Battle of the States Begins: Arizona Wants Solar Business

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Arizona wants to be the “solar-energy hub of the world,” Kristin Mays, chair of the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state, said at the Intersolar North America conference in San Francisco this week. The state last week enacted a law that offers new incentives, including a tax credit of up to 10 [...]

Solar Still a Draw: Intersolar North America Attracts Double the Visitors

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More than 17,000 solar industry insiders are gathering in San Francisco this week for the annual Intersolar North America conference. Conference organizers say the event is bigger this year, attracting more than double the attendees as the inaugural event last year – when the industry saw the solar-technology market grow 80 percent, with 5.5 gigawatts [...]

Saying It With Solar: eSolar's Independence Day Display

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Solar is already a source of power. Now some hope solar projects’ striking appearance can also make them a powerful marketing tool. For the Fourth of July, concentrating solar-thermal startup eSolar programmed a quarter square mile of mirrors in Lancaster, Calif., to form the American flag and the Statue of Liberty. The point? To celebrate [...]

VCs Expect Slow Recovery, But Cleantech Remains a Bright Spot

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While cleantech investment appears to be on the rebound, it’s clear the recession isn’t over yet. Mark Jensen, managing partner for the venture capital services group at Deloitte & Touche, said Wednesday that about half of the largest venture-capital firms expect to reduce their overall investments in the next few years in response to the [...]

Cleantech Group: Solar Startups See Venture Capital Fall in 2Q

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Solar venture investments hit a three-year low in the second quarter, the Cleantech Group said Wednesday. According to Brian Fan, senior director of research for the group, solar startups in North America, Europe, China and India raised a total of only $113.8 million for the quarter, which is down 7 percent from $365.7 million in [...]

Can the U.S. Government Be an Effective Cleantech VC?

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As stimulus funding leads some industry insiders to think of Washington as “the new Wall Street” for green energy, some investment experts say they’re concerned about the government’s new role. “I worry about the government as a dealmaker in this space,” said Tom Bratkovitch, director of LP Capital Advisors, a consulting firm for private-equity investors, [...]

GE to Cleantech Startups: We Can Help

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Cleantech startups have stopped seeing GE as an adversary and have started realizing the company can help them make a difference, Kevin Skillern, a managing director at GE Energy Financial Services, said in a keynote speech at a Thomson Reuters conference called “Financing the Cleantech Vision” in Palo Alto on Wednesday. In spite of the [...]

Green Jobs: So Attractive, So Few, So Far

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The prospect of green jobs has proven very attractive to Californian job seekers. According to a survey released this week by the Vote Solar Initiative, a solar advocacy group, more than 5,400 people are participating in solar job training programs this year in the state. “It is clear that Californians of different economic and educational [...]