Even without a strong, legally binding agreement in Copenhagen, investors have faith in clean tech and say that a couple of other things are more important than the international agreement for 2010 clean tech investment.
Traditionally, if you are in a water-poor region that has access to desalination technology and seawater, you were in luck. Israeli cleantechnology company ROTEC has developed a reverse osmosis system designed to remove salts from brackish groundwater. In other words, nowhere near the sea.
Yesterday, I wrote about the new DH9 from DewPointe, one of the cool eco-innovations to be showcased at West Coast Green October 1-3 in San Francisco. The DH9 is capable of extracting water vapor from the air and converting it to (very) pure drinking water, at a rate of about 6.5 gallons per day. The technology is inspiring, in that this is a free-standing water manufacturer, needing no water supply, and conjures up images of moisture farms and growing forests where once there was desert. Indeed, even in 30% relative humidity, which is akin to some of the driest deserts in the world, the DH9 can produce 4 gallons of water per day from the air.
The big drawbacks are the cost ($1600 retail price) and the need for electricity. While standing, the DH9 uses 80 Watts, and while actively filtering, it uses 500.
Researchers in Stuttgart, however, have solved one of those two problems: their system is completely based on renewable, on-site energy. Read the rest of this entry »
At a cleantech panel about business opportunities running up to the 2012 Olympics in London, Dallas Kachan, managing director for the Cleantech Group, said that the second quarter “looks a lot like the first quarter” for cleantech investing so far.
In other words, it’s still down from last year, but deals are still happening and money is still available, he said. “The amount of investment is not continuing to plummet; it’s stable,” Kachan said. “Some might say we’ve reached bottom.” Read the rest of this entry »
There were many viewpoints this weekend at TIE’s annual ‘pow-wow’ TIEcon 2009 when it came to cleantech, but if I were to boil them down (in a electric stove running on renewable energy) I would say the essence can be summarized as this: the mundane matters.
I say this not because there was a lack of enthusiasm in the air-absolutely the opposite-rather I say it because a more zoomed-out perspective on cleantech has begun to crystallize, and with that everyone from VC’s to the entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way through the battlefields of innovation has recognized the value of niches within the ‘ecosystem’ of cleantech.
This, of course, is a fitting metaphor for the area of innovation hoping to save us from ourselves. The area of innovation slated to reinvigorate our intuitions about what it means to work alongside nature as opposed to taking it for granted. At the same time, the principles of business and innovation surrounding growth of capital via monetization requires these innovations to return deep profits for those invested. Here’s how that duality played out in real-time:
Diversified renewable energy solutions provider Leviathan Energy announced today that it will officially commence US sales and marketing efforts for the Wind Energizer, its patented technology for increasing the power output of large wind turbines.
Speaking from the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference and expo in Chicago, CEO of Leviathan Energy, Dr. Daniel Farb, said he expects “that with the very fast return on investment the Wind Energizer can deliver, sales will be quite strong.”
Looking for a green job and wondering where they are? Well, as job hunters flood the usual suspects — such as solar and wind companies — with mountains of applications, you might have better luck finding your dream job in a more unexpected sector.
That’s the advice from Amy Vernetti, a managing director at headhunting firm Taylor Winfield. She says many of the green jobs are coming from areas that probably don’t leap to mind when you think of cleantech, such as companies developing fuel additives and air-filtration technologies. “These are hidden gems in the market,” she says, adding that some of them are “hiring like crazy.”
With all sorts of claims being made about clean energy and clean tech, it is more than a mere academic exercise to explore what those terms really mean. One way of defining something is by defining what it is not. For example, the large bucket-wheel excavators like those used in the open-cast lignite mines of western Germany are not clean tech. And here’s why…
At 300 feet tall and 600 feet long, the largest bucket wheel excavators are the biggest land vehicles ever made. Though they only dig at a maximum of 0.37 mph, these machines move 240,000 cubic meters of material daily, about as much as a football field dug to 100 feet deep.
Because they continuously dig, transport, and dump material twenty-four hours a day these machines require 16 megawatts of externally supplied electricity; and there are twenty-two currently in use in the four open-cast lignite mines in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Bucket wheel excavators have been working these lignite fields since 1933, playing an instrumental role in fueling the Hitler machine with coal-based synfuel. Over the years, the mining activities have scarred the land and created massive canyons, reaching up to 500 metres deep and over 10 Km wide (see a 360 degree panorama of the lignite coal mine in Garzweiler). Continued…
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