Green Skeptic Friday LinkFest - 03/04/11

Hugo Peabody (aka Bobby Rydell)

Some important client work and my son's appearance as Hugo Peabody in his high school's production of "Bye Bye Birdie" kept me in Philadelphia this week (ya gotta have priorities), so you didn't see me at TED or ARPA-E or the MIT Energy Conference. Here are some links to stuff I've been tracking this week:

First up, this blog made bschool.com's list of 50 Best Blogs for Green Business Students. 

Next, few DOE and ARPA-E related items:

Elizabeth McGowan at SolveClimate asks Can Obama's Bold Stroke on Cleantech Innovation Survive Budget Cuts?

Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm's Earth2Tech lists 10 Companies to Watch For Out of ARPA-E

CNET's Martin LaMonica suggests ARPA-E a litmus test for energy R&D agenda and then asks Then what?

The best quote I've read from TED 2011: "I"m just going to show you a kidney we printed earlier." (Yes, a human kidney. Printed.) Explore this TED recap from The Guardian: TED 2011 roundup: bionic body parts, self-driving cars and Jamie Oliver

Now on to China:

Energy China Forum suggests China, U.S. should form strategic alliance in clean energy development. 

and Ann Goodman, co-founder and executive director of the Women's Network for a Sustainable Future, writes about How business women are helping push a green agenda in China.  

Closer to home:

The US Fish & Wildlife Service announced the Eastern Cougar Is Declared Extinct, With an Asterisk

A new study tries to explain why Conservatives are much more likely to deny "global warming" than "climate change". 

The Wall Street Journal announced its second annual ranking of The Top 10 Clean-Tech Companies.

And, finally, GoodCompany Ventures announced it is now accepting applications for 2011 Class of Good Companies: Be a GoodCompany.


Have a great weekend, everybody!


(Disclosure: I am on the advisory board of GoodCompany Ventures, a social enterprise accelerator in Philadelphia.)

MIT Energy Conference 2010 - China: The Cradle of New Energy Technology?

One of the best conferences I've been to in a long time was the MIT Energy Conference in March. As I have written on this blog, there was an excellent panel discussion about China's role in the New Energy Economy. Here is a video of the panel (it's an hour or so long, but worth every minute):



Excellent insights from inside and outside China. Thanks MIT!

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MIT Energy Conference Influences National Legislation

A fun note for a Friday: The MIT Energy Conference, which I covered in March here, here, and here was cited by US Senator Jeff Bingaman when he introduced Supply Star Act of 2010, a bill designed to bring about energy-efficiency improvements in supply chains, much like Energy Star has done for appliances.

The Senator indicated that the idea for the bill came from this year's MIT Energy Conference, where he and his staff were particularly influenced by a panel discussion titled, "Supply Chain Energy Use: Exposing Opportunities for Innovation in a Global Economy. (link to video)"

Bingaman specifically mentioned the MIT conference, saying that the hurdles surrounding optimization of supply-chain energy consumption "were discussed in some detail by an expert panel. The hurdles include a lack of information and analysis tools for important parts of far-flung supply chains, which often lie far upstream or downstream (and therefore out of sight) of a particular firm, as well as a lack of leverage with which to drive global suppliers toward more efficient practices."

The bill, Bingaman said, is aimed at helping to address this lack of tools and information.

Kudos to the student organizers of the energy conference for making an impact.

For more information: Student-run MIT Energy Conference influences national legislation

While We Consider, China Constructs

When Duke Energy and ENN Group announced their partnership to accelerate development of low-carbon and clean energy technologies at the Clinton Global Initiative last September, Duke CEO Jim Rogers explained that "We must move at 'China speed' to combat global warming."

"China," Rogers explained, "is leading the world in investing in clean energy and we can make greater progress by joining forces and working together."

This was no less evident today at the MIT Energy Conference, where a distinguished panel shed light on what "China Speed" really means.

It means, according to Dr. Ning Li, Dean of the School of Energy Research at Xiamen University, that China's 2020 target of 30GW of wind capacity will be met by midyear -- that's this year. (They set that target in 2007.)

It means that China's new target for 100GW of nuclear power by 2025 will probably be met in record time as well.

The country currently has 26 new nuclear facilities under construction, compared to around the same number "under consideration" in this country, according to Dr. Andrew Kadak, Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

"Nuclear is now 'Made in China,'" said Dr. Kadak.

While we consider, China constructs.

It means that while we debate about technologies and subsidies and "buy American," the Chinese are "learning and innovating by doing," as Dr. Ning Li titled his remarks on the panel.

It means that a company like Gold Wind can, in just a few short years, go from licensing a German technology to buying the manufacturer to becoming a Top 10 company in its own country.

And it means that when Applied Materials is looking for the best place to site one of its largest R&D facilities, they look to China because of the "synergistic benefits of the largest market for its solar products," as Dr. Hongmei Zhang of ENN Group put it.

Fears of a cleantech race with China are surfacing throughout the US, and some are saying those fears are unfounded.

But, the reality is while we consider, China constructs. They are building the infrastructure of the energy future while we can't seem to get our heads out of the oil sands.

"You should think of China as a stimulating threat rather than a competitive threat," said Dr. Hongmei Zhang, with genuine hope that we might heed her advice.

But, as she also said in her remarks, Americans tend not to listen as well as Chinese.

Indeed, Hongmei noted, "In China, when president Hu says we will do this, we answer, 'yes sir.' In the US, the answer is "says who?"

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