AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its fifth annual GoingGreen Silicon Valley Top 200 Private Companies competition. We are looking for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in green technology. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors: 

It's December, and time for an annual reading of the green [tech industry] tea leaves. What will the new year have in store for cleantech?

From our standpoint at Kachan & Co., 2011 could be a strong year for the global clean technology sector. Seemingly, the markets have been correcting themselves in 2010; valuations are returning to rational P/E multiples, price signals are emerging again after massive government investment in cleantech, early stage deals seem to be returning, corporate investment is flowing, new funds are being announced everywhere. Outside the U.S., which is having an increasingly hard time supporting the sector, cleantech is alive and well, even in exits... albeit mostly in China.

Alphabet Energy is commercializing a breakthrough, inexpensive waste heat recovery technology developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its revolutionary thermoelectric approach and materials platform is the only of its kind that lends itself to massive scale at low cost. With these products, made entirely from sustainable materials, customers may use their waste heat to generate electrical power in the range of microwatts to megawatts. Alphabet's thermoelectric materials can be used to turn heat directly into electricity.

Mango Materials produces bio-based, biodegradable plastics that are cheap and green. This new startup company is staffed by a first-class team of engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and innovators. The Mango Materials process converts a "waste" material that is routinely released into the atmosphere into valuable PHA pellets. These pellets are used in a variety of high-margin or high-volume, eco-friendly plastic products, such as children's toys, electronic casings, water bottles, and food-packaging containers.

Ether2 is in the business of designing, manufacturing, selling, and licensing technology for ubiquitous network communications. This remarkable (layer 2) switching technology eliminates the need for complicated routers, switches, and middle hardware, whose job it is to create an asynchronous network on top of a synchronous network.

Automsoft is one of the world's premier providers of advanced data historian and process optimization solutions that provide international customers with powerful and secure high-speed data retrieval, vast storage capacity, complex analysis, and sophisticated visualization. Founded in 1997, Automsoft has a global customer base of thousands of installations across a range of industry sectors including power and utilities, renewable energy, maritime, manufacturing, life sciences, and oil and gas.

Its CEO received an accolade last week. Yet, with 7,000 vehicles and more than 400,000 members, car sharing service Zipcar has struggled to reach profitability.

A slump in average revenue per member over the last year and mounting fleet costs spelled a net loss for Zipcar of $4.67 million in 2009. And according to recent company filings, it's now losing $4M-$5M a quarter with no guarantee of achieving profitability in 2010 or even 2011 … a familiar story from another large recent clean transportation IPO: Tesla.

LiveFuels is developing an integrated approach to growing, harvesting, and processing algal biomass into fuels and other valuable co-products. The company's solution uses the productivity of natural aquatic life to fundamentally resolve challenges of cost, risk, and scalability. Using natural systems to keep costs low. While many algae-to-biofuels companies grow monocultures of algae-sometimes genetically modified strains-within expensive enclosures, LiveFuels grows a robust mix of native algae species in low-cost, open-water systems.

Mendel Biotechnology operates as a plant biotechnology company. The company focuses on developing genetic and chemical solutions for a range of agricultural markets. It offers biofuel feedstocks, yield enhancement, flowering, drought tolerance, freezing tolerance, disease resistance, nutrient use efficiency, and cold germination products. The company has strategic partnerships with Monsanto Corporation, BP, and Bayer CropScience.