CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--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.
Before I delve into the details of the bubble debate, let me say that focusing on venture capital deals is a myopic view of the market that could ultimately give the "clean-tech revolution" a bigger black eye than just a few failed start-ups.
Clean-, or green-tech, venture capitalists will tell you times have never been better if you judge by the number of business plan proposals crossing their desks and their ability to raise funds. Many an entrepreneur and investor sees energy and environment as a ripe area for technology innovation.
What worries me is whether the hundreds of newly formed energy tech companies will have enough capital to actually succeed--and change the world as they all set out to do.
Insiders have been fretting about the dreaded funding gap, or "Valley of Death," for years. It's the stage a company must cross to take its technology to commercial scale, such as building a manufacturing plant. In energy-related businesses, it usually take lots of money.
Now the financial crisis could actually make that gap tougher to bridge, given the difficulty in the public markets and the projected cost of an anticipated Wall Street bail-out plan.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars for say, a solar manufacturing facility, is outside the range of most VC funds. To some extent, project finance can fill in the gap, said CMEA Ventures investor James Kim.
... Read moreCAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Tesla Motors has received many accolades for producing an all-electric luxury sports car. But its long-term plans may hold its most challenging task: making a mass-market electric car.
The company intends to make a "family car" that it hopes will lead to the sale of millions of all-electric vehicles, JB Straubel, Tesla's chief technology officer, said Wednesday. He spoke earlier on a panel on "green transportation" at the EmTech 2008 conference here.
Tesla Roadster
(Credit: Tesla Motors)Code-named Bluestar, the car has been part of Tesla's plans for a few years. Tesla Chairman Elon Musk earlier this month was quoted as saying that the goal is to produce a car priced in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, possibly in partnership with other automakers.
Next out of Tesla's factories will be the Model S, a luxury sports sedan with a price tag of about $60,000 due out at the end of 2010.
From the same technology base, Tesla intends to develop a series of vehicles including a minivan, coupe, and light pick-up truck which could be used in fleets, Straubel said.
Technology from that Model S line may also make its way into the follow-on Bluestar line, he said.
"It could use the same or similar architecture, and we may partner with an existing OEM (original equipment manufacturer) to leverage their scale," Straubel said. "(But) lower cost is the target."
The goal is to be able to produce hundreds of thousands of these cars per year, he said. Leveraging existing technologies, such as its battery pack and powertrain, would help speed development.
"With Bluestar, we're looking at cost and lowering the overall expense to the user. If it's not cost-competitive (with oil), you are going to have a hard time scaling to a high level," Straubel said.
China and other fast-growing economies could be good markets for the Bluestar, he said.
Straubel said Tesla welcomes more electric car variants to the market, such as the Chevy Volt and Chrysler's recently announced line. The introduction of these cars and the release of the Tesla Roadster have helped changed the image of electric vehicles as "golf carts."
But he said that Tesla's all-electric technology, as opposed to a plug-in hybrid with a battery and internal combustion engine, gives it certain advantages.
The smaller battery in plug-in hybrids translates into more charging cycles, which means that they will need to be replaced sooner.
"You lower the wear and tear as you make batteries bigger. Also, you're pushing the envelope with bigger batteries and taking a bigger technology leap," he said.
Straubel said there are different motivations for interest in electric cars but energy security--a desire to reduce imported oil--seems to be the biggest driver, ahead of environmental concerns.
"Our goal is to change the transportation energy mix. To do that, you need a meaningful volume of cars," he said. "A family car is one market that means scale."
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The route to a less polluting car looks more like a multipoint intersection than a single superhighway, a panel of experts said on Wednesday.
The auto and fuels industries are in the midst of dramatic technological change, but it's still not clear how quickly which new technologies will be adopted.
Also unknown is whether consumers are willing to switch from traditional car ownership to the "transportation as a service" model where people share a fleet of clean cars dispersed around a city.
The EmTech 2008 conference, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put together a panel to discuss green transportation with Tesla Motors Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, BP chief scientist Steven Koonin, and Ryan Chin, a student at the MIT Media Lab involved in the City Car and RoboScooter projects.
All of them agreed that there's a need to shift from today's fossil fuel-based transportation industry because of concerns over energy security and climate change. But it's unlikely that one single technology will displace the gas-powered internal combustion engine.
"You have to ask whether change will be revolutionary or evolutionary. If I had to bet, I'd say it will be evolutionary," said BP chief scientist Steven Koonin. "The most likely scenario is a plug-in hybrid with a very efficient engine powered by biofuels--with plausible technologies."
... Read moreThis post was updated at 8:30 a.m. PDT with additional material from Khosla's speech on Wednesday and photo from the event.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Famed investor Vinod Khosla is one of the clean-tech industry's most vocal cheerleaders. But most of today's clean technologies fall short of his 1-billion-car test.
"If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter," says Khosla. "Most of what we talk about today--hybrid, biodiesel, ethanol, solar photovoltaics, geothermal--I believe are irrelevant to the scale of the problem" of climate change.
Vinod Khosla speaking at the EmTech conference at MIT.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)Khosla delivered the keynote speech at the EmTech08 conference (formerly called the Emerging Technology Conference) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday, where he talked about energy, policy, and investment.
On Monday, he spoke to MIT student energy fellows covering many of the same topics.
On the whole, Khosla is highly optimistic about the potential for technology to address climate change and other environmental problems. He challenges people to imagine cars and cement factories that actually remove, rather than add, carbon dioxide from the air.
But he views climate change as a global problem that requires an overhaul to today's energy infrastructure. That means displacing oil and coal in a world where consumers from Asia and other fast-growing regions will be adopting a more energy-intensive lifestyle similar to that in the West.
"We will ship a billion cars on this planet in the next 15 years or so. Unless a low-carbon technology gets into 80 percent of those 1 billion cars and over time causes an 80 percent reduction of carbon per mile driven, it's not going to be a solution. Everything else is just a toy," he said Monday.
He places wind and solar photovoltaics in the "toy" category because, without storage, they will remain a small fraction of electricity production, only 5 percent to 15 percent.
That's because, without a breakthrough in storage technology, solar and wind power cannot replace "baseload" electricity during peak times because of their intermittent nature.
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