If I Could Speak at Davos: My Top 5 Reasons Cleantech Is Alive and Well

My colleague who posts as @EY_Cleantech had an interesting tweet this morning. She posited the question, If you could speak at the World Economic Forum on cleantech, what would you say?

Here is my answer.

Cleantech isn't dead. It hasn't crashed, hasn't lost its value, and has only grown more important and necessary.

Here's My Top 5 Reasons Cleantech Is Alive and Well:

1.) China. China is finally acknowledging and stepping up to the plate to address its outrageous pollution problem. China's air and water quality is breaking its ability to make progress. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection estimates it will cost China upwards of $800 billion to clean its air. $800 billion. Beijing alone could cost as much as $163b. And its water doesn't fair much better: seventy percent of the groundwater in the north China plain is unfit for human contact -- not consumption, contact. And only half the water sources for Chinese cities are safe to drink. The Chinese government says it will commit 1.7 trillion yuan ($277 billion) to combat air pollution over the next five years, which is a start, but until then we'll keep seeing scenes like the LED sunrise on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

LED sunrise on Tiananmen Square. Credit: ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images

2.) Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion. This is a cleantech success story. I don't care whether Nest Labs ever considered itself a cleantech company since its founding in 2011. If cleantech is the set of new technologies and business model innovations that help use natural resources more efficiently, effectively, and responsibly, then Nest, which took a ubiquitous, yet poorly designed technology (the thermostat), made it smart and fun to save energy in homes because its cool and easy to use. That is cleantech.

Nest thermostat. Photo: Nest Labs

3.) Solar, distributed solar. I know, solar was a dirty word for some investors, including the American tax payer, who got burned by solar 1.0. But there's a new game in town now that solar panels are cheap and financing distributed solar has become easier thanks to innovators like SolarCity, Sungevity, and the like. Installations are on the rise and investment is pouring back in.

4.) Tesla Model S. Motor Trend Car of the Year. 2014 Detroit News Readers' Choice Award as North American International Auto Show Most Innovative Vehicle. Yes, D-E-T-R-O-I-T News. Tesla recently announced it had sold 6,900 of its Model S in the fourth quarter -- twenty-five percent higher than the previous quarter and roughly twenty percent more than expected. And with work begun on the Model S sedan, which will sell for about half the $69,000 price tag of its big brother, Tesla is in line for growth and more growth. That's for a company with $21b market cap.

Tesla Model S. Photo: SEA

5.) Many more innovations are needed. Energy efficiency, recycling, water use, as well as purity and scarcity, and food are all ripe for cleantech disruptions, innovations, and solutions. There are still plenty of opportunities out there for entrepreneurs, investors, and others to tackle resource scarcity, use, and management. We've only just begun to address the issues our planet faces. And the need for innovative financing to enable these solutions is also going to grow. Call it what you will, "cleantech" is going to be a growth engine for many years to come.

That's what I would say if I could speak about cleantech at Davos.

Terry Cooke on China, Cleantech and US Readiness

Terry Cooke spoke to the Cleantech Alliance Mid-Atlantic last week. I'm hoping to do a more extensive piece or interview with Terry at some point, but for now I wanted to share one of his points from the talk:

"Any CEO working on anything related to cleantech has to be thinking about China. China is the world’s largest market for needed application and deployment and that will not change next month, next year or next decade.

On the investment side, China is investing in absolute terms $2 for every dollar of U.S. private and public investment in cleantech. (Adjusting for the relative size of our economies, this mean China is currently out-investing the U.S. by a six-fold factor).

Technologically, the innovation and trade-flows are increasingly becoming a two-way street (as witnessed by the U.S. federal government’s commitment to a $150 million joint research center with China for jointly-developed and jointly–owned cleantech intellectual property).

As these facts sink in, we will all need to get prepared – at the company level, the regional level, and the national level – to sell our cleantech products and ideas to Chinese organizations."

Terry Cooke is currently a 2010 Public Policy Scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C., researching policy implications of U.S.-China clean energy cooperation/competition. He is the founder of GC3 Strategy, which works with U.S. companies seeking to partner in Greater China. Terry was a Director of the World Economic Forum from 2006-08, responsible for Asian Corporate Partnerships, and a career-member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Commercial Service from 1988-2002.

World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers: Embracing Disruption

The World Economic Forum made its selection of Technology Pioneers for 2010 last month.  The Energy and Environment group is an impressive list:

BioFuelBox BioFuelBox builds, owns and operates modular bio-refineries that recycle brown grease and trap grease and waste water sludge for companies and cities, converting it into premium clean burning fuel for local use. It eliminates the waste streams on site and shares part of the fuel profits with its customers. Steve Perricone, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer www.biofuelbox.com Bloom Energy Bloom Energy aims to change the way the world generates and consumes energy by converting a wide range of renewable and traditional fuels into electricity through a highly efficient electrochemical reaction, rather than combustion. K.R. Sridhar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.bloomenergy.com Boston-Power Boston-Power is pioneering the use of lithium-ion and other materials capable of powering end applications ranging from portable consumer electronic devices to electric vehicles. Christina Lampe-Onnerud, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.boston-power.com Care Electric Energia CARE has designed a turbine system that generates energy from the natural flow of a river, without any alternation of its natural state. It provides fish passage facilities and does not dam the normal flow of materials in the river, conserving the fauna, vegetation and ecosystem. Johann Hoffmann, Founder Epuramat Epuramat’s technology promises to revolutionize waste water treatment. Its Extreme Separator achieves an efficiency of up to 99% in terms of solid/liquid separation of organic and inorganic particles in wastewater and liquids – and it does it in only one treatment step. David Din, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer www.epuramat.com eSolar eSolar aims to become the first solar electricity company to reach parity with the cost of fossil fuel. It hopes to achieve that goal with technology that concentrates the sunlight of mirrors of one square metre to produce steam at centralized towers. Bill Gross, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.esolar.com Lehigh Technologies Lehigh Technologies manufactures very small, micron scale, engineered rubber powders from material derived from scrap tires using a proprietary, cryogenic, grinding technology. These powders are novel materials that are currently used in the manufacture of new tires and other rubber goods. Alan Barton, Chief Executive Officer www.lehightechnologies.com Metabolix Metabolix aims to create a new class of materials that can serve as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. It has developed bio-based and biodegradable plastics using both engineered microbes and engineered bio-energy crops that grow bio-plastic directly inside leaves and stems. Richard P. Eno, President and Chief Executive Officer www.metabolix.com Serious Materials The construction industry is responsible for 52% of C02 emissions worldwide, which is more than automobiles, transportation and industry combined. Serious Materials is tackling the problem with high tech building materials that include super insulating products. Kevin Surace, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.seriousmaterials.com Vihaan Networks Limited (VNL) VNL has developed a solar-powered GSM system specifically for remote and rural areas where people have less than US$ 2 a month to spend on their phone bills. Its base stations, which cost one-quarter of traditional equipment, only require as much energy as a 50-watt light bulb. Rajiv Mehrotra, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer www.vnl.in

The Technology Pioneers program is the World Economic Forum's way of identifying and integrating companies – normally in a start-up phase or in their first rounds of financing – from around the world that are involved in the design and development of new technologies. The innovations of these companies reflect society’s attempts to harness, adapt and use technology to change and improve the way business and society operate.

Each year, hundreds of innovative companies from around the world are nominated, and approximately 30 are recognized as Technology Pioneers in three categories:

1. Biotechnology and Health
2. Energy and Environmental Technologies
3. Information Technologies and New Media.

For more information on the Technology Pioneers, visit the web site or download the brochure.