I had a chance to wander around the Offshore Technology Conference this week and chat about some of the technologies on display. OTC is still heavily a mechanical engineer’s conference. Despite the high tech nature of the industry, in large part vendors are not yet leading customers, and steel still rules the day in technology. [...]
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’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 [...]
It’s Presidential Election year. Ergo, time to discuss our 40 year whacked out excuse for an energy policy. Royally botched up by every President since, umm? Objectives: Make US energy supply cheap for the US consumer and industry, fast growing and profitable for the American energy sector, clean, widely available and reliable, and secure, diversified, [...]
This week’s news: US NRC freezes decisions on new reactor, license renewal applications “The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted unanimously Tuesday not to issue final decisions on granting licenses to build new nuclear power reactors and 20-year license renewals to existing ones, pending resolution of the agency’s waste confidence rule overturned by a court in June. [...]
By Tao Zheng, with David Anthony, an active cleantech venture capitalist, who passed away in April 2012. The sun is the champion of all energy sources, in terms of capacity and environmental impact. The sun provides earth with 120,000 terawatt (TW) energy, compared to technical potential energy capacity of single digit TWs from other renewable sources, [...]
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, [...]
It dawned on me today, that after buying green ecommerce store Greenhome.com 8 months ago, we put up links to the site on CleantechBlog.com, and included special coupons for all our Cleantech Blog readers and Cleantech.org members in the monthly emailings. Here I thought people who were making a living off cleantech might *gasp* care [...]
Last week, I was made aware of an extraordinary essay published by GMO called “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever” written recently by Jeremy Grantham, the legendary investment strategist. I don’t use the word “extraordinary” lightly. The essay is immense in its historical sweep, extensive in its analysis, eye-opening in its implications. To [...]
Sandor Schoichet s a longtime Cleantech Blog reader, and Director of Meridian Management Consultants. Sandor has EE and SM degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT, where he studied artificial intelligence, office automation, and business process reengineering, and completed a joint program in Management of Innovation at the Sloan and Harvard business schools. [...]
Five things I’d like to see in cleantech 2011. A fuel cell in one of my blogger’s houses. This one’s actually in progress, so hopefully it’s a gimme. So come on Marc, we’re waiting for the pictures and the blog! More cleantech IPOs. Come on guys, the market’s been rolling, we ought to be able [...]
by Jason Barkeloo, CEO of Pilus Energy My business partners and I discovered an innovative way to unlock energy stored in carbon compounds. After a little back-slapping and “atta-boys,” we sought to raise the capital to launch a pilot. This led to another discovery; the destructive impact the economic crisis is having upon the capital [...]
I am struggling to find a single function in our society that is not impacted by the electron. The electron is a negatively charged particle that fuels digital work. It makes software work on hardware. It powers motors and manufacturing. It lights our bulbs and amplifies our sound. In my opinion, the electron is the [...]
by Neal Dikeman A few of you may have run across the Solar Bill of Rights Petition that’s floating around the web. I was really excited at the idea, until I read it. For a good environmental conservative like me, I had a lot of trouble swallowing the actual demands, despite the fact that a [...]
By Tom Rooney, CEO SPG Solar Conservatives, let’s talk about energy. And why so many conservatives are so wrong — so liberal, even — on wind and solar energy. Let’s start with a recent editorial from the home of ‘free markets and free people,” the Wall Street Journal. Photovoltaic solar energy, quoth the mavens, is [...]
There is a growing awareness that there are two convergent crises facing the world: Energy and Water. Scientific Amercican just launced a dedicated environmental publication this month, Earth 3.0 and the cover story? … ‘Energy Vs Water’. The article explores the dichotomy between the fact that we need energy to produce water and we need [...]
Those of you that know me know that fighting climate change is an issue near and dear to my heart – and day to day life, since I am currently involved with a start up working on helping to deliver even better transparency and environmental integrity to carbon credits. So as a small government, energy [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi It’s somewhat fashionable to bash the United States in terms of its energy/environmental policies and progress. But, is the rest of the world really that far ahead? This article in Sustainable Facility magazine suggests that maybe Europe isn’t quite as green as it fancies itself to be. Meanwhile, this story points [...]
