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Archive for the ‘cleantech’ Category

Report: Clean tech investment set to soar 35 per cent this year

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, cleantech, tagged , , , on March 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is an Cleantech story from BusinessGreen.

“Global investment in clean technology will rise 35 per cent this year, despite ongoing uncertainty over climate change policy in the US and EU, according to a report published today by research firm Datamonitor.

The report, entitled Challenges and opportunities for energy utility companies post-Copenhagen, predicts clean tech investment will bounce back strongly this year, led by the wind energy sector, which has received a major boost from government-backed economic stimulus packages.

Alex Desbarres, senior renewables analyst at Datamonitor, said that despite the failure to deliver an international climate change deal and ongoing uncertainty about the future of the carbon markets in the US and Europe, growing numbers of businesses are increasing their investment in clean technologies.

“Copenhagen did not deliver the low-carbon vision, clear policy landscape and regulatory frameworks that the energy clean tech investment community had hoped for,” he said. “For all its flaws, however, the Copenhagen Accord gave the clean tech community the sense that private investors will drive the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

The report said there was little evidence that an overarching global regulatory framework would be developed within the next few years, but argued that with new national and sub-national legislation and initiatives emerging all the time, investors will continue to flock to the clean tech sector.

“Datamonitor expects that progress on new global and US climate regimes will be slow and unconvincing this year, but that the race to dominate the emerging clean economy will accelerate regardless, fuelled by unprecedented quantities of green and clean stimulus funding,” the report states.

The study is the latest in a series of reports to suggest that the clean tech sector is recovering well after venture capital investment levels collapsed following the onset of recession in 2008.”

Read the full story here.

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Trouble Brewing for Cleantech IPOs?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, cleantech, tagged , , , , , on February 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is an interresting article from Seeking Alpha.

“By Rob Day

Haven’t had much time to go through the various recent cleantech IPO filings, and so haven’t talked about them much. Also just generally hoping they do well, for the sake of the overall industry.

But in a meeting today someone put up some stats that were pretty sobering.

Taking a basket of 4 high profile recent IPOs and filings, the total across the four companies was:

– Trailing twelve month revenues = $319M

– Trailing twelve month EBITDA = -($343M)

– Total venture dollars put into all four companies to date = approximately $1.5B

Like I said, I hope all of these companies do well and grow into great companies. But this type of profile for IPO isn’t the norm. So you have to wonder about it.

Someone today mentioned that they think these companies have to IPO now because they need yet more capital and the private equity world is tapped out. I disagree, I think companies with prospects like these would be able to raise more capital, if not from traditional VCs, then from non-traditional private equity players. Cleantech private equity is down, but far from tapped out.”

Read the full blogpost here.

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Silicon Valley faces fierce global competition in cleantech

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, cleantech, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is a Cleantech article from Mercury News.

“In other tech revolutions of recent decades, Silicon Valley became the uncontested global leader. The region’s ability to innovate its way to the top in cleantech, though, is far from guaranteed. Competition is fierce and global, with trillions of dollars at stake.

One of the valley’s greatest challenges comes from here. China’s drive to be a dominant power in the emerging global cleantech industry was on display one recent morning on the campus of the nation’s third-largest solar-panel maker, Trina Solar. New assembly-line employees, in an exercise designed to instill discipline, marched military-style around the grid-like campus, chanting responses to a drill leader dressed in army fatigues.

But China’s ambitions in cleantech reach far beyond piecing together solar panels. The central government has committed more than $100 billion a year to green technology research. It also has put in place incentives to create markets for everything from electric cars to rooftop solar water heaters to jump-start homegrown cleantech companies.

Provincial and local governments also are investing heavily in cleantech. Leaders in Jiangsu Province, where Trina Solar is located, are placing big bets on the solar industry, inspired by the municipal government of Wuxi. That Jiangsu Province city financially backed Suntech Power, now a global solar leader.

“China is moving very aggressively,” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said during a visit to Google’s Mountain View headquarters last fall. “They want to be a leader in this new industrial revolution.”

A group of valley tech executives, including former Intel CEO Andy Grove, recently sent a letter to Chu urging the energy secretary to “sound the alarm bell to make America aware — clearly and unequivocally — of how rapidly other nations, particularly China, are moving on clean energy.

“Unless we move quickly and commit substantial resources on a sustained basis, we risk becoming an energy also-ran, and risk developing a new dependency,” said the letter, also signed by Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, and John Doerr, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

They urge the government to provide financial assistance to clean energy industries, including incentives for replacing polluting power plants with renewable sources of energy.

U.S. is lagging

Currently, only five of the world’s top 30 companies in the solar, wind and next-generation battery markets are based in the United States, according to John Denniston, also a partner with Kleiner.

U.S. government incentives — such as tax breaks and a regulation requiring utilities to buy power from solar and wind energy companies — were slowly eliminated in the 1980s after helping California become a global cleantech leader, said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Around the same time, Denmark, Germany and Spain — whose governments adopted policies and incentives to jump-start cleantech enterprises — were emerging as global leaders.”

Read the full article here.

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