Last week we reported on the $130 million round of funding for Bloom, the decade-old fuel cell firm that has drawn down more than $1.1 billion in venture capital funding. (Also see last month's detailed update on the fuel cell industry.) A panel at a recent SVLG Summit had Xilinx's Matt Jorgensen presenting on his company's positive experience with a 1-megawatt Bloom Box installation. We'll get you more details on that case study shortly.

On the other hand, Bloom Energy had $101 million in pro forma Q3 2012 revenue alone. And Bloom suggests it will turn a profit, according to Dan Primack of Fortune. Bloom's valuation dwarfs the collective market cap of the public fuel cell firms and its

Jeff St. John: April 18, 2013. Facebook has just taken a bit of internal data center energy efficiency wizardry and made it available to the world. On Thursday, it opened access to the minute-by-minute power use effectiveness (PUE) and water use effectiveness

California leads the nation in green policies and programs, from its decades-long battle to keep per-capita energy consumption flat via efficiency (accomplished), to getting one-third of its power from renewable resources (still in the works). It’s also a leader in smart grid, with more than 16 million smart electric and gas meters deployed by its big three investor-owned utilities, and millions more coming from municipal utilities around the state.

Ultra-low power processing gains momentum (or at least money) in 2012. Calxeda just a closed a $55 million funding round for its ARM technology to cut data center power. The Austin, TX-based company will not only help the company scale up but also expand to new markets. “In the time since we first met Calxeda, they have executed exceptionally well, and the market has begun to embrace disruptively power-efficient datacenter architectures,” Clark Jernigan, venture partner at Austin Ventures, one of the new investors, said in a statement. 

More VC funding and controversy for fuel cells Funding Fuel Cells: ACAL Energy and Lilliputian Systems ACAL Energy, a U.K.-based fuel-cell developer, raised $5 million from existing investors. ACAL builds platinum-free or low platinum-content catalysts and PEM fuel cells for applications requiring more than one kilowatt of power. The firm raised $4.8 million in 2008 from CT Investment Partners, Rising Stars Growth Fund, NorthStar Equity Investors, Porton Capital, and Synergis Technologies, along

Bloom Energy, the Silicon Valley fuel cell maker with an estimated $800 million in VC and backers like John Doerr, T.J. Rogers and Colin Powell, is on a short list of green technology startups voted most likely to IPO someday soon, though the company has remained consistently mum on the topic. But what's the value of the San Jose, Calif.-based startup to its investors? The answer depends on who's selling. 

Those Bloom Energy fuel cells that eBay said it will use to power its new data center in Utah? They’ll run on natural gas. Likewise most Bloom Boxes going in these days. But they can run on biogas -- and eBay, like many of the companies turning to fuel cells these days, is paying a premium for its natural gas in order to enable biogas production. This is part of the story of the rise in demand for biogas, a trend highlighted by Pike Research in a new report. The market analysts said biogas, while still “a relatively minor player within the overall bioenergy sector,” reached $17.3 billion in revenue in 2011 and is on course to nearly double that figure by 2022.

Green technology means job growth for Silicon Valley, whether we’re talking about smart grid, solar, energy storage or some form of IT that supports the green industries named above. So says a new report that pegs the Valley’s 2010 “smart grid-related” job count at nearly 17,800, up from 12,560 in 2009 and more than double the number of jobs back in 1995. That growth includes a five-percent increase during the 2008-2010 recession, when California total employment fell nearly eight percent. All in all, it’s a good statistic to bolster the Valley’s claim as the center of greentech innovation and investment — even if some regions, like North Carolina’s Research Triangle, might be nipping at its heels in terms of specialties like smart grid.

Keeping data centers energy-efficient takes quite a bit of data crunching if you’re going to do it right. How to scale up to that big data challenge is an interesting IT challenge in itself. Vigilent says it’s got the solution to tackle the challenge, and just raised its first publicly announced venture round of $6.7 million led by Accel Partners to bring it to broader markets. Vigilent is the new name of long-time data center facility management technology company Federspiel Controls. Since 2004, it has built software to connect with the chillers, air handlers, variable-speed fans, and all the other gear that keeps servers cool enough to do their jobs, as well as the sensors that tell temperature, humidity, wind speed and other key variables.

But can the fuel cell firm survive as subsidies fade? Earlier this week Adobe announced that it had added another 400 kilowatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells to its current fleet of Bloom Boxes. I spoke with Mike Bangs, Adobe's Director of Global Facilities, about the installation. The two 200-kilowatt units installed at the company's San Francisco site are Bloom's next-generation design and put out twice the