The renewable energy business is kind of odd. On the one hand, there is a large established and entrenched infrastructure on both the electricity and the transportation sides served by giant companies with huge profits. On the other hand, there is something of a gold rush mentality of entreprenuers setting up Silicon Valley like startups ranging from new technology to acquisition of “old world” assets to “operations” companies.

The easiest bits to get a grip on are established players (like Florida Power and Light) who are entering the renewable space aggressively and expect the renewable portion of their portfolio to represent growth and the small technology startup that really does look like a traditional Silicon Valley startup. The other companies, like renewable project developers, are a little tougher for investors to grok.

For example, take a company like Raser Technologies. Raser has expertise in motors and generators, has acquired geothermal leases, has acquired binary technology, and is publicly traded. If one looked only at Raser’s sales and earnings, the valuation of the company would be miniscule. Yet Raser inexplicably has a listed enterprise value of $250M. The right answer seems to be between the enterprise value and a strict earnings valuation.

As Raser develops its properties, it will likely require more funding. Where will that funding come from? Debt or further dilution of equity? That seems to be the gap – developers and operators don’t have access to traditional venture capital. They can gain access to funding through private placement and PIPE offerings, but the market to match funds with these sorts of capital intensive activities is fractured, small, and immature.

So if you’re not a traditional startup aiming for technology breakthrough or an established utility, you’re likely living in that gap. We’d be interested to hear what you’re doing to bridge it.

It is widely rumored that the Carlyle Group and AES have bid to buy Calpine and its $26B in assets. A key asset Calpine holds is the Geysers geothermal power plant complex in Northern California of which Calpine owns 20 of the 22 plants producing around 700MW, or 5.5 gigawatt hours of electricity, enough to power San Francisco each year.

We’ll see if this comes true, Calpine has been in bankruptcy reorganization for some time and has steadily been divesting assets oved the past 18 months.

In March of 2005, Goldman Sachs acquired Zilkha Renewable Energy for an undisclosed purchase price, though it was widely speculated to be in the $500M range. Zilkha then morphed into Horizon Wind Energy, LLC. and was operated as a Goldman company until yesterday.

Energias de Portugal, S.A. (EDP) announced it’s intention to acquire 100% of Horizon in return for $2.15B. The combined EDP/Horizon portfolio will have over 3,800MW of generation by the end of this year and a pipeline of some 9,000MW.

This marks the latest in a series of European acquisitions in the US renewable power market. Earlier this month, AMP Resources was acquired by the Italian electric utility ENEL. It’s clear the large European companies are taking advantage of a window where US utilities are asleep at the switch…

Yesterday, US Geothermal was awarded a 45.5MW power purchase agreement from the Idaho Power Company. This deal largely places the output of the Raft River project for the next 25 years. This can only be described as a large step forward for US Geothermal as they continue to develop the Raft River resource.

Techconnect, an organization connecting technology to the business world, is sponsoring this conference. It looks to have a rich set of participants from the venture and clean technology entrepreneurial communities. If you’re local, this is a good forum to attend. The conference details are available at the event web site.

Cleantech 2007 is a multi-disciplinary and multi-sector conference on global sustainability addressing advancements in traditional technologies, emerging technologies and clean business practices. The mission of Cleantech 2007 is to bring together the entire cleantech ecosystem with the goal of accelerating the flow of technologies from the research phase to the viable market phase. We do this by linking scientists, engineers and researchers with potential business, financial and government partners. The Cleantech ecosystem enables a growing set of knowledge-based technologies, products or services designed to improve operational performance, productivity or efficiency while reducing costs, inputs, energy consumption, waste or pollution.