Clean Tech: Clean Edge Releases Clean Energy Trends 2008

The guys at Clean Edge, a leading research and publishing firm in the clean tech space, have released their 2008 Clean Energy Trends report. They scan the sector for trends and point to "select companies to watch" within those trends.

Joel Makower, Ron Pernick, and Clint Wilder (Pernick and WIlder are authors of last year's Clean Tech Revolution) offer a quick assessment of global clean-energy markets, which they say "are expanding rapidly, with revenues in four benchmark sectors — biofuels, wind power, solar photovoltaics, and fuel cells — up 40 percent from $55 billion in 2006 to $77.3 billion in 2007."

The four sectors are projected to more than triple over the next decade, growing to $254.5 billion by 2017, according to their findings.

One surprising note, in my view, is that the authors don't spend much time on the rapid expansion of solar (especially thin film and thermal) over the past year or point to its rocky start in '08. Maybe that would be stating the obvious.

The full report can be downloaded at: Clean Energy Trends 2008.

Highlights include:

Global production and wholesale pricing of biofuels reached $25.4 billion in 2007 and is projected to hit $81.1 billion by 2017. The global biofuels market last year consisted of more than 13 billion gallons of ethanol and more than 2 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide.

Wind power is expected to expand from $30.1 billion in 2007 to $83.4 billion in 2017. Last year's global wind power installations reached a record 20,000 megawatts (MW), equivalent in size to 20 conventional fossil-fuel power plants.

Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation), which totaled $20.3 billion last year, will more than triple to $74 billion by 2017. Annual installations in 2007 were just shy of 3,000 MW worldwide.

New global investments in energy technologies — including venture capital (VC), project finance, public markets, and research and development — have expanded by 60 percent from $92.6 billion in 2006 to $148.4 billion in 2007, according to research firm and Clean Energy Trends content provider New Energy Finance.

In the U.S., venture capitalists invested $2.7 billion in the clean-energy sector, representing almost 10 percent of total VC activity.

Clean Energy Trends 2008 also outlines five trends poised to make an impact on the markets this year. They describe:

-How small start-ups are powering markets for electric vehicles;
-Sustainable cities are being designed and built from the ground up;
-Overseas players are powering the U.S. wind market boom;
-Geothermal energy is experience a global renaissance as a clean- energy resource;
-New technologies are helping oceangoing ships take a cleaner tack. (Kite sails, anyone?)

"Clean energy has moved from the margins to the mainstream and the proof is in these numbers," said Clean Edge co-founder and principal Ron Pernick. "Amid last year's plummeting housing prices, rising foreclosure rates, and record high oil prices, clean energy continued to provide a bright spot in an otherwise sluggish economy."

Green Day: New York Observer Launches Green Channel

On Monday, Observer.com introduced The Green Channel, a collaboration of Observer.com staff and Columbia University. Here is how they put it:

"More and more these days, you're hearing the word Green. Whether it's Nike introducing a new line of "green" Air Jordans, a band of celebrities and socialites partying to celebrate the opening of a new park on the reclaimed elevated train line known as The High Line, the City Council duking it out over the control of the city's economic waste problem, or Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious initiatives to turn New York into a Green city (congestion pricing!), we've found here at The Observer that on every beat, there is something to say about the new drive to make the city friendlier to the environment.

"Here you'll find in one place all of our reporting on Green New York.

"You'll also find a new online colum by Steve Cohen, who will be writing about the new Green New York that's struggling to emerge in the city's social, political, corporate and cultural scenes.

Over the coming weeks and months, we'll be expanding this channel to incorporate new material, the product of work going on in our newsroom and in Columbia's dozens of programs and research institutes devoted to the study of the environment and our impact on it."

Worth checking out:

http://www.observer.com/green

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, a Review

Social entrepreneurs. They have been variously defined as people with game-changing models to address the world's most pressing social problems or individuals who address market failures by using new business models to affect change globally by acting locally. Or just crazy people.

Whatever your definition, social entrepreneurs can be pretty unreasonable people: tenacious, stubborn, and focused on pursuing their ideas to the fullest.

Judging by The Power of Unreasonable People, the new book by SustainAbility's John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, until recently managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which takes its title from a quote by George Bernard Shaw, there are plenty of them out there ready to take on the world or at least disrupt its equilibrium.

Jean-Baptiste Say, author of A Treatise on Political Economy (1803), is credited with coining the term "entrepreneur" as someone who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower production into an area of higher yield and production."

Add the word "social" and you have someone applying that same principle to the concerns of civil society. Wherever there is a market failure that leads to a social or environmental ill, you're likely to find a social entrepreneur coming up with a solution.

Whether you're talking about Takao Furuno, whose ducks are used to protect rice crops; Fabio Rosa, who has pioneered systems to electrify rural Brazil; or Wangari Maathai, founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, who aims "to plant trees to provide sustainable sources of firewood and halt soil erosion," you're talking about people who will not rest until their idea is realized and the world is changed as a result.

These "unreasonable people" are making steady progress not by, "giving a man a fish or even teaching him to fish," to paraphrase Ashoka's founder Bill Drayton, who is credited with coining the term social entrepreneur, "but by revolutionizing the fishing industry."

As such, according to Elkington and Hartigan, social entrepreneurs are "highly sensitive barometers for detecting market risks and opportunities." The authors suggest it's an important reason that global corporations are scouting for high-impact social entrepreneurs.

But how to find them and where?

The social entrepreneurs I know say, "You know one when you see one." After my recent trip to India, where I met half a dozen or so in as many days, I kind of understand what they mean.

Elkington and Hartigan offer "Ten Characteristics of Successful Social Entrepreneurs" that may help to call them out, including "Try to shrug off the constraints of ideology or discipline"; "Identify and apply practical solutions to social problems, combining innovation, resourcefulness, and opportunity"; "Show a dogged determination that pushes them to take risks that others wouldn't dare"; and "Display a healthy impatience (e.g. they don't do well in bureaucracies...)." Describe anyone you know?

They also offer a useful framework of three models for the types of organizations social entrepreneurs set up: leveraged non-profit ventures, hybrids, and social business ventures, which try to put some parameters around some of the more classic types of ventures.

To date, most of the social entrepreneur ventures with which I am familiar are of the leveraged non-profit variety. But issues of sustainability and technological innovation seem poised to demand alternative approaches.

Much of this important book draws on the stories of social entrepreneurs from around the globe who are focusing on social value creation. And this is a good and useful thing. Where the authors stray a bit too far afield, in my view, is when they erect too large a tent.

While I appreciate GE's ecoimagination as great market innovation, it seems clear that a large multinational corporation such as GE can hardly be described as a social entrepreneur, even if they ditch the company's Six Sigma culture. Even with the disruptive nature of GE's marketing and product development, most social entrepreneurs would chafe at the bonds of their corporate culture.

Shedding light on social entrepreneurs who are bringing solutions and innovations to the "epochal challenges" we face is a timely exercise. David Bornstein did it well with How to Change the World, and Elkington and Hartigan have complemented that earlier work in the field.

The bottom line is: we need more celebrants of such agents of change and perhaps even need to cultivate the art of being unreasonable. For if Shaw was right that "all progress depends upon the unreasonable man," then we are at risk if we do not call them out and give them the resources they need. It may just save our assets.


(Disclosure: The author is a vice president of Ashoka, which seeks, invests in, and supports social entrepreneurs around the world.)

Social Entrepreneurs: Kalyan Paul and Grassroots, Integrated Solutions in the Indian Himalayas

I spent last weekend with Ashoka Fellow Kalyan Paul and his group Grassroots in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand, one of the northernmost states in India, bordering Nepal and China.

Kalyan and Anita Paul moved to the "hill country" -- Ranikhet is 1829 meters above sea level -- in 1987. Originally from Calcutta, Kalyan met his future wife and partner in social change, Anita, while both studied for a Masters in Social Work at Delhi University.

After facing numerous challenges and frustrations in urban settings and with more traditional development approaches, the Pauls decided to work with mountain communities. "Kalyan always wanted to live and work with hill folks," according to a source familiar with the situation. "Anita, a Himachali who grew up in the plains, egged him on."

Less than 20,000 people live in the area in and around Ranikhet, a high percentage of whom live in small hamlets and rely on natural resources for their livelihoods and sustenance.

"We got a grant from the Ford Foundation to literally just 'walk around,' and that's what we did," Kalyan says. "At first the local people were skeptical; they'd check us out and see what we were doing. When they saw us walking around like them -- and we walked all over, man -- they decided, 'He's probably okay.'"

That walking around gave the Pauls a clear sense of the integrated nature of the issues facing mountain people.

"They live totally off of what nature provides," says Kalyan. "If there's no water, they can't grow their food. If there are no trees, there is no water. It affects everything in their lives and some leave the mountains for more urban areas. That kind of life can be hard, man."

Enter Grassroots, which the Pauls founded in this area 16 years ago. They started by looking for the root causes of the mountain peoples' poverty: their lives and livelihoods are tied to the land and its natural resources.

Those resources have been dwindling as a result of changes to the landscape that started under British rule and continue in the Indian forestry bureau today. Basically, the foresters promoted non-native pine plantations and eucalyptus over native broadleaf deciduous trees.

Sounds like a simple thing, but it had two major impacts: the pines didn't help recharge the water sources, especially after harvesting, and the dead leaf litter was gone, which the farmers spread on their fields. Leaf litter is a natural top-soil maker. In contrast, the more acidic pine needles form a thick mat on the forest floor, preventing rainwater from seeping into the soils.

You can figure out what happened next. The water table, that feeds the springs that nourishes the crops that feed the people, kept dropping. Today, at winter's end, there is very little water in the aquifer and the springs are extremely low.

The Pauls, and the people who work with them, are addressing it by promoting native plant nurseries, replanting saplings from those nurseries, and developing rain water catchments to help regenerate the water supply.

That would be fine as a standard environment project, but Kalyan hasn't stopped there.

Grassroots determined that another factor in the forest decline was the villagers' own needs for firewood used for cooking in their homes. This use was not only denuding the forests, but was having health impacts as well: women cook with open wood fires in their homes (breathing in the smoke all day) and they have to walk farther and farther each day to find firewood, which they carry on their heads.

So, Grassroots introduced biogas stoves to their homes. The villagers now burn the methane generated by animal waste (cow and goat dung -- one thing of which they have plenty!) instead of firewood, and they use the slurry on their fields as an excellent fertilizer.


They also formed an artisan's guild to train local villagers as masons to build these stoves, thereby accomplishing three things in one: reducing forest cutting, improving the health of women, and providing jobs for at least 30 men in the area; at least 50 men have been trained as masons.

The Kumaon Artisans Guild promotes and builds appropriate technologies for rural development, including the biogas wells, twin pit outhouses, and infiltration wells for drinking water. (The infiltration well technology, developed by Dr. Tim Rees, is worth another post of its own.)

Members of the Guild, who are known as "Barefoot Engineers," told me they are now installing 300 biogas units annually, 60 water pumps a year, and 400 toilets.

In addition, Grassroots has organized a women's cooperative, called Umang, which means "inner strength" or "self-confidence." Umang now comprises a network of 2000 women spread over hundreds of villages and governed by reps from participating women’s "self-help" groups, with day-to-day functions managed by a group of women from the surrounding area.

Umang’s work includes savings and credit, but also enterprise development. They produce knitwear worth more than Rs.1.5 million each year, about a third of which accrues to the women as wages, according to sources familiar with the situation.

In addition, the Umang women engage in food processing, producing about 10 tons of product annually, especially pickled condiments made from local produce such as chilies, ginger, and garlic, along with fruit preserves and jams. (Their plum chutney is fantastic!) Umang also has an apiculture program that produces about 3 tons of honey every year.

To better understand the impact watershed-wide, Grassroots, together with UNESCO, is conducting a study of the hydrology of the Gagas River Basin, which covers 500 square kilometers and includes 360 villages.

Faisal K. Zaidi, a Post Doctoral Researcher in Hydrogeology who works with UNESCO in New Delhi, on the study says that the Gargas has been included in UNESCO's Hydrology for Environment, Life, and Policy (HELP) program. HELP, according to its website, "is creating a new approach to integrated catchment management through the creation of a framework for water law and policy experts, water resource managers and water scientists to work together on water-related problems."

Zaidi says that by the end of the monsoon season this year, likely around September, they should have the first water budget for the Gagas River Basin, based upon the data collected from this study. To date, they have set up rainfall and stream flow monitoring stations in almost 20 locations, and at least a half-dozen weather monitoring stations in the basin.


The true innovation in Kalyan Paul's work is the holistic approach to the root problems. I have seen plenty of economic development and environmental projects that are limited in their scope. Most projects, indeed most organizations attack one problem, and not always the root of a problem. It's often an either/or dilemma: either economic development or conservation; either livelihood or watershed protection. The Grassroots approach is integrated, holistic and more effective as a result.

Not bad for a guy who started out "walking around" 20 years ago.


(Disclosure: The author is a vice president of Ashoka, which selected Kalyan Paul as an Ashoka Fellow in 1992, preceding the author's employment.)

Clean Tech: Will Solar Thermal Finally Get Its Day in the Sun?

Michael Parekh, in my view, one of the smartest thinkers on Internet and Technology trends, posted this piece on solar thermal tonight, which I am thankful for because I haven't seen the Times in about two weeks!

I'm reblogging this piece from India on a Friday morning (hope you don't mind, Mukesh):

The New York Times has a piece worth reading on how Solar power may finally be ready for it's close-up. Titled "Turning glare into watts", it lays out the base case:

"After a decade of no activity, two prototype solar thermal plants were recently opened in the United States, with a capacity that could power several big hotels, neon included, on the Las Vegas Strip, about 20 miles north of here. Another 10 power plants are in advanced planning in California, Arizona and Nevada.

On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset."

The economics, while getting competitive with sky-high fossil fuel and coal alternatives, still require subsidies:

"The power they produce is still relatively expensive. Industry experts say the plant here produces power at a cost per kilowatt- hour of 15 to 20 cents.

With a little more experience and some economies of scale, that could fall to about 10 cents, according to a recent report by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Newly built coal-fired plants are expected to produce power at about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour or more if carbon is taxed.

The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential.

"Unless there's a subsidy involved, it doesn't seem like a very attractive technology," said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium."

The whole piece is worth reading, especially if you've been wondering about what all the recent hoop la around solar is all about. Along with wind, geo-thermal and wave energy, it's a critical part of the global renewable energy crusade. It's going to be a long, bumpy road, but the journey may be worth it in the long run.

And my comments:

Thanks for sharing this, Michael. Indeed, it's going to be a bumpy road for all renewables, but the two solar plays to watch are thermal and thin film.

As for subsidies,the oil and gas industry in the US receives subsidies estimated at $15-35 billion/year, depending upon who is counting (and whether you include things like highway construction/maintenance, which I don't think is fair), and the coal industry is propped up by $60 billion in tax breaks since 1932, including $8 billion included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

By contrast, the Production Tax Credit, which is supported by the Senate Finance Committee's own Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), amounts to a whopping $5.5 billion. Woot!

Sure, alternative energy needs to compete on a level playing field with fossil fuels. But that means either clean tech alternatives should be given equal access to subsidies or subsidies should be removed for all and let 'em duke it out.

Aren't subsidies generally considered pro-business? Bring on the New Green Economy!

Social Entrepreneurs: Goonj, "One Person's Rags Are Another's Riches"

"What are the three basic human needs?" asks Anshu Gupta, an Ashoka Fellow and founder of Goonj. "Food, clothing, and shelter. Everyone talks about hunger and homelessness, but we don't talk about the second basic need."

Indeed, argues Gupta, the only time people think about clothing for the poor is after a natural disaster or when some charity has a clothing drive.



And what happens to those clothes? Typically, if they are not shipped right away, they are stockpiled for future disasters. Many times without quality control: resulting in torn or soiled clothing or single shoes from a pair being distributed. The usefulness is questionable.

Gupta wanted to change all that.

"Clothing is a symbol of dignity," he says, without a trace of sentimentality. "We're not promoting charity; we are adding value and professionalizing the collection of discarded materials."

Through Goonj, which means "echo," Gupta started a "clothes for work" initiative, designed to help poor people earn their clothes in exchange for work cleaning up and taking care of their villages. "This takes the charity out of it," Gupta shares. "They earn their clothes and help improve their surroundings at the same time."

Goonj is run like a business, a social business, and one gets the impression Anshu Gupta could easily be running a large manufacturing or distribution center in the private sector if he wasn't possessed by an idea that clothes are a basic human need that all need access to.

The journey starts at one of over 30 collection centers in India's major cities, where volunteers and employees of Goonj sort and process the materials and package it in jute bags, which are all coded according to contents and entered into their database.

It's a sophisticated process. One of the centers, in a series of warehouse-like buildings in a modest neighborhood in New Delhi, was a hub of activity on the day we visited. Women were sorting the incoming clothing according to whether it's a male or female garment, color, size, and condition. Other women were sewing articles of clothing in need of repair; if it's beyond repair, it will be used for something else.

Two women are sorting through a recently obtained bag of clothes, blue shirts, blouses, pants, and skirts.

"They are putting together school uniforms," Gupta says. "Of course they may be slightly mismatched, but the schools where this is going otherwise wouldn't have a uniform, the kids may not even have clothes to wear to school."

Goonj is having an impact on dignity, but also on health.

Gupta cites villages in Rajasthan, which is one of the areas on their distribution network. Rajasthan is mostly desert, and most people don't think of desert people needing warm clothes or blankets.


But temperatures drop precipitously at night and if you barely have clothes to cover your body, it can be a night of agony. Goonj is making sure that blankets and clothing get to those who need it.


Clothes are only an entry point for Anshu Gupta and Goonj. And one of their newest innovations is having tremendous impact on the health of poor women.

Sanitary napkins are ubiquitous in the west; a disposable product that most people take for granted. But countless women in rural villages use dirty, useless cloth during their five days of menses, leading to infection and disease. Gupta speaks of one woman who used a piece of an old blouse and died of tetanus because she was unaware there was a sharp metal hook inside.

Through its initiative "Not Just a Piece of Cloth," Goonj has developed a cloth sanitary napkin product made from selected scraps of cloth from the sorting process (25 percent of the cloth they receive is unusable as a garment, but can serve other purposes).

They provide clean cloth napkins to rural women and women living in slums and campaign in rural and urban India to generate awareness of the need for cleanliness in the monthly cycle.

Awareness-building is a big part of what Goonj does, especially where waste is concerned. And as India's economy accelerates so does consumerism and increased wastage. Goonj is concerned that the next generation of Indians understand the connection between consumerism, waste, and poverty.

So they have developed a program called School-to-School (S2S), Winner of an Ashoka's Changemakers Innovation Award, to turn the wastage of urban school children into a resource for thousands of rural and slum schools. It also serves the dual purpose of sensitizing urban students and their parents about the needs of the less fortunate.

"The urban kid has a fight with his parents between a Pokémon bag and a Spiderman bag," Gupta says. "They have no idea what it's like to fight for a bed."

Goonj's target is to support 30,000 children initially by channeling material like used books, uniforms, shoes, school bags, and even furniture to the rural and slum schools.

And each year, Goonj hosts an event called "Pratibimb," bringing together urban and rural school children and teachers from across the country who would otherwise never know each other.

Goonj sends out over 20,000 kgs of material every month in 19 Indian states. Their small staff is augmented by over 300 volunteers and a distributions network of over 100 grassroots organizations, Ashoka Fellows, social activists, and even units of Indian army in rural India.

Recycling is not a new phenomenon, even in India. Indeed, Anshu Gupta says that almost everything in India gets recycled, with the exception of food waste and some plastics. The true innovation here is in the distribution of the materials.


Goonj has figured out an elegant solution to ensure that materials get to those who need them all year-round, rather than waiting for disaster to strike.

In the end, Anshu Gupta and Goonj are proving the old adage that "one person's rags can indeed be someone else's riches."

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Postscript: At the India NGO Awards tonight, in New Delhi, Goonj was awarded the India NGO of the Year Award for 2007, sponsored by the Resource Alliance and the Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation. It is another in a string of recognitions that this organization has garnered.

(Disclosure: The author is a vice president of Ashoka, which selected Anshu Gupta as an Ashoka Fellow in 2004, preceding the author's employment.)