Yellowstone, and catching up

Work and work-related travel have made it difficult to post lately, so here's a laundry list of recent items of note:

• Houston's Yellowstone Capital Partners, a private equity firm with broad interests across several industries, announced the final close of their $10M Yellowstone Energy Ventures Fund. They also announced six investments made to date, including Protonex Technology Corp (fuel cells -- see previous mentions here and here), Fideris Inc. (fuel cell-related testing equipment), and Solaris Nanosciences (solar-related advanced materials).

• Following up on the previous post on the Energy Venture Fair in Boston, here's Bob Bellamare's take.

• Following up on their previous discussion of the impacts of Katrina on clean energy markets, Red Herring has put up a more thorough discussion here.

• While we're on the topic of solar, SunPower has priced their IPO.

• If this is true, it should be pretty entertaining. Start working on your elevator pitch now... And forget about an NDA.
  

• Last, but certainly not least, the ever-knowledgeable Joel Makower has put up a couple of very interesting posts lately. First of all, here's his discussion of the San Francisco city government's efforts to help promote a clean energy cluster in the area (take note, Matt) [update: see Gavin Newsom and William K. Reilly's announcement here]. Secondly, he discusses a recent report put out by REN21 that concludes that global investments in renewable energy reached $30B in 2004. That number seems a bit high given other data points out there, and as an investor I can't draw necessarily positive conclusions from Joel's inference that this remains an industry with more investment dollars than revenue dollars coming in the door. But it's certainly worth checking out.

The NREL Industry Growth Forum is in the bay area this week -- I look forward to seeing folks there.