Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWhy the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust
John Doerr was crying. The billionaire venture capitalist had come to the end of his now-famous March 8, 2007, TED talk on climate change and renewable energy, and his emotions were getting the better of him. Doerr had begun by describing how his teenage daughter told him that it was up to his generation to fix global warming, since they had caused it. After detailing how the public and private sectors had so far failed at this, Doerr, who made his fortune investing early in companies that became some of Silicon Valleys biggest namesNetscape, Amazon.com, and Google, among othersexhorted the audience and his peers (largely one and the same) to band together and transform the nations energy supply. I really, really hope we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent, and all of our influence to solve this problem, he said, falling silent as he fought back tears. Because if we do, I can look forward to the conversation Im going to have with my daughter in 20 years.
As usual, Doerrs timing was perfect. Just weeks earlier, Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth had won an Oscar for best documentary. (Gore is now a partner in Doerrs green tech team at the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.) Interest in climate change had never been higher. And as the economy recovered from the dual shocks of the Internet bubble and 9/11, Doerrs fellow Silicon Valley VCs were already looking to clean technology as the next big thing. What followed was yet another Silicon Valley gold rush, as the firms on Sand Hill Road were pulled along by the promise of new fortunes and the hope that they would be the ones to wean America off of fossil fuels. The entrepreneurs and tech investors who had transformed media and communications were ready to make Silicon Valley the Saudi Arabia of clean energy.
Never mind the fact that green technology had been struggling to achieve critical mass for decades. You had folks who came in with the hubris to say, I know these guys have been working on this for 50 years, says Andrew Beebe, chief commercial officer for Suntech, the Chinese solar manufacturer. But Ive got $50 million and I can blow the doors off this thing.
In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerrs speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.
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http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/01/ff_solyndra/
leveymg
(36,418 posts)We hear nothing about cannibalistic ways of the the rest of the energy sector, particularly the petrochemical industry, until the last paragraph.
Mildly informative, but ultimately off-target.
bananas
(27,509 posts)Kolesar
(31,182 posts)Joe Romm's response covered a lot of material. Don't miss this part!
In 2008, the solar industry was on the cusp of finally creating ways for common Americans to invest in solar power, to put their money where the poll numbers already suggest their heart is. This last step was postponed by the financial crisis and is finally ready to be started again. There are ten individual initiatives that are being led by entrepreneurs, well-known private equity managers, and large well capitalized companies all headed for the same objective, bring low risk solar assets to the public markets so that pension funds and individual investors can benefit from what Warren Buffet already knows renewable energy projects have a higher yield and are a safer investment than corporate bonds.
The choice of headlines and wing nut graphics were no credit to Wired magazine. It was like when that guy from New Jersey was here.