Clean Edge, a Berkeley consultancy focused on clean technologies, has just released their latest forecast of clean energy markets, and the results are again encouraging.

Clean Edge has reason to be a bit of a booster for clean energy, but Joel Makower and his team over there are very sharp, and even just looking at what happened over the last year is -- to a cleantech investor, at least -- pretty exciting.

Their data shows that:

- The worldwide market for solar PV grew from $4.7B in 2003 to $7.2B in 2004 (they forecast it to grow to $39.2B by 2014).
- Wind stayed steady at about $8B for both '03 and '04 (they forecast $48B by 2014).
- Fuel cells and hydrogen markets are already a $900M market (they forecast $15B by 2014).

The 10-year timeframe for the forecasts is a bit long for venture investors to be counting on, but these are already big markets today. Solar in particular appears to be poised to become as important and established in the energy market as wind already is.

Now, how much of that is driven by regulatory and not market forces? Well, that's a post for another day. But this is an important and encouraging study.

Given the increased interest in clean energy, and clean technologies in general, it seemed time to devote a space to sharing the latest cleantech investing news with friends and colleagues. As usual, I nominated myself...

First, a bit of background. I am a Principal with Expansion Capital Partners (note: Who have nothing to do with this blog), a cleantech-focus venture capital firm. I'm based out of San Francisco, and we also have an office in New York. What is "cleantech"? We tend to define cleantech as technologies that:

- Use energy, water and other raw materials more efficiently and productively,
- Deliver equal or superior performance,
- Improve customer profitability, through cost reduction and/or increased revenues, and
- Create less waste or toxicity

As you might imagine, this covers a lot of industries, from clean energy to clean water to clean manufacturing, etc.

I plan on using this space to aggregate various news stories of interest for cleantech investors (or perhaps just myself). Studies, news stories, and simple commentary. Comments are always welcome...

- Rob