Solar panel maker SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA) has chosen California as the location for its
first US manufacturing facility, according to a Reuters story published this week. An unnamed source said the facility will be located near the company’s
headquarters in San Jose. Last September the company said it also was considering locating in Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. But since then, they signed a 200-MW supply deal with Southern California Edison, and the State of California instituted generous incentives for clean energy manufacturing. SunPower currently assembles solar panels in the Philippines, Mexico and China.
Amyris Biotechnologies, a company that genetically modifies microorganisms to produce custom molecules, filed for an initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to $100 million. The company, which spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, primarily works with yeast strains that convert plant sugars into more-desirable substances. Their first product was an anti-malarial drug, but the company’s grand plan is to produce a "drop-in" biofuel that could replace, or be blended with,
gasoline. To date, the company has raised more than $200 million dollars from some well-known venture capital firms, but the company has yet to turn a profit.
Molycorp, the owner of a rare earths mine in California, also filed for an IPO this week, hoping to raise up to $350 million to restart operations, which have been shut down since the 1990s. This is part of a larger story, which has gotten a lot of coverage in the last six months. Rare earths are increasingly in demand for use in clean energy equipment, but the supply is completely dominated by Chinese mines. China has said it will soon begin restricting exports to ensure supply for it domestic manufacturers. As a result, Molycorp is planning to bring its California mine back to full production by the second half of 2012.
Concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) solar company Amonix, Inc. announced
Wednesday that it has raised $129.4 million in Series B financing
led by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. The company previously raised $25 million from Goldman
Sachs (NYSE: GS) and MissionPoint Capital, and also received $15.6 million in
grant funding from the US Department of Energy. Amonix said it will use the new funds to accelerate deployments of its systems and expand manufacturing capacity in Arizona and Nevada.
San Francisco-based solar power developer Recurrent Energy
announced a joint development agreement with BlueWatt to
finance, build, and operate 50 megawatts (MW) of commercial rooftop solar systems in France. BlueWatt will work to acquire major real estate partners in France, and Recurrent Energy will finance, own and operate the systems. Recurrent Energy said it now has a pipeline of over 1GW of distributed-scale solar projects in
development across North America and Europe.
The largest US ethanol producer, Poet, said it expects to
contribute to the production of 3.5 billion gallons of cellulosic
ethanol per year by 2022. CEO Jeff Broin spoke to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on Thursday, and said his company has made enough progress on technology and feedstock development to break
ground on its first commercial-scale cellulosic plant later this year. It will be cited at an existing corn ethanol plant, and it will use corn cobbs as a feedstock for the cellulosic process. The company says it can reach 3.5 billion gallons per year by adding this technology to its 26 existing corn-ethanol plants and licensing the technology to other corn ethanol producers and joint ventures for other feedstocks. 3.5 billion gallons would represent more than 20% of the 16 billion
gallons of cellulosic ethanol
mandated in the Renewable Fuel Standard for the year 2022.
GE (NYSE: GE) announced plans to open a new smart grid technology center
in its home city of Atlanta, Georgia. The center will combine the world headquarters for GE’s Digital Energy
business with
a smart grid engineering laboratory and a
smart grid showcase for the general public and industry customers. The technology center will partner on research with the Georgia Institute of Technology, and it is expected to create 400 jobs over the next three years.
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