on reports like this one, which claim, as has been done many times before, that new nuclear plans will be sucker-punched by cost overruns. In large part these overruns are due to lack of practice at building new plants. The newer generation of companies, though, may soon have exactly the right experience.

Everything else As I mentioned last week, job growth in the U.S. wind industry has proven something of a disappointment so far. The L.A. Times has a longer article on the same phenomenon.

The estate of Dr. Seuss is suing a clean coal company for using the name Lorax, an environmentally-friendly character from the famous children's author's books. And Google, another oddly-named character (and company) announced its latest round of research awards, this time including computing energy efficiency.

Finally, a geothermal power company called Vulcan Power picked up $108 million in venture capital for its dream of feeding power from Nevada to California, providing a welcome lift to an industry that has been suffering a bad PR moment since Altarock failed its first drill hole.