Heady times in downstream solar panel , to be sure, and that's probably not going away.

That said, there are reasons to expect solar panel   financing in particular will eventually be dominated by a few big players rather than the current somewhat fragmented group. Scale-driven efficiencies can be seen in branding, installer relationships, customer acquisition, and especially in cost of capital.

This latter area is where I'm already seeing a fair amount of separation starting to develop between "winners" and "losers". We've just been through a period where a small handful of investment banks (most prominently, perhaps, US Bancorp) spread around their commitments to rooftop solar panel  financing across a number of solar panel  financing players. But now I'm seeing indications that these banks are starting to gravitate toward a shorter list of rooftop solar panel  financing players, even actively shifting away from others, because of factors like dealflow, quality of contracts, low cost of customer acquisition, etc. The rooftop solar panel  financing players who can't obtain the lowest-cost capital from banks will be at a decided pricing disadvantage, and will be forced to join forces with other financing players, or to be acquired by upstream solar panel  manufacturers looking for access to certain markets, or simply will go away. I think we'll start to see this happen in 2013.

Just remember, when you see solar panel  rooftop financing players start to fall out like this, it's not necessarily a sign of bad health for the entire sector. It's just a sorting out of winners and losers, and the winners will be likely doing quite nicely indeed.

4. Large corporates will continue to play a vital role in keeping cleantech entrepreneurship vibrant -- but there will be a shift from oil / chemicals to consumer products, IT and industrial equipment/controls strategics, in terms of level of activity.

Even as LPs and VCs have (temporarily) fallen out of love with cleantech, large corporates have continued to find these subsectors (again, under a variety of labels) strategically interesting. And over the past few years I feel like I've seen a significant upswing in the seriousness with which large corporates are looking to new energy and resource technologies for topline growth.

This seems poised to continue. Fortune 500ish companies have never been sitting on more cash, and the strategic interest in the cleantech sector broadly-defined hasn't waned much as far as I can tell. But with the emergence of low-cost natural gas in the US and the likelihood of low-cost gas (and to a lesser extent, oil) being readily available going forward, the major corporates that had been the strategic partners of choice seem to have less motivation to search for low-cost inputs. Namely, oil and gas giants, and large chemicals manufacturers.

These are the large partners who had helped some of the capital-intensive plays in cleantech to address the first-project "valley of death" by doing things like JVs where they would provide the capital to put steel in the ground. And while this role likely won't be fully abandoned by them, a) many of them already have a pretty full dance card of startup partnerships by now; and b) low-cost traditional inputs reduces the need to find alternative inputs.

Meanwhile, the data side of cleantech has risen in prominence, and many customers still care about "green". This is attracting renewed interest amongst large players like Google and Facebook and IBM who view data as their bread and butter, and amongst consumer products companies eager to offer their customers green alternatives. In terms of focus and rhetoric it's almost a return to the days of emphasizing "sustainability" such as I used when working with such companies nearly two decades ago (and, btw, which will further drive interest in things like the Cleanweb and sustainable food/agriculture amongst investors),grid tie inverter rather than just low-cost commodities production (such as dominated cleantech over the past decade).

Furthermore, while energy prices are currently low and on the decline, volatility of demand (especially in electricity) isn't going away. In my interactions with corporates in the industrial controls and equipment markets, there's a recognition that automation and optimization around energy will be a crucial complement to controls they already offer for production, quality, and so forth. So companies like Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens are all poised to be important players in 2013, and I already see them getting serious about partnerships with smaller companies. Again, they may not consider it "cleantech" per se, but under whatever label you prefer they're getting serious about it.

5. There will be no significant progress on US federal energy policy.

I plan to write up some observations soon from a couple of trips I made to DC in December to talk with policymakers, pundits, etc. about energy policy. But the short answer is that the White House and Capitol Hill don't have enough bandwidth to take on any major energy legislation effort this year -- pending some kind of unexpected disruptive disaster.

The Fiscal Cliff is taking all the air out of the room currently. And that won't be a quick resolution, even if there's some kind of 11th hour compromise that happens over the next couple of weeks -- there will be a lot of follow-on fights on the budget throughout this coming Congress. To the extent anything else can get done, the White House has already signaled that they care more about Immigration Reform and Gun Control as legislative priorities over Energy and Climate. It's not as if the White House doesn't care about energy policy. But they don't care about energy enough to elevate it over these topics and whatever other crisis-du-jour pops up along the way. Only if there is some kind of major unexpected disruption to energy supply, or some kind of horrific and obvious climate-driven disaster (because apparently even Sandy wasn't enough) will this topic pass the threshold from "yes, we should do something about it when we can" to the "we must do something immediately" category, at least in 2013. And clearly I'm not rooting for something like that to take place, so my hopes for any important happening legislatively are low. At least in terms of forward progress; there's always the chance of some rollback as the White House and Congress horse-trade in favor of higher priorities.

That said, there might be some small rationalization of energy policies that can be helpful on the margin. MLP treatment of renewables,power inverter  for example, and more information-driven (as opposed to dollar-driven) efforts by the DOE to promote clean energy and energy efficiency. These would be good to see.