Technology Review: Blogs: Emerging Technologies Conference: Is There a Clean-Tech Bubble?

Technology Review in English | en Español | auf Deutsch | in Italiano | 中文

Emerging Technologies Conference

Technology Review's EmTech Conference brings together world-renowned innovators and senior business leaders to discuss the emerging technologies that are poised to make a dramatic impact on our world.

Comments

tomsawyer : Cool stuff for slackers like me. Lols. If that thing is released in the market, I can slack all...
... : I disagree with Mr. Halamka’s perspective regarding the lack of benefits to doctors that utilize...
... : E-voting is an election system that allows a voter to record his or her secure and secret ballot...
javs : The old paradigm has made demand a lot fatter than necessary. The financial crisis will end up...
tomaq : Amazon's infantile single variable prediction engine is an irritant and will drive users away....
FreddyG : $7Trillion per year. That's the big difference between the clean energy market and other rapid...
phoenix : "tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis." "tempus edax rerum."
tnieminen : Predictive technologies have a lot of potential in situations where the underlying patterns are...
javs : Erica,Is the power industry obsolete price controls business model a great barrier to the...

Is There a Clean-Tech Bubble?

Experts analyze the debate held at EmTech08.

By TR Editors

At Technology Review's 2008 Emerging Technologies Conference, EmTech08, experts debated the idea of a clean-tech bubble. Here is CNET News' Senior Writer Martin LaMonica and author of the blog "Green Tech" analysis of their opinions and the related issues:

Clean-tech bubble talk is a red herring
It's fashionable these days to ponder whether there's an investment bubble in clean tech. But I believe this discussion obscures a bigger problem for the clean-tech crowd: not enough money.
A panel of venture capitalists at the Technology Review EmTech 2008 conference on Thursday took the bubble question head on. The response from investors tends to be nuanced: No, there isn't a bubble, but there are some silly company ideas getting funded...read more

GS Early of KCI Investing gives his insight on the panel in his blog "At These Levels":

Is There a Clean-Tech Bubble?
This was the last breakout session of the EmTech 08 Conference and I stuck around for this panel of venture capital guys to see what they were seeing in emerging energy technology companies.
On the panel was David Berry, Principal at Flagship Ventures, Robert Day, Principal at @Ventures, and James Kim, Senior Partner at CMEA Ventures...read more

Tags: energy, biofuels, funding, EmTech, startups, clean-tech bubble, venture capital

Comments

Close Comments

A $7 Trillion Market

$7Trillion per year. That's the big difference between the clean energy market and other rapid growth phases like the internet bubble. In the internet space, or software or computer hardware, people have been competing aggresively over a potential future total market size of $10 Billion or $100 Billion. $7,000 Billion currently changes hands every year to deliver energy to users around the world. This "bubble" is like no other we've seen in a long time since it's playing in a real market and a huge market. And it's only just begun, with renewable energies having 1% of the market; they can grow at 30% per annum for many years. At this rate, market saturation might begin to occur in the late 2020s. Furthermore, the economics of renewable energy are now competitive with "conventional" energy and continue to improve relentlessly. "Conventional" energy forms dominate because of huge momentum and installed capital bases, but the renewables are shaping up to be fundamentally better mousetraps. This spells fantastic profit opportunities for a game-changing industry.

Rate this comment:

(Reply)

FreddyG
09/27/2008
Posts:10

Avg Rating:

First Things First

The old paradigm has made demand a lot fatter than necessary. The financial crisis will end up with is much less demand. Energy efficiency is one of the most important Clean-Tech opportunities for a sustainable world, which like distributed resources are located on the demand side, not the supply side.

In order to be able to change the world on a firm footing, Clean-Tech needs to address first the electricity restructuring issue to enable the digital era raise the plateau level of the power industry. That will only happen with business model Clean-Tech innovations that replace the obsolete price controls business model highly risky bets that regulators are now doing on the retail market. In order to avoid throwing good money after bad money, please take a look at the article EWPC Blog's First Year Anniversary: Electricity for the Digital Era to learn about it.

Rate this comment:

(Reply)