2007: Cleantech Investing's Watershed Year

Maybe one could make the case that 2006 was a more critical year for cleantech investing. It was, after all, the year that saw venture capital investment in the industry break one billion dollars US. But at that point, it seemed the industry was still on the cusp. Would a 1980s-style turnaround and market growth in other sectors cancel out the effects of rising energy prices, or would the market be looking toward cleantech for the growth to drive the economy?2007 seemed to answer that question, definitively.Energy prices have continued to fluctuate, sometimes dramatically so, prompting consumers, as well as corporate energy customers to start to look toward new ways of procuring energy and better ways of using what they have. And in spite of significant market instability, thanks to a long-pending credit crisis among subprime mortgage lenders, cleantech investing has continued to rise, on pace to double last year’s total. That by itself would be considerable, but 2007 was also a year for cleantech’s profile to rise considerably.On the investment side, Vinod Khosla became a known name in environmental circles, and there’s no end to the upside of that kind of information. Khosla is one of the richest men in America and rightly regarded as an extremely savvy venture capitalist. Where he goes, industries tend to flourish, and he’s been heavily invested in cleantech for some time now. Google and Virgin founder Richard Branson have poured their money into serious cleantech efforts, leading the way as they also tend to do.In the more public eye, former Vice President Al Gore saw his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, win an Oscar for Best Documentary and bring the whole question of global climate change to light, followed more recently by the awarding of the Novel Peace Prize for his efforts. Likewise, several corporations got on board strongly, including the aforementioned Google which turned much of the parking lot at the Mountain View, Ca. headquarters into a solar farm, Wal-Mart which has been developing a number of key cleantech developments for their retail outlets, and Home Depot which gave away over 1 million compact fluorescent light bulbs to shoppers on Earth Day.There’s no reason why the trends that built steam in 2007 should not thunder forward in 2008, making it look as though 2007 was the critical year for cleantech and global climate change. In reality, there’s been too many developments to list and they’re all pointing to a strong and healthy future, not just for cleantech, but for the world as a whole.

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