“The Geopolitics of Energy”: that was the title of a talk given at the Opportunity Crudes conference in Houston last week by Guy Caruso of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It’s an endlessly fascinating and urgent topic, as very few sectors of the economy shape the world in which we live as much [...]
Last week, I attended a breakfast hosted by the Michigan Venture Capital Association, at which the President of the National Venture Capital Association, Mark Heesen, made some comments and fielded Q&A about the state of the U.S. venture capital sector. Mark presented a mixed picture. On the one hand, the VC industry is clearly contracting: [...]
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that cleantech, in large part, is actually materials tech. “Nanotechnology” has some vogue as a term, but fundamentally nanotech is materials technology, and materials technology is broader than nanotech (altering materials at a molecular or atomic scale). Materials are at the core of most of the required innovations to help solve [...]
With the Solyndra debacle and other bankruptcies (e.g., Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt), and a 65% decline in the MAC Global Solar Energy Index (SUNIDX), 2011 was a bad year for the solar industry. Now into 2012, the hits just keep on coming. Last week, the long-time solar energy poster-child First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) announced it was closing its [...]
At the foot of the Flatirons along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, Boulder is one beautiful town. With the University of Colorado and the region’s unparalleled outdoor activities, Boulder attracts many intellectual environmentalists. Of course, like everyone else, this set of people needs to make a buck to pay the bills – there [...]
In late January, a significant solar storm unleashed enormous amounts of energy into space. Here on Earth, warnings were issued that the bursts of solar radiation could significantly affect a lot of the things that we 21st Century humans take for granted, such as telecommunications, air travel, and power grid stability. Alas, in the event, [...]
The consulting firm Deloitte recently released a report entitled “Every Company Is An Energy Company (And If It Isn’t, It Will Be Soon)”. The main message is that, with increasing energy prices, it will be imperative for every company to consider how to reduce energy consumption in its buildings and its shipping/fleet, as well as [...]
On March 1 in Chicago, I attended the Clean Energy Challenge, a business plan competition among energy tech ventures from the Midwest, convened by the Clean Energy Trust. With $250,000 of prizes sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Challenge was the culmination of several weeks of screening and coaching of over 100 ventures from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, [...]
It’s virtually impossible (for me, at least) to understand or keep track of the organization of the U.S. Department of Energy. And so, when I encountered the booth at the recent Energy Innovation Summit (as reported last week) for the generic-sounding DOE group called “Office of Science”, I had to stop and ask to find out [...]
Last week, many of the leading minds of the cleantech world congregated in suburban Washington DC for the 2012 Energy Innovation Summit. The Summit is mainly oriented as a showcase of some of the most interesting and promising technologies that have surfaced directly or indirectly as a result of ARPA-E: the Advanced Research Project Agency [...]
Innovation in the cleantech arena often entails combining inarguable facts in strange ways. Consider these apparently-unrelated truths: Much of the developing world lacks access to electricity. Fertility rates in the developing world are typically much higher than in the developed world. There are few things with more untapped energy than a young child. Children around the world [...]
On January 18, BP (NYSE: BP) released Energy Outlook 2030, its official corporate view of the future of energy. Every year, BP releases its Statistical Review of World Energy that serves as an excellent compendium of historical and current data on a host of energy-related issues, but rarely does BP present its projections of trends [...]
In most of the discussions about anthropogenic (i.e., human-influenced) climate change, the concept of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is usually short-handed to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In fact, humans are responsible for emissions of many other pollutants that contribute to climate change, and while these emissions are sometimes converted into “CO2-equivalents” to make discussions simpler, it’s [...]
The USA Today recently ran an uncommonly in-depth article about the massive efforts to clean-up the decommissioned and horribly contaminated Hanford nuclear site in rural Washington state. A relic of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, Hanford was the primary site for the production and refinement of plutonium (atomic symbol Pu) for the U.S. arsenal of [...]
The Water Innovations Alliance (WIA) recently completed an assessment of the state of the U.S. water infrastructure, which was given an overall grade of D- by the American Society of Civil Engineers in its most recent infrastructure report card. Underlying that nearly failing grade, the WIA produced some startling statistics in a recent newsletter (not yet posted to [...]
I don’t know exactly when “green” became the de facto official color of environmentalism, but it dates back at least to the 1970s, when European political parties rooted in ardent environmental positions took the name “Green”. But, as Paul Markille noted in The Economist‘s excellent annual round-up of speculations for the new year — “The World [...]
One of the world’s largest banks, London-based HSBC (NYSE: HBC) issued last September a very interesting research report entitled “Sizing the Climate Economy”. At less than 60 pages, it’s an excellent read for those interested in the future growth of the advanced energy economy. There are really too many highlights to capture all of them in this [...]
It’s that time again: sifting through the detritus of a calendar year to sum up what’s happened over the past 12 months. Everybody’s doing it — for news, sports, movies, books, notable deaths…and now even for cleantech: here’s the scoop from MIT’s Technology Review, and here’s a post on GigaOM. So, my turn [drum roll, please], here’s [...]
For the uninitiated, “nanotechnology” refers to the science of the very small, engineering particles and their corresponding materials at the nanometer scale. For a sense of perspective, at one-billionth of a meter, a nanometer is about 1/60,000 of the width of a human hair, so we’re talking engineering not just at the microscopic scale, but the [...]
