Glitnir Bank of Iceland has extended a $20M loan to Nevada Geothermal to help ease the cash crunch in the preconstruction phase of the Blue Mountain project. Upon entering the construction phase, the previously announced $100M loan from Morgan Stanley will be used to repay the bridge loan from Glitnir. The near-term financing should help the project move along into the construction phase.

Glitnir Bank and Geysir Green Energy have jointly invested $18M through a combination shares and warrants. Western Geothermal has been working to raise funds to build its 25MW plant on the site of old PG&E Unit 15 at the Geysers and further develop its Canadian project at South Meager. The $90M price tag on the Geysers project means there is still a significant sum of money to be raised, likely through debt financing like Nevada Geopower arranged with Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley extended a $100M loan to Nevada Geothermal to construct the Faulkner I project at Blue Mountain, Nevada. This comes on the heels of a 20 year duration power purchase agreement that Nevada Geothermal entered into with Nevada Power. In addition to building the plant infrastructure and more drilling, a 20 mile transmission line will need to be completed to bring the power to the grid. Nevada Geothermal projects the plant to be online in 2009.

With over 150 delivery trucks (lorries if you prefer,) McDonalds consumes over 6 million litres of diesel fuel each year. That many people have been asking the restaurant (and others) for their used cooking oil has not gone unnoticed and as a result, McDonalds UK plans to use a mix of 85% recycled cooking oil and 15% rafeseed oil to power their fleet.

At the beginning of this month, a subset of 50 trucks was converted to run on the bio fuel and the full fleet should be converted shortly. From a financial perspective, this is great news for the company as they could realize savings of up to $12M per year in fuel costs and potentially have excess fuel to resell providing even more bottom line boost. Reuters published an interesting writeup on this earlier in the month.

Another case where recycling and smart ecological thought translates to positive cashflow.

Last week at the Renewable Energy Financing Forum there were some great data points given about the level of investment in renewable energy and clean tech. The rate of growth and the sheer amount of investment are overwhelming:

• 2006, the total venture investment was $2.4B – of that amount, $1B was invested for “steel in ground” projects
• 2007, Q1, the total venture investment was $0.9B – a run rate of $3.6B for the year
• 2006, mergers and acquisitions totaled $41B
• 2007, year-to-date, mergers and acquisitions totaled $43B
• 2006, initial public offerings raised $7.3B
• 2007, year-to-date, initial public offerings totaled $2.2B – it’s worth noting another $5.5B in value has filed for 2007 though has not yet been offered.

The numbers are staggering, particularly when one considers that the total venture investment in this space was a mere $400M in 2003. The source for this data generally is New Energy Finance.