Ascent Partners » Financing

Fisker Automotive Closes DOE $528.7M Loan Package

Byron McCann — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:40:21 +0000

Fisker Automotive hits a major milestone on the road to delivering advanced vehicles we can drive and enjoy eco-performance with the official closing of its sizable DOE loan package. The loan along with additional private equity will fund both the launch of the Karma later this year and the development of the next model called “Project NINA”. As oil prices start to creep up again, more attention will be paid to these innovative driving solutions that reduce our dependence on oil and are much more enviro-friendly, without compromising a superb driving experience.

Official Release:
The Department of Energy announced today the closing of a $528.7 million loan with Fisker Automotive for the development and production of two lines of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). The loan will support the Karma, a full-size, four-door sports sedan, and a line of family oriented models being developed under the company’s Project NINA program.

“The story of Fisker is a story of ingenuity of an American company, a commitment to innovation by the U.S. government and the perseverance of the American auto industry,” said Vice President Joe Biden. “The Boxwood Plant is opening again, employing workers in Delaware, and is serving as a roadmap for all we can accomplish if everyone works together. Thanks to real dedication by this Administration, loans from the Department of Energy, the creativity of U.S. companies and the tenacity of great state partners like Delaware – we’re on our way to helping America’s auto industry reclaim its top position in the global market.”

Fisker, a startup based in southern California, expects to manufacture the Karma and Project NINA lines at a recently shuttered General Motors factory in Wilmington, Delaware. Fisker anticipates that it will employ 2,000 American assembly workers. Industry experts expect that domestic parts suppliers and service providers also will increase employment substantially.

“Not only will the Fisker projects contribute to cleaner air and reduced carbon emissions, these plug-in hybrid cars will help put American ingenuity at the forefront of automotive design and production,” said Secretary Chu. “And they will bring innovative cars to the market place while putting American workers back on the job,” Secretary Chu added.

Fisker’s plug-in hybrid products will be among the first to market and will help to accelerate the introduction of fuel-saving electrified vehicles in the U.S. When full production is reached in 2015, Fisker estimates annual sales at up to 115,000 vehicles. Combining Fisker projected sales volume with the expected sales volume of the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S, sales of electric and PHEVs funded with DOE ATVM loans could exceed 300,000 annually.

Initially, Fisker Automotive will use the proceeds of the loan for qualifying engineering integration costs as it works with primarily U.S. suppliers to incorporate components into the Karma’s design. The engineering integration work will be conducted in Irvine, California, where engineers will design tools and equipment and develop manufacturing processes. The Karma is scheduled to appear in showrooms in late 2010. The second stage will involve the purchase and retooling of the former GM plant to manufacture the Project NINA line of PHEVs, which is expected to begin rolling off the assembly line in late 2012.

Fisker automobiles are driven by electric motors that get their power from a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery, or, when that is depleted, by a generator driven by an efficient gas-powered engine. The Karma and Project NINA models will have an all-electric, tailpipe-emission-free range of 40 to 50 miles on a full charge, more than most Americans drive each day. The battery can be charged at home overnight. Using gas and electric power, Fisker plug-in hybrids are expected to have a cruising range of up to 300 miles.

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program supports the development of advanced technology vehicles with improved fuel efficiency that help reduce the nation’s dependence on oil. This is the fourth loan arrangement signed by DOE with an advanced technology vehicle manufacturer.

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EnerNOC Buys Cogent Energy for Energy Efficiency Application

Byron McCann — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:52:14 +0000

EnerNOC, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENOC), a leading provider of clean and intelligent energy solutions, today announced that it has acquired Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx) firm Cogent Energy, Inc. By integrating Cogent Energy’s extensive commissioning and engineering experience into EnerNOC’s MBCx energy efficiency application, EnerNOC will be able to deliver even more value to its rapidly growing customer base.

“We’re excited to combine forces with EnerNOC, helping to enhance the functionality of EnerNOC’s MBCx energy efficiency application and to introduce EnerNOC’s leading product suite to our existing customer base,” said Tom Riley, Co-founder of Cogent Energy, who along with his team, has joined the energy efficiency business unit at EnerNOC.

Cogent Energy’s solutions enable EnerNOC to service smaller facilities with less sophisticated controls systems, which significantly increases the size of the addressable market for EnerNOC’s MBCx energy efficiency application. EnerNOC plans to build on Cogent Energy’s present and past work with more than 200 customers nationwide, including California State University, University of California, the City and County of San Francisco, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the State of California. Cogent Energy’s experienced engineers will leverage their deep energy expertise to enhance the proprietary analytic filters within EnerNOC’s MBCx application that process energy data captured from building management systems and automatically identify, quantify, and track energy savings opportunities.

“The market for MBCx represents a huge growth opportunity for EnerNOC. We’ve already experienced early successes with our in-house built application and established ourselves as a leader in the rapidly evolving MBCx industry,” said Tim Healy, Chairman and CEO of EnerNOC. “Combining Cogent Energy’s expertise with the automated power of MBCx will enable EnerNOC to deliver one of the most powerful energy efficiency offerings in the world.”

“Assisting our clients in their pursuit of operating efficient facilities while helping to promote a sustainable environment is our number one priority,” said Tom Arnold, Vice President of Energy Efficiency and Carbon Management Solutions at EnerNOC. “Cogent Energy has worked with universities, local governments, commercial properties, utilities, and dozens of other industries to extract significant value from energy efficiency investments.”

U.S. May Wind Up Green with Envy – CNBC article

Byron McCann — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:53:03 +0000

Here’s an excerpt of an article from CNBC which gives an idea why without clear, long term energy policy in the U.S., we may fall behind in the global clean tech industry. (Link follows excerpt)

Mark Koba, Senior Editor | 15 Nov 2009 | 06:20 PM ET
Green is not turning into American red, white and blue.
AP

Despite recent advances, the U.S lags far behind other major countries when it comes to clean energy investment and experts say it may never lead, let alone compete on equal terms.

And that’s after some $836 million in green technology deals in 2009—the most ever, according to Greentech Media, and another $8 billion in renewable energy loans budgeted under the Obama administration’s stimulus package.

“We stand to fall farther and farther behind other countries like China and India unless there are fundamental shifts,” says Susan MacCormac, chair of the venture capital and cleantech practices at international tech law firm Morrison & Foerster. “The U.S. should catch up, but odds are low that it will.”

A recent report from Deutsche Bank ranks the U.S. and Canada as two of the worst countries for investing in renewable energy, with Germany, France and China listed as among the best. The report cites a lack of long term and transparent energy polices in the U.S. that would translate into any kind of certainty for investments.

“I think there’s been no long-term vision that’s been executed,” says William Brent, SVP of cleantech practice at Weber Shandwick, an international marketing and communications firm. “The Bush administration pretty much left it (green technology) on the table and Obama’s made some improvements, but there’s no political leadership that you’re seeing in other markets.”

Washington needs to commit to both policy goals and funding levels, says Dr. Fred Murphy of Temple University.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33605819

China Aims Strategically at Clean Tech Industry-a VC’s View

Byron McCann — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:32:22 +0000

With all the talk about the importance of clean tech in addressing economic, employment, security, and climate issues, what are the actions taking place for the U.S.to be a global leader in the rapidly unfolding opportunity? This quote from Patrick Tam, General Partner at Tsing Capital in Beijing, is quite telling in that the U.S. is not necessarily the annointed one unless we move faster than we are:

According to a Time.com report, “Tam…says the government is aggressively helping seed the development of new green-tech industries. An example: 13 of China’s biggest cities will have all-electric bus fleets within five years. ‘China is eventually going to dominate the industry for electric vehicles,’ Tam says, ‘in part because the central government has both the vision and the financial wherewithal to make that happen.’ Tam, a graduate of MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, says he does deals in Beijing rather than Silicon Valley these days ‘because I believe this is where these new industries will really take shape. China’s got the energy, the drive and the market to do it.’ Isn’t that the sort of thing venture capitalists used to say about the U.S.?”

Quite provoking wake up call for more action…

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938671-2,00.html#ixzz0WxAbWqRK

Clean Tech Takes A Lot More Capital

Byron McCann — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:04:59 +0000

Article form the Puget Sound Business Journal by Byron McCann and John Pierce on 11/09/09.

There’s no doubt that the global meltdown has fundamentally altered the prospects for current and long-term economic growth in our region.

Although the region was already somewhat of an outpost for large multinational corporations, the recession has further shrunk the ranks of corporate giants here in the Pacific Northwest. Those that remain face intense pressure just to maintain market share, much less increase it dramatically. Prospects for the meteoric growth we saw in the ’90s are gone.

Luckily, our region (including Oregon and Idaho) is blessed with a new cadre of entrepreneurs, startups and innovative mature businesses that are poised to jump-start an economic rebound that we believe will allow us to create jobs, increase state revenue and pull us out of the trough we’re in.

This industry we’re talking about is clean technology. It’s composed of people and companies developing and commercializing new, renewable, sustainable and “clean” approaches to fuels, electricity, energy efficiency and materials.

While both of us have spent decades investing in and helping launch startup technology companies, we’ve noticed some key differences between the needs of early-stage software and hardware companies and today’s emerging clean technology companies.

While it is certainly a challenge to launch any new venture, the barriers to starting a software or Web 2.0 company today are far lower than they were 10 or even five years ago. The access to open-source code, the wide availability of API’s (application programming interfaces) and the adoption of platform standards enable software and web entrepreneurs to create and deploy new products and services much more quickly and inexpensively than before.

In addition, promotion and distribution has never been easier. The ubiquity of the web allows customers to directly download applications to PCs, phones and other digital devices. The popularity of social media virtually erases the need for capital for advertising or promotional campaigns. We don’t mean to trivialize it, but it doesn’t take much to launch a web service these days.

Conversely, clean technology startups face more daunting and complex challenges — almost diametrically opposite those of their web peers.

First, the research and development needed to create new forms of energy is exponentially more costly and time consuming. Then, even if you can get an innovation to work in the lab, it’s extraordinarily complex to scale it to the level needed to perform at utility or commercial levels.

In addition, there are significant regulatory, safety and policy issues that must be addressed before certification. Finally, the capital costs of developing new industrial scale energy products are in the billions of dollars.

In short, creating a new form of renewable energy is much different than coding a downloadable app for an iPhone (although I’m sure we wish it could be that simple).

That’s why more than two dozen business leaders in the Pacific Northwest came together to launch the region’s first Clean Tech Open (CTO) competition. The CTO is far more than a typical business plan competition. Rather, it’s a community of nearly 100 volunteers from across the spectrum of venture capital, legal, science, environment, policy — you name it. These business leaders committed time and resources to help clean technology entrepreneurs create or evolve business models to support their clean technology idea, raise money, find strategic partnerships and launch a business.

On Oct. 29, the journey culminated in the first Pacific Northwest Clean Tech Open awards gala in Seattle, where three companies out of an initial pool of 56 were awarded nearly $50,000 in cash and in-kind services each. These three companies will go on to compete in the national competition.

Even those that were not named finalists emerged from the process with a refined business model, practice in presenting to funders, and a leg up on the competition for venture capital.

A vibrant clean technology industry in our region increases venture capital, job creation, income, tax base and GDP at a time when we need high growth in order to rise out of the recession. Traditional industry alone won’t be able to do it big enough or fast enough.

BYRON MCCANN is a founding partner at Ascent Partners Group, a Seattle-based investment bank advising technology entrepreneurs. He can be reached at 206.626.6340. JOHN PIERCE is a member in Seattle of the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati law firm, where he is a leader of the firm’s energy and clean technology practice and can be reached at 206.883.2500. McCann and Pierce are co-chairs of the Pacific Northwest Clean Tech Open.