By Ian Rogoff •
May 28, 2009
Editor’s Note: The is a guest contribution by Ian Rogoff, Chairman of the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization, and Chairman and CEO of The Helio Group (parent company to HelioPower). This is the sixth post in a series from the CEO’s of major solar companies. You can follow the complete series here.
There is a long overdue debate underway in industry and political circles regarding the merits of federal funding for renewable energy (RE) commercialization.
Distinct from RE projects and RE deployments, commercialization involves identifying specific technologies and entrepreneurs based on their perceived commercial potential and financing the respective project teams along a vector towards commercial success.
The types of commercialization activities typically funded include scaling benchtop prototypes to meet market requirements, characterizing technologies to understand performance and limits, testing boundary conditions, designing for manufacturability, testing for real world conditions, scaling refinery processes, among others.
By Alan Smith •
April 3, 2009
A new way to treat wood has trees back in the limelight: a hardwood’s reliability that even a rain forest mahogany tree can love.
Check out the world’s first heavy traffic road bridge made from Accoya® wood. The bridge, located in Sneek in the Netherlands, is “the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons”. At this week’s Wall Street Green Trading Summit, a panel on forestation introduced a new way of [...]
By Alan Smith •
April 2, 2009
The longer I am here at the Wall Street Green Trading Summit, the less this feels like anything to do with environmentalism. At some point, when does off-setting stop being feasible, and when does carbon reduction become the name of the game?
By Alan Smith •
April 1, 2009
The summit is over for today, but I wanted to throw some concluding thoughts out after an afternoon spent discussing good business models for producing alternative energy and for overhauling our current electrical grid.
By Alan Smith •
April 1, 2009
Excuse Me, Waiter? What Year is this Carbon?
By Reenita Malhotra •
October 15, 2008
After another tumultuous day in the market with the worst one-day percentage declines since the crash of 1987, addressing the state of the U.S. Economy was supposed to be foremost for both candidates in an effort to win the votes of undecided and independent voters. Advisers for each candidate said that he would use the final debate to lay out his vision for the country and promote his economic policies while drawing differences with his opponent.
By Reenita Malhotra •
October 15, 2008
The failure of Lehman Brothers is seen as the last straw that broke the credit market. The financial markets have been in a state of complete disarray ever since the U.S. Government allowed Lehman Brothers to file for bankruptcy on September 15th 2008 instead of intervening to save it as it had done with Bear Sterns and later with the insurance company, American International Group.
Can a cap and trade system for greenhouse gas emissions harness market forces to address climate change? As I noted on Monday, that’s the thesis of Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn’s new book Earth: The Sequel. To support this claim, Krupp and Horn focus on the innovative ecopreneurial efforts happening around the world in the broad field of clean technology. From thin-film solar to algae biodiesel to an Alaskan ice palace powered (and kept frozen) by geothermal energy, Earth: The Sequel tells the stories of scientists, business people, and outright dreamers experimenting with both current incarnations, and the next generation, of renewable energy technologies. A few of these companies include:
Of course, the technologies under development by the companies profiled in Earth: The Sequel aren’t cheap; in almost every case, major investors, such as Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, have backed these start-ups with significant funding. At one level, some might argue that the market is already working: capital is flowing to promising ideas.
That’s one of the major findings of the recently-released 2007 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, and research firm Rockbridge Associates, Inc. This is good news for ecopreneurs, especially since the survey also notes that many consumers want to buy “green tech” products, but can’t find what they want:
…while 83 percent of adults said they wanted to protect the environment, and 59 percent said they like trying new technologies to help the environment, about 42 percent said such technologies were hard to find.
An ideal situation for ecopreneurs? Perhaps… both for new companies, and for those that want to market green products better. Both P.K. Kannan, director of the Smith School’s Center for Excellence in Service, and Charles Colby, president of Rockbridge, offer some tips for effectively tapping this market:
By Maria Surma Manka •
January 3, 2007
The standard benchmark for certification of a building's efficiency and sustainability in design, construction, and operation is called LEED certification. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED-certified buildings – also called “green buildings” – are popping up and gaining momentum around the country.
Charles Lockwood highlights the burgeoning market surrounding green buildings in a recent Barron's magazine opinion piece. Hint: they aren’t just for environmentalists anymore.
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