Energy storage is still the rage in cleantech. But after the collapse of A123 and Beacon, and the spectacular failure on the Fisker Karma in its Consumer Reports tests, fire in Hawaii with Xtreme Power’s lead acid grid storage system and with NGK’s sodium sulphur system, and now battery problems grounding the Boeing Dreamliners, investors [...]
I am selling my little Honda in California, since I moved to Texas two years ago, I left a car in San Francisco to drive when I’m here. So I’d been looking into getting car share. Absolutely loving the concept, been trying to figure out if it is a better deal for me than renting [...]
Great article today on a study suggesting that traffic congestion is created by the marginal driver, and more interesting, from the marginal driver from specific and predictable locations. Maybe 1% of commuters leaving from specific neighborhoods have a big increase on traffic congestion and commute time for everyone. The link to the study is here. We dealt [...]
I drafted this memo in early 2003 for a venture capitalist friend of mine, well before the bubble in cleantech. In light of the back and forth on the recent Solar City IPO, I thought it was worth revisiting. Some of the points were pretty prescient, calling out many of the challenges cleantech investors and [...]
Our firm, Kachan & Co., has just published its latest annual set of predictions for the cleantech sector for the year ahead. To our analysis, 2013 is shaping up to be something of a year of backtracking for the cleantech industry, a year that calls into question some of its traditional leading indicators of health, and [...]
The phrase “Black Swan” was coined in the book of the same name by author Nassim Taleb to describe an event that is hugely important and influential that was not anticipated but yet in retrospect could have been. September 11, 2001 is a classic example of a Black Swan. It was only a failure of [...]
It’s been a busy, ummm interesting year. We’ve tracked profits to founders and investors of $14 Billion in major global IPOs on US exchanges and $9 Billion in major global M&A exits from venture backed cleantech companies in the last 7-10 years. Money is being made. A lot of money. But wow, not where you’d [...]
Earlier this month, I turned 50 years old. Such milestones are natural occasions for reflection. Beyond recalling many of the phases and individual episodes of my life, my reflection included a consideration of how the world had changed in the 50 years in which I had lived. And, naturally, given my profession, I pondered what it would have [...]
I’ve personally written hundreds of articles over the years. I selected a few I thought were pretty timeless or prescient, and worth rereading: What is Cleantech? Always a good starting point: or try, The Seminal List of Cleantech Definitions The “Rules” in Cleantech Investing – Rereading this one after the cleantech exits study we [...]
When people ask me, are investors making money in cleantech, I tell them yes, but not by whom or in what you thought they were. Most of the analyses of cleantech exits do not differentiate for venture backed companies. So we conducted our own study. In the last 10 years, Cleantech.org’s Cleantech Venture Backed M&A [...]
By David Niebauer In the early part of the 20th Century physicists theorized that a mysterious force held the nucleus of an atom together. When it was demonstrated that this force could be tapped, releasing tremendous amounts of energy, a wave of excitement swept the scientific world. It took only a few short years before [...]
We all know energy is global, and as much policy driven as technology driven. We have a quote, in energy, there are no disruptive technologies, just disruptive policies and economic shocks that make some technologies look disruptive after the fact. In reality, there is disruptive technology in energy, it just takes a long long time. [...]
One of my friends, John Moore. the CEO of Acorn Energy (NASDAQ:ACFN), recently sold off their rapidly growing CoaLogix investment for a quick return. I caught up with John to get the story. So John, who the hell is Acorn Energy anyways? Acorn Energy (NASDAQ:ACFN) is the Sun Studios of the energy sector. We have [...]
Yup. Solyndra’s going BK. Taking with it US government loans to the tune of $10 for every taxpaying household in the country and $500K or so for every job it created for one year. But seriously, raise your hand if you DIDN’T see this coming. Like, OK, those with their hand’s raised, you are no [...]
Last night while watching Office reruns, I realized I’d been remiss, and a lot’s had been happening in the public equities end of the cleantech sector. Not to mention yesterday’s billion dollar BK broiler announcement by the one-time Next Greatest Thing, Solyndra. So, with my usual aplomb, I thought I’d simply peanut gallery what’s “Hot or [...]
If there’s really a significant gulf, as onetime marketer Geoffrey Moore put it, between selling to early adopters and the majority of technology buyers, what does this mean for companies in cleantech? The chasm model holds that there’s a big difference between what companies need to do to effectively sell technology products to early adopters [...]
By Neal Dikeman I had a chance to chat today with Dr. Charlie Gay, the President of Applied Material’s solar division. You may recall, we broke the story in the blogosphere 5 years ago about Applied’s entry into solar, which was anchored with a highly touted and very aggressive strategy for turnkey large format amorphous [...]
Energy is life, the rest runs on it. Since the 70s through every presidential administration and every Congress, we have had an energy policy that boiled down to fighting the cold war through oil and getting lucky on locally sourced coal and gas. It’s not a zero planning energy policy, we’ve spent money, defined policies, [...]
Large scale energy has proven almost as elusive a Yeti, and perhaps almost as all world saving juicy as the silver bullet for the werewolf or the Holy Grail itself (and not the Monty Python kind). Energy storage for nearly 15 years has been the energy tech and cleantech version of the ultimate “but-if”. I.E., [...]
The Economist had an article in a recent issue about the “anthropocene” period, our new geologic era, where mankind is the dominant force in the geology of the planet. A period where our agriculture, cities, dams, etc literally have and will permanently change the face of the earth itself, forever. The article suggests that we [...]
