Clean Edge has finished their Report Entitled “Clean Energy Trends 2008″. You can get your pdf copy here.
An excerpt:
Further proof of clean tech’s move from marginalized to mainstream is abundant. A growing number of governments announced plans to generate electricity from renewables. Corporations continued to jump on, if not lead, the race to transition to a cleaner, greener economy. Venture capitalists in the U.S. invested $2.7 billion in the clean-energy sector, representing more than 9 percent of total VC activity. Cleanenergy indices outpaced the broader markets in 2007. For example, the NASDAQ® Clean Edge® U.S. Liquid Series index (co-developed by Clean Edge and NASDAQ) was up 66.67 percent last year, compared with 3.53 percent for the S&P 500 index and 9.81 percent for the NASDAQ Composite index.
According to Clean Edge research:
Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $25.4 billion in 2007 and are projected to grow to $81.1 billion by 2017. In 2007 the global biofuels market consisted of more than 13 billion gallons of ethanol and 2 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide.
Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to expand from $30.1 billion in 2007 to $83.4 billion in 2017. Last year’s global wind power installations reached a record 20,000 MW, equivalent to 20 large-size 1 GW conventional power plants.
Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) will grow from a $20.3 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017. Annual installations were just shy of 3 GW worldwide, up nearly 500 percent from just four years earlier.
The fuel cell and distributed hydrogen market will grow from a $1.5 billion industry (primarily for research contracts and demonstration and test units) to $16 billion over the next decade.
Together, we project these four benchmark technologies, which equaled $55.4 billion in 2006 and expanded 40 percent to $77.3 billion in 2007, to grow to $254.5 billion within a decade.
For those of you that might be interested in the wind sector in particular or clean energy in generatl, the latest issue of Renewable Energy World has a couple of great articles worth the read:
As a pretty prolific reader, I always wonder what other people read? I usually ask my friends what they read and this guides me to expand my horizons. Another question that always comes to me when trying to find my next read is “What do really sucessful people read?” What is it that people who’s billable hour wage is a lot higher than mine read?
The answer to this popped up when I was following a random link from one of my blogs I normally read. I can’t remember which tangent I was off on, but I sent the link to myself so I would make sure to put it up here on the blog.
Here a link to an article on Roland Piquepaille’s blog conerning some prototype electrochromic sunglasses put together by the University of Washington. What I really liked about this example is not that electrochromic materials are totally unknown as there has been significant work on them for decades. It was that they built a prototype to try it. I also see applications like sunglasses as the perfect enabling application for electrochromic materials. The fact they they are fault tolerant, non-mission critical, and bring a new axis of differentiation, and are adjacent to the “real” or “large” market. Applications like these allow for processors, material suppliers, and designers to become comfortable with a new innovation and accelerate the acceptance in the markets that will ubiquitize electrochromics (Building and Construction).
This is about a recent post from Guy Kawasaki about his experiences in starting a new site based on use provided content. The basic premise is the stats on his new site truemors.com. The biggest shock to most people was that the total cost of the site was around $12K to set and get operational (as Guy call this credit card magnitude debt). There is a whole list of 26 stats and an accompanying slide presentation. The last stat caught my eye in that it was the 4 things that Guy learned from this experience:
There’s really no such thing as bad PR.
$12,000 goes a very long way these days.
You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.
Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.
I would say Guy’s success is certainly quite a bit different from the average joe that might try the same thing as he has a extremely popular blog from which he could launch this site. So the amount of traffic and the speed to grow a base of users may have been faster than what a less popular person may have been capable of.
On the other hand the low cost of entry was quite eye opening as he was able to implement his concept to a usable and growable state with the funds that are within reach of a large portion of the industrialized world.
So what idea for the web do you have that could be launched or at least prototyped for this kidn of money?
Guy Kawasaki has a good post on TrendHunter Magazine (warning, some content not suitable for work on there). Guy’s post gives some great examples. Also look at the Science category and the Art and Design Category. This is a mix of the weird and strange mixed with the insightful and coo . As with anyone that is a trendsetter they are usually on the fringe which is extremely evident from the links above. You can see the tongue-in-cheek in this publication, but take a look at the about trendhunter page and the associated list of publications at the bottom.
So how do you use Trendhunter? Where are the gems there you can develop? Are there some common threads on there that would make the basis of a trend you could ride and tailor your products to? Can you market to a fringe customer base? Should you?
On a related subject Phil McKinney has a great podcast over at Killer Innovations that deals with the “Trend Safari.” Well work the listen. The transcipt is also there for the podcast/mp3 challenged.
Hugh MacLeod over at gapingvoid (of the cartoon fame) has a great summary of a talk he gave recently. For anyone in business this is a must read. It is the best synopsis I have seen on why you want to have strategy around the use of blogs in business.
Some great quotes from the article:
“To me, The Cluetrain is the most important book about the internet ever written. Why? Because it was the first book that talked about the internet the way it REALLY is- i.e. people talking- as opposed to the way business and the media pretend it is- i.e. people buying.”
“If corporate blogs work, it’s because they help humanify the company”
“Blogging is not about reaching a mass audience. Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. Blogging is about allowing “The Smarter Conversation” to happen.”
”Blogs allow you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business- including advertising, PR and corporate communications.”
There is much more in the link and it is worth the few minutes it takes to read. Seth refers to this article as a great take “humanification” and “being small”. That state of acting like a small, nimble company that is in-tune and aligned with its customers because they only have a few and they make or break you. You can’t treat them as a transaction.
Guy Kawasaki has a post on the TEDTalks from this years TED2007 being up on for your listening and viewing pleasure. Looking at the speakers and the topics, this looks to be an interesting set of talks for anyone interested in trends and how the world is changing from the perspective of those that are changing it. I was not previously aware of TED (If you are not either, check it out here), but I will be working my way through these and some of the older talks. Note that both audio and video are posted. I will probably do a summary of a couple of these, so watch here for more.
I was actually watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe” where he was working with someone making biodiesel from waste cooking oil. I was surprised at the relative straight-forward nature of the process. This started me thinking about the growth in awareness of biofuel.
For a while now I have been somewhat following the interest in bio-sourced plastics, biofuels, and carbon footprint as a factor in purchasing decisions and marketing. With Walmart including sustainability (carbon footprint and biodegradability) as factors in its Packaging Scorecard for vendors and the rise of interest in bio-sourced fuels and chemical feedstocks it is a good idea to keep an eye on this trend. For example, in my inbox last week I noticed again that 10 of the top25 articles in Chemical Engineering on ScienceDirect are articles on biodiesel or biofuel processing.
For biodiesel I was wondering how much of thisinterest is really linked to crude oil prices versus the publics commitment to eco concerns? So I compared biodiesel, Crude Oil, and “carbon footprint” in the same graph. (separate terms by commas to compare, neat feature). This is the comparison that came up:
I was shocked to see how tightly biodiesel and crude oil searches were linked. The cause:effect relationship is not clear however. Are people searching for biodiesel because of high crude oil prices or are they looking up crude oil prices to see how much they are saving by using the biodiesel that have already decided to use for environmental reasons? Either way the two terms are linked tightly. The other interesting thing to note is that carbon footprint is a farily new term emerging in late 2005, with press coverage picking up in late 2006. (bottom lines are news reference volumes.)
Some questions:
Is biodiesel a hype tech or the future?
Do you pay more for eco-friendly products?
Do you choose an “eco” labeled product over another product that you view have similar performance?
Does bottom-line overrule “eco” every time?
I’d appreciate your opinions on the subject, drop me a comment or an email.
