Clean Tech: Tyler Hamilton Interviews Vinod Khosla

"What is a material 'climate solution' in [Vinod] Khosla's world?"

That's one of the things Tyler Hamilton asks Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and a long-time partner with venture capital titan Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (and one of our favorite social capitalists in his Toronto Star column today.

The answer: "What's clean, cost-competitive, can be deployed on a large scale and is capable of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions?"

Among the other insights Tyler shares: "Khosla more or less divides clean-technology investments into two camps: those that can make real but relatively small changes and those that can make huge changes to the world's environmental problems, most notably climate change.

"'There's a difference between a good green investment and a climate solution,' he told me last week in an interview. 'I came into it from the point of view that asks what the large solutions are that actually matter to climate change.

"'I love PV (solar photovoltaics), and we have investments in PV, but I don't think it will be relevant to climate change in the next 20 years.'"

We have to stop playing with toys, Khosla tells Hamilton, who is also author of the Clean Break blog.

"Khosla, in addition to his other green investments, is placing a big bet on solar-thermal technology – what he considers the best weapon in the 'war on coal power generation.' To a lesser extent, he's also increasingly drawn to the potential of enhanced geothermal power.

"'Solar thermal has been ignored completely in favour of sexier photovoltaics,' he says. 'When I started looking at solar thermal early last year, I couldn't find anybody who was paying attention, which sort of surprised me. It's a great technology, and about one-fourth the cost of PV with the kind of reliability that utilities actually like.'"

"By solar thermal," explains Hamilton in a sidebar, "Khosla is referring to concentrating solar power, as opposed to solar thermal technologies used to provide space heating and hot water in buildings, or conventional solar power, where the sunlight strikes a PV cell and is converted into electricity.

"Concentrating solar power uses parabolic mirrors to focus the sun's energy on a single point, creating high temperatures that generate steam from a fluid. The steam spins a turbine, just as it would in a coal plant, which in turn generates electricity."

Khosla is also ahead of many others in his consideration of another important investment area: next-generation, ultra-high-voltage DC transmission technologies and infrastructure.

To Khosla, suggest Hamilton, "getting off coal and other fossil fuels means playing to our clean-energy strengths and connecting our energy sweet spots to a large, trans-national grid that can efficiently carry power over long distances."

This irks many extreme greens -- and bothers some NIMBY opponents of big alternative projects. But it is a solution that needs to be investigated and invested in.




Read more: Sun to Shine on Solar

Read Tyler Hamilton's Clean Break blog

Global Climate Change: Vienna Talks Focus on Economics and Energy Investments

The global economy will be fueled by over US$20 trillion of spending on energy over the next two decades and this week's round of talks on global warming, which begin today in Vienna, Austria, will focus on how to make that investment as green as possible.

"We need to 'climate-proof' economic growth," said the UN's top climate official Yvo de Boer yesterday. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change believes additional investments of about US$210 billion a year are necessary to maintain greenhouse gas emissions at current levels until 2030.

More than 1,000 delegates from around the world will gather to talk about how best to ensure energy investments will contribute to reducing emissions rather than adding to it.

"The war against climate change is not a war against oil," De Boer said, recognizing that the world will likely be dependent upon oil and coal for many years to come. "It's a war against emissions."

The goal should be to find every way possible to reduce those emissions, increase efficiency, and catalyze investments in alternative energy, carbon capture, such as sequestration, and making what fossil fuels we do continue to use be more clean and efficient.

I've often been critical of the UN-led discussions for being nothing more than hot air. Let's hope this meeting and the others leading up to the climate summit in Indonesia this December will have concrete and economically viable outcomes.

View a webcast from Vienna: Climate Vienna

Ecosystem Benefits: Brand and Fink Creating Markets for Nature's Services

Next month's Wired Magazine features a piece by David Wolman on efforts by "eco-capitalists" to create new markets for the life-sustaining services provided by Nature. That's right. Call it natural capital, ecosystem services (see my earlier post on that subject), environmental markets, ecological assets, or as my former colleague John Kinch and I coined it, ecosystem benefits. Whatever. These are the services provided by nature free of charge -- or free until now.

In an effort to create viable markets for such services as clean water, storm surge protection, and greenhouse gas build-up, people like David Brand, founder of New Forests Pty Limited, and Priceline.com cofounder Jessie Fink, among others, "are betting that successful trading of carbon will kick-start the creation of other cap-and-trade systems for ecological services like watershed protection, biodiversity, and erosion control."

Read more @ Wired: Eco-Capitalists

Global Climate Change: Idean Salehyan's "The New Myth About Climate Change"

This from YaleGlobal Online: Global warming is a serious problem and could result in a decline of basic resources such as water or food in some regions of the world. But Idean Salehyan rejects the notion that climate change will necessarily lead to civil wars, uncontrollable immigration and global violence.

“Dire scenarios like these may sound convincing, but they are misleading,” writes Idean Salehyan for Foreign Policy. “Even worse, they are irresponsible, for they shift liability for wars and human rights abuses away from oppressive, corrupt governments.”

Global leaders can muster a strong response to climate change, reducing carbon emissions and adapting to changes. Salehyan also offers the reminder that abundant resources often lead to conflict more so than scarcity. People are responsible for their reactions to scarce resources. The world is fortunate to have plenty of fair warning about climate change, and governments can take action to cooperate or compete.

As Salehyan concludes, "Yes, climate change is a serious problem that must be addressed, and unchecked environmental degradation may lead to intensified competition over scarce resources in certain regions. The good news is that the future is not written in stone. How governments respond to the challenge is at least as important as climate change itself, if not more so."

Read the full article: The New Myth About Climate Change

Conservation Action: China's First National Park

China will soon create its first national park in one of the most biodiverse regions of the world. Pudacuo National Park will contain more than 20% of the country's plant species, about one-third of its mammal and bird species and almost 100 endangered species.

My former employer, The Nature Conservancy, played a major role in making Pudacuo National Park a reality. By doing so, it also

Increases conservation in the region by incorporating 10 times more land into an area that was formerly a nature reserve;

Introduces skilled park management techniques to help abate threats to biodiversity in the area;

Provides a source of environmental education for local communities; and

Provides economic benefits to local communities through park-related jobs and ecotourism.

The Conservancy supported the Chinese government's efforts to establish Pudacuo in June 2007 by introducing the concept of the national park system to officials and advising the government on how best to establish this kind of protected area.

And on a personal note, how cool is it to see the impact of your words halfway around the world?

“What…distinguishes this park [from a typical Chinese nature reserve] is that the local communities are already benefiting from it because they are preferentially employed for jobs within the park,” says Zhu Li, communications manager for the Conservancy’s China Program. “The national park system embodies the conservation ideal of ‘nature for people’ rather than ‘nature from people.’"

In the preamble to TNC's 2005 Annual Report, Nature for Life, I wrote: "Conservation today is about conserving lands and waters for people, rather than protecting nature from people."

Cool to see one's words carrying over the world and transforming the way we think about conservation, to connect people and nature in new ways and articulate the interdependency between nature and human well-being.

read more | digg story

Social Entrepreneurs: Global X Interviews blueEnergy Founder

Global X continues his series of short video interviews with social entrepreneurs. This time, Mathias Craig, one of the founders of blueEnergy, which provides low-cost, sustainable solution to the energy needs of marginalized communities through the construction, installation and maintenance of wind turbines and hybrid wind and solar electric systems.