Tubular solar startup Solyndra piled on more sales contracts and today announced a $320 million deal with Carlisle Energy Services, a newly formed division of Carlisle Construction Materials. The deal is for 100 megawatts of panels over five years. Carlisle will work with an independent solar integrator to sell and install the cylindrical thin-film solar panels in conjunction with its Energy Star-certified, cool roof systems for commercial buildings.

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Lilliputian Systems Inc. will expand its Wilmington, Mass., power systems manufacturing plant and add 100 clean tech jobs, Gov. Deval Patrick announced Wednesday.

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Wind Energy Corp., a startup developing a small, vertically spinning wind turbine, has raised about $6 million from private investors since launching a year and a half ago, CEO Jim Fugitte told Greentech Media this week.

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We were pretty sure that the news that solar thermal startup Ausra had raised $25 million back in August, wasn’t the full story — Ausra Executive VP Robert Morgan had said that the company was looking to raise a round closer to $50 million for its Series C. Well, this afternoon Ausra says that it has closed a round of $60.6 million. The round includes Al Gore’s investment fund Generation Investment Management, as well as KERN Partners, Starfish Ventures and founding investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures.

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As wind farm developments have soared in the U.S., turbine makers are finding they can barely keep up. Northern Power Systems said its parent company, Wind Power Holdings, has completed a $37 million round of financing to boost its turbine manufacturing business, led by RockPort Capital Partners and Allen & Company.

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RoofRay, a sort of online clearinghouse for solar that we wrote about in August, launched an embeddable widget (see below) for web sites on Monday. RoofRay creator Chris Bura tells us that a widget was a commonly-requested feature from users and he created the widget to “take solar viral.”

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There are 1,700 operating landfills in the U.S., and according to the the EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program, they contain enough natural gas to produce 2,643 megawatts of electricity. As part of its previously announced goal of developing 60 landfill gas-to-energy (LFGTE) projects by 2012, Waste Management, one of the largest landfill operators in the country, said today it plans to partner with private and municipal landfill owners to tap those trash-based resources.

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Japanese consumer electronics maker and solar giant Sharp plans to boost its thin film manufacturing capacity six fold. The company is still working on reaching its goal of 1 gigawatt of production capacity by 2010 but Toshishige Hamano, a vice president in Sharp’s solar-battery division, told reporters today that as early as 2014 that number could jump to 6 gigawatts. Hamano, speaking at the opening of Sharp’s new thin-film production line at its Katsuragi Plant, added that Sharp is aiming for a 50 percent market share in thin-film solar by 2012.

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eSolar, the startup that says it’s using computing and algorithms to produce low-cost solar thermal gear, says it has signed a commercial contract with Sundrop Fuels, a young solar startup backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. eSolar, which was recently backed by $130 million in funding from Google, Idealab and Oak Investment Partners, is supplying the Colorado-based Sundrop with its heliostat and suntracking technology in a “multi-million dollar deal;” Sundrop will use the technology in a “process heat application.”

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SkyFuel’s VP of business development, Christopher Huntington, compares his solar startup’s strategy to the tortoise, in the old tortoise and the hare story. He says while many young solar thermal startups are racing to rush next-generation, unproven technologies to market, SkyFuel is working on dramatically lowering the cost of an established solar-thermal technology that’s been used for decades: trough-shaped solar concentrators.

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