The Cleantech Avenger

August 17, 2009 - by the Cleantech Avenger - EEStor, the U.S. coal lobby and a handful of failed cleantech companies: will they Transform or be Terminated by the financial Ice Age? It's... the Cleantech Avenger!

The battle for Earth has ended... but the battle for the cleantech universe has just begun.

Or thusly you may think if you've seen this summer's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (even cleantech superheros deserve a little summer movie fun, after all.)

In the race for cleantech universe domination, there are prone to be casualties. Such as those, of late, detailed below. Clean technology companies are taking body blows. Some have fallen. Others, like EEStor, keep taking hits, but seem as impervious as Optimus Prime.

Blame Starscream taking command of the Decepticons.

Meet me in the lobby

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which represents coal producers and power companies, has been found to have indirectly hired lobbying firm Bonner & Associates, through the PR firm Hawthorn Group, to lobby against recent climate change legislation.

The move backfired. The lobbyists have since admitted to sending fake letters as if they were from nonprofits to lawmakers opposing the legislation, known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which would establish a “cap-and-trade” market for greenhouse gases (see New paper advocates U.S. carbon tax shift and Obama administration could fast track cap-and-trade, RPS in '09).

The trade group is now considering legal action against Bonner, which admitted to sending the forged letters and said it fired the responsible person. At least three other legislators have said they also received the letters.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), is looking to combat the tactic, increasingly being termed astroturfing, where paid lobbying is made to seem like a grassroots effort.

Astroturfing is also being criticized as being behind the shoutdowns at this summer's U.S. town hall meetings on health care reform. But we digress.

 

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs?

The summer’s long, cold economic winter is taking its toll on select California cleantech companies.

Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., groundwater remediation company Basin Water (OTC:BWTR) announced it has declared bankruptcy and is selling its assets to Amplio Filtration Holdings, part of a Canadian capital management consultancy called Amplio Group. While being sold for $2 million, the company acknowledged it had never been profitable.

It intends to keep bleeding money in the short term. “We do not anticipate any significant disruptions to our business,” said Michael Stark, Basin Water’s president and CEO, in a news release announcing the moves.

Even boomtown Silicon Valley isn’t immune to cleantech busts. Mountain View, Calif., fuel cell developer PolyFuel (LON:PYF) said last week it’s closing shop and liquidating assets (see Polyfuel throws in the towel on portable fuel cells). The company was developing portable direct methanol fuel cells, even obtaining a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in April, on top of $3 million the DOE awarded between 2004 and 2007 (see PolyFuel gets balance of grant from DOE).

Do two datapoints a trend make? Perhaps not. Yet, eight months ago Cleantech Group Executive Chairman Nicholas Parker predicted the failure rate of cleantech startups would double this year (see Nine clean technology predictions for 2009).

Let's see if more cleantech companies go the way of the triceratops.

 

A new YouTube paradigm

Terminator's Christian Bale isn't the only one to be haunted by a YouTube recording.

Toronto-based private investment firm Paradigm Capital is mitigating damage after a confidential conference call about a client’s equity offering made a very public, but short debut on YouTube.

The source of the leak hasn’t been identified, and the recording was quickly removed. But an unnamed source quoted by the Toronto Star expects Paradigm is going to get “a very bad kick in the pants” by regulators.

The call featured an interview with Dick Weir, CEO of stealthy energy storage developer EEStor, based in Cedar Park, Texas (see EEStor's Weir on ultracapacitor milestone). Toronto-based electric vehicle maker Zenn Motor plans to incorporate EEStor's ultracapacitors into full-speed electric vehicles starting in 2010 (see Zenn CEO reveals details of EEStor's progress).

Last month, Paradigm co-led a $10 million equity offering used by Zenn to increase its stake in EEStor from 3.8 percent to 10.7 percent (see Zenn raises $8.2M as it takes bigger stake in EEStor).

In a purported transcript of the call, Weir provides new details about EEStor’s ownership structure—including a ~20 percent equity stake by investor Kleiner Perkins—industry relationships, the status of its technology and what it plans to charge Zenn for its energy storage system under an exclusive contract.

Read the supposed transcript and juicy details »

The summer's blockbusters may be waning, but cleantech derring-do and antics are always in season. As always, the Avenger welcomes tips. Send them here.