 That’s why they call it cleantech: SMUD’s anti-idling project provides electricity to truckers so they can turn off their engines at truck stops, saving fuel and cutting down on air pollution. PHOTO COURTESY OF SMUD |
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Forget about the Internet. With President Barack Obama
pledging to invest $150 billion in green and sustainable energy over
the next 10 years, “cleantech” is poised to be the next big
thing in industry and commerce.
Cleantech is a broad term used to describe products and services
that aim to maximize energy efficiency and productivity while
minimizing or eliminating pollution, waste or other negative
environmental impacts. This includes everything from solar and wind
energy to water purification, renewable sources of fuel, cleaner forms
of transportation, and new power grids that enable more efficient use
of energy.
The term is a current buzzword among entrepreneurial types, who were
well-represented at “Cleantech in the New
‘Environmental’ Environment,” held at the UC Davis
School of Law earlier this month.
“It takes an entrepreneur to see the latent or inherent
commercial application in a noncommercial product,” explained Dr.
Erik Stenehjem, director of the Industrial Partnerships Office at
Lawrence Livermore Lab, describing the collaboration between scientists
in the lab and the innovators who bring new products to the market.
Peter Van Deventer, president and CEO of SynapSense, a wireless
networking company out of Folsom, also expressed the importance of
investing in clean technology. He stated that China is outinvesting the
United States in cleantech, and that we need to step it up in order to
compete globally. Stenehjem agreed and added, “If we don’t
develop [new technologies] we lose in a hot, flat and overpopulated
world.”
As pointed out by keynote speaker John Doerr, a partner in Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital firm, a director of
companies such as Google and Amazon.com, as well as a recent appointee of
Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the United States is
already be losing its comparative advantage in clean technology.
“In the Internet economy we dominated,” Doerr said,
before noting that less than a handful of American companies appear on
the top 10 lists of companies leading in the fields of wind, solar and
other alternative energy sources. “If this is the next great
economy, we must change our strategy.”
Doerr urged the audience to recognize cleantech as not only the
largest economic opportunity of the 21st century, but also the largest
moral issue. He has worked extensively with former Vice President Al
Gore and believes there is no single “silver bullet”
solution to problems such as global warming.
“I want to take every city, town, nation, and business and
reindustrialize it, because right now they are not sustainable,”
he said. “Clean energy is the cheapest way to do it.”
Thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which
was signed into law by President Obama on February 17, the Department
of Energy awarded 2,648 grants in the last year, totaling more than $18
billion. That includes 286 grants, or a little more than $1 billion,
that were given out to projects in California.
About 45 percent of this statewide total was given in seven
different grants to Sacramento alone, with another $2 million given to
Citrus Heights, Folsom, Roseville and West Sacramento.
While the Obama administration hopes these grants will stimulate the
economy and create new jobs, it has already stimulated the development
of cleantech. Stenehjem noted at the UC Davis symposium that although
this sort of technology has not been a big feature of research and
development departments in labs in the past, it’s now starting to
change.
“The money has increased the commercial interest in
cleantech,” Stenehjem said, giving examples of technologies that
have been adapted by enterprisers for environmental purposes, such as
carbon nanotubes that are now used to create purified water, or
flywheels used for cheap and clean energy storage. “The stimulus
has driven people to look at existing technology such as these in new,
green ways,” he concluded.
“Its like we are back in 1992 during the development of the
Internet,” said Eric Dresselhuys, executive vice president and
chief marketing officer of Silver Spring Networks and panelist at the
symposium, “and we are just about to get the Web
browser.”
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