In “The Clean Revolution: Technologies from the Leading Edge” Joel Makower begins by positing, “When it comes to clean technology, questions far outnumber the answers… clearly, this is not business as usual.”
The twenty-four page report, published in May 2001 by CleanEdge and the Global Business Network (GBN), addressed many of the challenges and benefits posed by clean technology as an emerging business sector that merited close attention.
Now, six years later, the report is as prescient and relevant as ever — perhaps even more so now that the market for clean technology is being called “bigger than the Internet” by the likes of Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.
Make no mistake about it, the relationship between the Internet and clean technology is much more than casual. Anyone familiar with the key players in the dot-com boom (and subsequent bust) will recognize a few names (Vinod Khosla, Elon Musk, Larry and Sergey, etc.) bandied about in wave after wave of clean tech news releases and press reports.
This past January, an article appeared in the New York Times that linked Silicon Valley’s recent employment bonanza to the tremendous increases in clean tech investment.
Several statistics appear to support this conclusion, including an annual report published by the Silicon Valley network Joint Venture, stating that investment in clean technology rose from $34 million in the first quarter of 2006 to $290 million in the third quarter in the Silicon Valley area.
Additionally, a report by the Cleantech Venture Network showed that North American and European venture capital investment in the cleantech category totaled a record $3.6 billion for 2006, representing a 45% increase over 2005 cleantech investment of $2.5 billion and a doubling over 2004 investment of $1.7 billion.
The trend that began well over six years ago appears to be racing towards the proverbial tipping point. Perhaps we really are witnessing a monumental shift in business on par with, if not greater than, the halcyon years of the dot-com era.
Speculators would do well to recall the early years of business 2.0 and the Internet revolution. It wasn’t until 2004 that Google made its disruptive splash into the public market, but it was supported by venture capital, private investment and numerous small acquisitions early on that helped fuel the multi-headed search behemoth we all love and fear today.
Everyone I’ve met with in this space talks strategy — their speculations surgical and scientific. Not everyone’s gunning to be the cleantech Google, some investors are simply looking to do a little good on their way to being bought out. Still others are looking to add a little green to their portfolio — a little flourish of environmental awareness and global goodwill. Some simply enjoy riding along the confluent cutting edge where heavy hitting finance and environmental science meet in the cleantech sector.
Somewhere in between these motives there seems to be a shared, conscious acknowledgement. There’s a lot of room for improvement, a lot of work to be done, a lot of problems to solve if we are to support moderrn society and remain solvent as a civilization. If crisis is another word for opportunity then we may be looking at the greatest investment opportunity in our time, of our time and for our time as we know it.
Who could have predicted that PepsiCo would top the EPA’s list of the 25 largest purchasers of renewable energy certificates? Or that the largest solar power plant in North America would be used to power an Air Force base in the Nevada desert? Or that a source for cleaner, cheaper jet fuel could be found in our nation’s discarded animal fat?
If I were a tech executive or asset manager I would begin by taking a look around my industry’s ills instead of ignoring them. I would look to where markets overlap and ideas seep between disciplines. Who has the capable, closed-loop, common sense solution in your space? Who are your flexible, nuanced innovators? Where are the “low hanging fruit” and leapfrogging, capability-enhancing applications poised and primed for success?
Right now every cleantech conference presentation, hushed hallway hot tip and elevator sales pitch is being heard with open ears and handled with delicate discrimination. Tomorrow’s captains of industry know that in order to remain competitive they are going to have to produce more while consuming less; their businesses will have to do good in order to do well.
Diverse, distributed, robust realtime resource sharing systems will be de rigueur. Carbon will have a price and a market as cleantech IPOs drop like disruptive hammers and a new investment clique is born. It’s go green now or go green with envy later.
Business unusual indeed.
About the Author
Curtiss P. Martin is ScribeMedia.Org’s Cleantech editor. He can be reached at cleantech [at] ScribeMedia [dot] org.
