1 billion Euro investment in clean technology
Posted by DavidM in Climate change, Solar, Wind | 1 March 2007
I read an article in The Times on Saturday that venture capital investment in European clean-technology firms has now hit the 1 billion euro mark.
In 2006 there were 95 venture capital deals investing in the sector in Europe - covering solar panels, fuel cells and other environmentally friendly technologies - worth 400 million euros. In the US the figure is even higher - $2.9 billion was invested in cleantech in 2006.
A friend and I have talked for a while about 'green' investment being the next bubble following the dot-com boom, bust and boom. Now it looks like we were right.
This is good and bad news for the industry. Having worked in telecoms during the boom and bust I can see the same thing happening with cleantech.
No investor wants to miss the boat once the hype kicks in, so money is thrown at a wide range of projects and individual merits get overlooked. Once the industry overheats, lots of companies will fail to hit profit targets and the bottom will fall out of the market leaving a few sensible, well-funded, properly thought out businesses. Then the industry will grow more steadily and robustly.
However, for the green consumer and the environment I think it's great news. Once the dot-com bust stabilised we were left with wider choice, lower prices and broad general acceptance of the technologies.
If the same happens with cleantech and we have more choice of fuels, energy generation devices and energy saving appliance, if their prices come down due to better production efficiencies and if the general public accepts those technologies as mainstream, then all is good.
So support your local venture capitalist and let's get the industry glowing.
