Rob Day | December 9, 2008 at 8:42 AM

I predict that…

...There will be a lot of cleantech VC predictions this season. First of all, it's clearly a bit of an "in" thing this year, based upon the traffic of P.R.s through my mailbox right now -- and of course I already put out some of my own a couple of months back, so mea culpa as well.  But secondly and more importantly, in cleantech perhaps more than any other sector we have a very wide set of plausible scenarios about what 2009 will look like. It could be a very good year, thanks to a supportive government coming in, continued strong performance in cleantech markets, and continued strong investor interest in the sector. And it could be a very down year, as the dramatically falling economic tide lowers all boats. So it's interesting to see the predictions from Andrew Chung and Peter Nieh of Lightspeed for the coming year, which I would describe as a "glass half-full" take.  They were already posted on GTM so I won't regurgitate them in full (but it's worth reading them here if you haven't seen them yet), but the basic gist is that dealflow's going to fall and cash is going to be king, but in a couple of sectors (esp. energy storage) and geographies (esp. China) things will look brighter.  Last year Andrew and Peter also posted their predictions for 2008, specifically about solar, and while they weren't fully right about things it's mostly because that whole sector got caught up in the 2H08 chaos like everything else. The Cleantech Group also put out 9 predictions about 2009, and predictably (sorry for the repetitively redundant repetitiveness in this sentence) they are a bit more positive, albeit still with ups and downs.  Interesting to see some policy predictions in there, but the one that really strikes me is the prediction that global cleantech VC will be stable at $7B next year.  I have a hard time believing that, for reasons I discussed in my own predictions linked to above... Then I also just got hit up to post predictions from CMEA Ventures:

• The green bubble correction will continue through the first half of 2009, then we will enter a new environment of strong but cautious investing

• Lower oil prices will not impact green tech in the long term, electricity prices are what really counts

• Obama will turn to green tech for economic stimulus but will need to appoint an energy secretary to make sure things really get done and the money is disbursed

• Project financing will be on hold until the debt markets free up at the end of 09

• Those that get financed first will be the ones who have been on hold in the pipeline as opposed to new projects

• Companies developing new battery, solar products, etc. will do best to partner with those that already have their own manufacturing plants

• There will be down rounds in financing and exits will be pushed out at least a couple of years

• VC’s with relatively new funds will continue to invest cautiously while others may simply go out of business

• Silicon Valley will establish itself as a green tech hub as engineers and dollars move from hardware and semiconductors into the green tech space

A bit more negative, clearly, but that's what you would expect from a shop that has been pushing the "bubble" talk for a while, and negativity isn't necessarily wrong right now... Three smart teams with three different but in many ways overlapping predictions.