Yesterday, two days after President Obama signed the stimulus bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA) into law, DOE Secretary Steven Chu announced a reorganization of how the Department of Energy will disperse loans, loan guarantees and funding contained therein.

Obviously, the idea is that there will be a disbursement of money to begin investments into the economy which will put Americans back to work and create millions of new jobs. What is good for CleanTechies like you and me is that there’s a leader at the helm Department of Energy that is keen on energy efficiency and renewables because it is the DOE that will be in a position to bring relevant projects to the table. More great news is he’s added ex-McKinsey consultant Matt Rogers to the team, a long time analyst of energy issues and climate change. It is great to have such strong representation from the business community within the DOE.

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A couple of days ago, US energy behemoth Chevron announced it will commit $20 million over five years to a partnership with the Qatar Science and Technology Park in Doha. Lip service and green washing, you might shout.

“Chevron believes that energy efficiency and conservation are the most immediate and cost-effective sources of new energy, and we are proud to work in partnership with Qatar,” Chevron Vice Chairman Peter Robertson said.

Guess what… they really “drink the kool aid.” With oil at $45/bbl, traditional perspectives change: “The crude oil price is around half the level required to attract adequate investment in the industry,” UAE’s oil minister Mohammed al-Hamli said last week. It doesn’t make financial sense to invest in oil exploration, so if you were an energy company in 2009 where would you invest?

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There are all kinds of tax credits and other green incentives in the new economic stimulus bill.

But nonprofits are being left out of the mix. Such organizations are usually ineligible for federal tax incentives for renewable energy projects, according to folks from the National Development Council.

The council, one of the oldest national nonprofit community and economic development organizations in the U.S., aims to change that. The group has secured $1.5 million for a solar installation project at the Gasser Foundation’s base in Napa Valley, Calif.

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It already has to some extent.  I hate to be overly pessimistic, but sometimes you can’t just “make do.”  With the exception of high expectations from the Obama administration, things don’t look particularly great between the news of job cuts from Ausra, SunTech, OptiSolar and the abysmal rate at which new companies (and projects) are getting financed. Since the valley-jarring Sequoia deck slowed down bandwidth throughout the bay area in a display of viral marketing that rivaled anything put together by web 2.0 gurus, valuations have gone down, budgets have gotten stretched, and start-ups with great teams and traction have been told to jog in place.

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MMA Renewable Ventures, employer of one of our Bloggers, announced earlier this morning that it has fully deployed it’s Solar Fund III, contributing nearly $200 million to the creation of new solar energy.

Knowing the team there fairly well, the news doesn’t surprise me given how capable their well respected engineers and development associates are.  What will be more interesting is how quickly, in this current climate, they can raise new funds to take advantage of depressed module prices and further establish themselves as one of the 900 pound gorillas in the world of Solar and Renewable Finance.

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Business Week recently published an article on advice for start-up trying to attract venture capital and it made interesting reading on a couple of fronts.

First of all as I am sure a lot of you are aware the pool of venture funds has got smaller, a lot smaller additionally the opportunity for concept or speculative deals is near enough impossible to fund and finally on the plus side, if a business asks for less (sub 5m) and manages to succeed in a bear market, it has a very good chance of survival.

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In the last few weeks both Shell and BP have pulled out of developing off-shore wind developments in the UK due to better incentives and support from the US government in the form of tax breaks and incentives.

The same is true for Spain where in the last few years the country has been unprecedented growth in wind farms along the majority of the eastern part of the country. Then just as the country was seeing clean and green as a way forward – they remove the tax break for further development. Almost overnight the work stops, new planned sites are abandoned and people are laid off.

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Yesterday Q-Cells reduced their revenue guidance for Q4 by 25%, effectively implying there would be no revenues in December. This is just three weeks after being particularly upbeat during their investor conference call. Certainly the signs were there three weeks ago as well, but according to management, shipments of product (solar cells) were strong through November but in the last couple of weeks business slowed down dramatically.

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Nov. 4th was a great day for progressives as well as community-based energy solutions. Little-noticed ballot Issue 1A in Boulder County, CO, passed by nearly 2:1, marking an historic milestone in the United States’ quest for energy independence/security. Ballot 1A approved $40M in local EE/RE bonds for local residents and businesses who wish to invest in energy efficiency or green energy generation, and is similar to Berkeley’s $80M solar roof bond program.  Bonds are paid back on property taxes-and the obligation stays with the home so repayment is assured even if the house is sold.

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If you made it out to GreenBuild last week, you likely saw San Francisco based Project FROG’s latest product.  Last week the building start‐up announced it had closed an $8MM Series B financing led by RockPort Capital Partners, a leading Boston and San Francisco based CleanTech Venture Capital firm.

That wasn’t all they had to announce though, earlier this week they announced that they will build their first energy-neutral building in New England on Hartford’s Watkinson School. John Bracker, Watkinson’s Head of School, announced, “Not only will the building provide state of the art science classrooms and a hub for Watkinson’s Global Studies Program, but also deliberately provide a location for teachers and students to explore the intersection of these subject areas, specifically environmental studies and ethical action. We believe the building should be as twenty-first century as our educational philosophy.”

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