The myths being thrown around about cleantech venture capital perhaps reached a new height of silliness this weekend, with a NYT article which suggested that cleantech venture capital is responsible for the lack of VC-backed IPOs in the last quarter (also mentioned in this Earth2Tech post). They reported that some VCs said that"the pipeline for public offerings has dried up in part because of the considerable shift in the industry’s interest in the last three years into 'green' technologies, which was taking time to bear fruit." That's just plain silly. It does, however, provide a nice opportunity to discuss a few of the myths (and half-truths) surrounding cleantech venture capital these days, because that silly statement about IPOs rests upon a few key assumptions worth looking into: Necessary assumption #1: Cleantech venture capital activity has reached such a point that it's "driving the bus" in the sector, so if there are no cleantech IPOs, then there are no VC-backed IPOs. Look, I know all the media wants to talk about is the excitement around cleantech/ greentech/ energytech these days, and not the "boring" other technology sectors [insert ironic tone here]. But it's not like the entire VC industry woke up three years ago and decided to abandon all other investments. Even by the most generous measures (and they're indeed generous, if you look at the details), cleantech remains less than a fifth of all VC dollars invested in the U.S. And most tallies put the proportion going into cleantech at much lower levels (less than 10%, according to Ernst & Young). In fact, as we noted before, health care still attracts significantly more venture dollars than cleantech. Not to mention software and IT, internet, etc. Especially when one considers the size of the market opportunity (and with some exceptions in specific sub-sectors, perhaps), cleantech remains a relatively underinvested sector. There are a lot of attractive places venture capital is going these days, and cleantech is only a small part of that. So how is cleantech possibly driving the overall venture capital asset class? Necessary assumption #2: Clean technologies take longer to mature. This falls into the category of "half-truth". Yes, when compared to a software or internet startup, a biofuels or solar startup will take longer to mature. It just makes sense. The process iterations take longer and require more capital, and the end product can't just be thrown out there into the market before being fully vetted and in some cases certified. Not problems that a Web 2.0 startup has to deal with, for example. But NO, when compared with many other venture-targeted sectors, and when the entirety of cleantech subsectors is taken into account, it's hard to argue that the entire universe of clean technologies takes longer to mature than the rest of the VC-backed markets. Since we've already mentioned health care, let's consider that as a contra-example. It's a regulatory-driven market that requires significant time to develop, iterate, and get approval for new technologies. As previously mentioned, it's much bigger as an investment category than cleantech. I'm not knocking that investment category, just asking: Why single out cleantech as being particularly long to mature? And let's consider the many efforts within cleantech that aren't solar and biofuels -- does energy efficiency software take longer to mature than other software plays? Do solar financing startups take longer to mature than other financial services startups? I'm willing to grant that there are many cleantech segments where the technologies will take a fair amount of time to mature, and that includes a few of the hottest segments in the sector -- but there are plenty of other segments where that's simply not true. This myth, that cleantech invariably takes longer to mature than other sectors, has been given some credence lately by several high-profile venture capitalists who make that argument publicly. But a) they're usually focused on the longer-gestating cleantechs like solar, biofuels and solid oxide fuel cells, and thus conflating the rest of the market into their narrow view of "cleantech"; and b) they're often referring to specific examples in their early experiences in the sector where they made a bet with overly optimistic expectations around time-to-market, and got burned. All of which is fair, and smarter investors may disagree with my point of view... but when you see a journalist (perhaps citing a VC) implying there's a consensus that cleantech always takes longer to mature than other tech types, know that they're over-generalizing greatly. Necessary assumption #3: A sector where the techs take longer to mature means a sector where the investments take longer to exit. Maybe if all VCs always invested at the same stage in a startup's development, this might hold true. But it's been clear for some time now that VCs have reacted to the longer gestation periods for solar and biofuels (where most of the capital has been deployed) by shifting later stage. According to the Cleantech Group, while the number of seed and "first round" cleantech venture capital investments actually fell from about 200 total in 2003 down to about 175 total in 2007, "follow on" rounds shot up steadily over that period from 150 in 2003 to 300 in 2007. Later stage venture capital has been driving the growth in venture capital spending in cleantech. Basically, if a technology takes 3, 5, 7 or 55 years to mature... but the investors don't get in until it's just a couple of years from commercialization... how does that affect the amount of time between writing the check and the exit? The longer gestation period may be a reason why some investors have been moving later-stage, but it shouldn't be a reason for any gap in exits, in other words. Now, what may have been happening is that even "follow on" rounds into cleantech companies have ended up being further from a point of exit than had been expected by the investors when they did the deal. But what that says is that the gestation period of clean technologies doesn't matter... the VCs' ability to ESTIMATE the gestation period of clean technologies is what matters. And as they've gotten smarter about making those estimations, many have gone later and later in their investments. To the point where now we see the emergence of very large cleantech funds being raised with the explicit expectation of shifting a bit more (as a proportion of dollars spent, at least) into "growth stage" investments. At my firm, we are early stage specialists in cleantech. But we're not seed stage investors. Because we know that in many sectors it can take longer than expected for the technologies to be developed, commercialized, and adopted by the market. It's just a strategic choice we've made. Other firms are making other strategic choices, and some have chosen to focus more on later-stage investments, especially during this period when exits have been forestalled. Still others (esp. including angels) continue to focus on seed stage investments, filling that pipeline referred to in the article. There's no single uniform timeframe venture investors are targeting, in other words, so the journalistic tendency to paint the entire category as some monolithic herd is a bit misguided. In any case, there's no inherent reason why, even though solar and biofuels have longer tech maturation periods, that should have any impact on exit timing for venture capital investments. It's not like VCs have been doing only early-stage cleantech investments over the past few years. Necessary assumption #4: Any of the above assumptions, whether right or wrong, would have any impact at all relative to the overall macroeconomic effects being felt right now. What makes the NYT article particularly silly is that it flies clearly in the face of available evidence that there are indeed numerous cleantech startups that are primed to IPO as soon as the overall window opens. In fact, as we've talked about before, 2008 was supposed to be the year of the first big wave of VC-backed cleantech IPOs, which are now only being held back by broader market conditions. Investment bankers are saying that cleantech will be the sector that leads the way when the IPO window re-opens. Retail investor interest in the sector doesn't appear to have waned much, as record oil prices continue to make the most visible argument (albeit far from the only one) that the underlying fundamentals are greatly in favor of strong growth in cleantech markets. So far from being blamed for the IPO "gap" this year, cleantech is being viewed as a potentially critical sector that will drive the next wave in exits. The simple fact is that the macroeconomic conditions, and the mood on Wall Street in general, is not conducive to IPOs of any color. So the argument that cleantech is a significant reason for the lack of VC-backed IPOs this quarter is just plain silly. ...although perhaps not as silly as bottled water economics. Finally, on a lighter note, this cartoon was kind of funny.

Ran across this interesting article on Forbes.com full of useful tips for investors who "know that human-caused global warming is hokum."  I'm pretty sure it's the first time I've seen the word "hokum" written this century.  The best line refers to the "clueless U.S. venture capital community"... "throwing their investors' money at futile chimeras based on the idea of a climate crisis." Apparently either we VCs really are clueless or we fundamentally disagree (or, I suppose, both).  Because according to recently released numbers, cleantech was one of the few areas to see increased VC spending in Q1. Ernst & Young/ Dow Jones VentureOne announced their tally for Q1 last week.  While overall VC spending declined 7% yoy to $6.5B, cleantech totals grew 18% from Q1 '07 to $571.6mm.  Solar and biofuels (once again) led the pack, although energy efficiency showed a bump as well.  These numbers are significantly lower than numbers from other groups like the Cleantech Group, but as we've discussed before, the differences are largely methodological and the overall trends remain consistent across surveys.  Here's GTM's coverage of the E&Y totals. A couple of things to take note of in particular:  a) while it's impressive to see cleantech grow while other sectors declined, those totals suggest cleantech remains less than 10% of all VC spending; and b) while the dollar amounts grew, the number of deals DECLINED by 11%. Meanwhile, Moneytree/NVCA released their 2007 cleantech VC totals, which they pegged at $2.2B.  And yes, solar and biofuels led the pack there, too.  They also noted that the highly-anticipated first big wave of cleantech exits is expected this year and next. So what's going on?  A storyline appears to be coming together that (as we've talked about recently) as cleantech venture firms raise much bigger new funds, they're having to write bigger checks and shift into later-stage investing. One of the most interesting factoids in the E&Y data was on deal stage, where they note that early stage deals accounted for 37% of cleantech financings in Q1, down from over 50% a year ago. This also mirrors a trend spotted by some observers (and discussed here as well) that while some cleantech sectors are getting a lot (perhaps too much) attention, others aren't getting nearly as much attention.  Well, of course -- as investors move later-stage, they have to double-down on sectors that have already gotten a lot of attention.  And as generalists move into this complex and varied sector, the simplest decision on where to focus attention is on the "proven" subsectors... where others are already investing. It's a good time to be a small, flexible, disciplined early-stage cleantech specialist.  Unless, of course, it's all hokum... Deals from the past week:

• We mentioned GM had put money into Mascoma -- apparently Marathon Oil put in $10mm as well, and the company announced the new financing totaled $61mm overall.

• Wellbore Energy Solutions, which has technologies to "clean up" the wellbore in oil & gas applications, raised an undisclosed amount of financing from NGP Energy Technology Partners.

• BASF Venture Capital announced a 4mm (dollars?  euros?) investment in Deutsche Rohstoff AG, a mining company that BASF believes will help them gain access to supplies of minerals critical for applications like efficient lighting and energy storage.

• Airship Ventures, which seeks to bring back the dirigible as a form of transportation, raised an undisclosed amount of Series A from six individuals.  [Insert your own bad pun or analogy here]

• Cleantech investors in the news:  Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has been ramping up cleantech investment activity, announced the closing of Fund VIII at $800mm...  Good Energies appointed George Coelho as managing director and head of venture capital -- he'll also head up the European solar team...  And kudos to The Quercus Trust and 21Ventures for their $100k award to Engineers Without Borders.

Other news and notes:  Neal shares five investment strategies to play in cleantech...  The promises and challenges of solar power...  CNet's top 10 cleantech companies (6 are in solar, and none are in water -- really?)...  Lux Research points to the strong links between nanotech and cleantech, but has some cautionary words...  New England area VCs are starting to look far and wide...  Finally, where's my checkbook?

Over the past week or so we've gotten a couple of data points indicating that VCs are pulling back a bit from the cleantech sector, or at least from some of the hotter sectors in the space. The Cleantech Group pointed to a big drop-off in Q1 cleantech VC totals in North America, Europe and Israel -- from $1.6B in Q4 down to $1.25B last quarter. They note that the Q1 total still represented a 42% increase on 1Q07 totals, but still, that's a more than 20% decrease in dollar totals from Q4, which itself was down from Q3. The drop-off was mostly led by (in)activity in North America, where dollar totals fell from $1.23B in Q4 to $873mm in Q1. Importantly, the pull-back was even more pronounced in terms of numbers of deals done in North America, where Q1's 50 rounds was significantly down from Q4's 72 deals. What this means is that, while activity was down, investors went more to later stage deals, and indeed it's probably indicative that the global average deal size in Q1 was $15.8mm, up from $10.3mm a year ago. That suggests a big shift toward later-stage investing. The Cleantech Group release notes that the pull-back was led by lower investment levels in solar and biofuels, but it's worth noting that those two categories still led all others. Dallas Kachan speculates that the biofuels activity is partially explained by a switch from corn-based to cellulosic ethanol investments. All of this was then echoed in yesterday's tallies from New Energy Finance, which came up with somewhat similar global cleantech VC totals. NEF made a particular point of showing how "private equity" (meaning all private equity except venture capital, presumably) was heavily down in the sector, while VC was up year on year. They suggest that the credit crunch is having a double-whammy effect on non-VC private equity and public markets: The credit crunch makes buyouts, etc., more difficult, and the broader effects of the financial crisis have closed the IPO window. However, M&A activity surged in the sector, from $3.5B in 1Q07 to $7.7B last quarter. That's a huge jump. So apparently the turmoil in the financial markets hasn't yet dampened large corporate interest in getting into the sector. Furthermore, NEF follows the Cleantech Group by pointing out that late-stage VC "saw a big increase." They suggest that VCs are filling in while the private equity and IPO opportunities remain shelved. So what about that health care bubble that no journalists talk about when they're all worried about how $873mm is far too much money to invest into the trillion-dollar energy, water, and materials markets? Well, they're seeing big declines in that sector as well, but the average deal size remains high at $18.6mm. Still bubblicious... for now... Joking aside, the general impression is that cleantech investing is roughly following the overall VC category, with a general slow-down but not collapse in activity. All in all, our "third scenario" prediction still seems to be on track. In other news:  Maybe they should settle it with a drag race.  Is there a Fast and Furious sequel in the making?  Tell you what, whichever one is first to provide me with a 3-month loaner will get my vote.

Now that we're almost a month into the new year, it's time to corral and sort out all the various cleantech VC tallies that have been put out there. So: Why isn't there more talk about the "health care tech bubble"? Check out the Dow Jones VentureSource annual roundup. By their count, cleantech investments in the U.S. totaled $2.5B over 187 investments, the dollar growth being 67% from 2006. Yes, significant growth. However, then note that the "health care" sector took in $10B over 671 investments. Yes, "only" a 17% growth in dollar amount over the $8.5B 2006 total, but that's an increase of $1.5B versus an increase of around $1B in their cleantech sector tally. And unlike in cleantech, where the popular consensus appears to be that the growth drivers won't go away soon, in health care policy discussions all the talk is about how to limit the growth in spending. Perhaps most notably, the median deal size in cleantech was about $7mm -- just about the same as that for all VC deals overall, and flat from 2006. But in health care the median deal size jumped up above $11mm, a 33% rise from 2006. I'm not at all trying to argue against the attractiveness of health care as an investment sector, I'm not informed enough to say anything like that. Nor am I trying to use this simplistic comparison to argue that there isn't a bubble in cleantech (I'll argue that in other ways, elsewhere). But I am indeed arguing that the business media seems far too willing to throw around the B-word in cleantech in comparison to the treatment given to other investment sectors. Why? 1. Probably because percentage growth is high -- allowing some to focus on relative rates in growth versus the absolutes. But remember how small a percentage cleantech has represented in venture spending up until recently. Health care is a huge market, but so are global markets for energy, water and materials, so sometimes it might be useful to take a step back and recognize just how early we are in the process of creative destruction of these huge industries. Potentially a lot of room left to run... 2. Another reason is that a few cleantech entrepreneurs and investors persist in making bold statements about how their ideas/ investments are going to re-make the world in the blink of an eye. Health care entrepreneurs and investors learned the hard way a few years back that claiming to have cancer cured is a sure-fired way to trigger a lot of skepticism and scrutiny by the press. The current generation of cleantech entrepreneurs and investors are only now learning that lesson (although one would think the lessons of 2000-2001 would be more vivid than they apparently are). Big, bold changes are indeed happening, it's an exciting time, but one can hardly blame the jaundiced business journalists for raising an eyebrow at some of the claims and mega-deals that are being made. 3. Finally, there's always confusion about publicly-traded stocks versus venture investments, in terms of thinking about valuations, etc. For good reason, we refrain on this site from getting into questions about appropriate valuations for publicly-traded cleantech stocks. It's not the author's purview, there are smarter people looking at it, and it's also only indirectly relevant what those companies are doing. It affects potential exits, but it doesn't necessarily impact what venture investors are doing. Certainly VCs will tend to follow the exits... but that doesn't mean that when journalists see solar stock prices rise and fall precipitously that the same volatility is felt by early stage investors making multi-year investments in privately-held companies. Again, not looking to revisit the "is there or isn't there" discussion here. And we probably shouldn't expect that mainstream business journalists will somehow back away from the whiff of controversy inherent in such discussions. But the juxtaposition of the sectoral data in the VentureSource release was pretty fascinating... The Cleantech Group also put out their annual total recently, as GTM wrote up a couple of days ago. As usual, they have the highest numbers among those counting, which is understandable given the group's central role in the industry and their inclusiveness. By their count, North American total cleantech venture investments were $3.95B, up 38% from 2006, and European cleantech venture investments totaled $1.23B, up 34% from the previous year. Interestingly, the number of deals in North America only increased 15%, to 268. This means, of course, that average deal size went up significantly -- but if you also believe the VentureSource data suggesting that median deal size stayed the same, then the conclusion must be that there were more mega-deals out of the bunch. And this is exactly what the Cleantech Group reports, pointing out not only that the number of $100mm+ deals increased from 2006, but that 8 of the top 10 solar financing rounds since 1999 took place last year. So we are left to conclude that valuation pressure isn't really impacting the sector for most deals... yet. But that certainly the pace of mega-deals doesn't appear to be slowing down. At least that's what this data would suggest, although shifts in the mix toward earlier stage (although we haven't seen anything like that, it's possible) would also hide valuation pressure as counted by median, and some VCs are sharing anecdotal evidence about some valuation pressure out there (mostly in solar deals, of course). We already talked about Eric Wesoff's first-cut tally (as well as yours truly's poor track record with annual predictions) earlier in the month. His VenturePower report, looking worldwide, totaled $3.4B for 222 deals. And rounding up the surveys, the MoneyTree/NVCA totals for the U.S. in the cleantech sector (note: link opens pdf) were $2.2B for 201 deals. It's helpful to see them aggregate cleantech deals from across several of their traditional categories, kudos -- and another good validation of interest in the sector. So as usual, big disparities in the counts. Which is understandable, reflecting the different levels of inclusiveness -- how do they define cleantech, what geographies are considered, how do they count project-finance type rounds. The difference in deal count between the VentureSource survey and the Cleantech Group survey, for example, was 81 deals. And most importantly, all the surveys pointed to very strong growth in the sector, both in terms of dollars and numbers of deals. So no matter how you're counting it, cleantech remains hot... just not as hot as health care tech.

Wanted to share some numbers with everyone, from Eric Wesoff's work with GTM's Venture Power Report.  Eric tracks cleantech deals as they happen, so he always has a quick running tally on the sector, and he shared with me some of his 2007 totals.   These include deals in North America, Europe, Israel, and Australia, but some deals in China and India and ROW are a bit hard to find.  It's also renewable energy focused, and doesn't include other cleantech categories, so read accordingly. In any case, it's a pretty impressive story for the sector.  Eric's total VC investment in renewable energy for 2005:  $800m.  For 2006: $2.3B.  And for 2007?  $3.4 Billion in 222 venture rounds. Taking a closer look, solar ($1.1B in 71 rounds) and biofuels ($796mm in 44 rounds) made up more than half of the total.  Energy storage / batteries ($434mm in 16 rounds) also did very well, but that's dominated by the headline-grabbing Project Better Place reported round (more on that later) -- even still, $200mm in 15 rounds would have been a healthy year regardless.  And demand response / energy efficiency took in $419mm in 34 rounds. Other category totals:

• Wind/ tidal/ geothermal -- $201mm in 16 rounds
• Coal tech -- $176mm in 8 rounds
• Nextgen transportation -- $152mm in 10 rounds
• Fuel cells -- $121mm in 16 rounds
• Lighting efficiency -- $87mm in 7 rounds

The totals are interesting, but it's also interesting to see which segments took in larger average round sizes.  Batteries led with $27mm per round, but as noted that's because of Project Better Place's announcement.  Once that's taken into consideration, coal tech was the category with the biggest average round size ($22mm), and fuel cells had the lowest ($8mm), with all others in the teens.  An indication of capital intensity?  An indication of stage preference varying by category?  Would be interesting to drill down into the categories to see. But what's perhaps most interesting is seeing the average round size of $15mm across all renewable energy sectors.  That's a pretty large round to be the average.  Median would be a preferable figure, but even still, it feels like renewable energy is pretty dominated by later-stage investing right now.  Even more reason that 2008 is a critical year for exits. Eric also helpfully pointed out that my 2007 prediction that total venture investment dollars would go down was only off by about $1.5B.  Thanks, buddy!  At least that puts me in good company with other VCs in terms of prognosticatory skills... Other news and notes:  Speaking of Project Better Place, here's an interesting story and video, and for more fun read the back and forth in the reader comments at the bottom...  Ed Gunther has his own predictions for 2008...  The IEEE's take on Winners and Losers includes several cleantech applications...  Finally, the inventor of the Super Soaker has also invented some intriguing solar power tech, cool.

The past few weeks have seen a few market updates put out by those who track cleantech venture numbers, so it's time to re-cap and review: First of all, it's the usual wide dispersion of figures, sometimes even from the same trackers, based on differences in scope and definitions. But what's clear is that the third quarter was a huge quarter for cleantech venture capital. The Cleantech Network (note: link opens pdf) reported a couple of months ago that the Q3 total for North American cleantech VC spending was $1.3B, which was a 50% increase over their Q2 tally, and a 36% increase over Q3 2006. In particular, energy technology made up $901mm of this total, and solar alone was $410mm. They also noted that water investments saw a big increase, and that cleantech VC investments in Europe more than tripled from Q2 figures. Confusingly, there are two sets of numbers I've seen publicly issued from Thomson/NVCA. The ones they put out in a press release recently showed that over the first three months of this year, the dollars put into cleantech investments by U.S. venture capital firms (but note: including international investments) were already 46% higher in the first 9 months of 2007 alone than they were for all of 2006 -- Q1-Q3 totals of over $2.6B, with $1.7B of that in the U.S. Their numbers also showed that solar has dominated in the sector. It's particularly noteworthy to see Mark Heesen's very blunt statement that, while there are strong opportunities in the sector, "short-term 'tourists' should steer clear." The second set of Thomson/ NVCA numbers are from this Moneytree presentation (note: link opens pdf), which shows the dramatic upturn in the cleantech deals they tracked from Q1, to Q2, to Q3 of this year. Their tally shows a more than 4x increase in cleantech venture investing from Q4 2006 to Q3 2007. Finally, while I haven't seen a publicly-released Q3 update, there were similar numbers for 1H07 from Dow Jones/ E&Y, including their calculations that the median pre-money valuation for cleantech venture rounds in both 2006 and 1H07 were up around $30mm, double that of non-cleantech transactions. As always, there are major differences, driven by vaguaries of U.S. versus global tallies, differences in definitions of whether any particular deal should be counted as "cleantech" or fitting into another category, institutional investors versus angel/seed rounds, etc. No need to re-hash that here, we've talked about it before. But the important takeaways from all this are: 1. Cleantech venture investments are in another big upswing, to the point where I would expect (guess?) to see a bit of a "breather" over the next quarter or two. But it's still a very small portion of overall venture capital, and we're still in the early stages of cannibalizing some of the world's biggest industries... After all, the U.S. energy market is about 3 times the size of our IT and telecom markets combined, and yet internet-related investments alone remain higher than cleantech in terms of both number of deals and total dollars. 2. Even during this period of strong investor interest, it still tends to be very much focused in a few "hot" areas -- solar, biofuels, and now water added to the list. Which suggests there are still plenty of other investment areas as yet relatively untapped. 3. The exceptionally high pre-money valuations tracked by Dow Jones don't fit what we're seeing in the marketplace for Series A or B stage deals (with a few spectacular exceptions, of course). So what that tells me is that later-stage investing continues to dominate in the cleantech space. In all likelihood, the MEDIAN deal in the last 18 months or so was a fairly large Series C. Either the early stage is being somewhat neglected, or there are a lot of stealth deals out there. That having been said, there have been some disquieting moves lately by some investors, demonstrating a willingness to write a very big check just to get the resulting attention... One investor I spoke with recently had a two-word warning for those who would purposefully over-capitalize (and thus over-price) a startup as part of a PR/ bizdev strategy: "Sock puppets". In any case, overall valuations have clearly been creeping upward, but the dramatic levels noted by Dow Jones suggest more of a stage-focus issue than anything else. 4. Where are the exits? We'll revisit this subject again soon, but suffice to say that most investments made in this recent surge of VC interest have neither exited nor shaken out, so there's a bit of a portfolio backlog there across the industry. Pulling it all together, cleantech is clearly hot, hot, hot. Yet, while the strong market fundamentals suggest there's still plenty of room to run, it wouldn't be surprising if stage focus shifts and other market/ economic cycle factors dictate a bit of a pause over the next few quarters. There are still many questions, with few answers. Other news and notes: More on the intersection of nanotech and cleantech... How do you pronounce "RE<C"?... MIT is offering a $200k Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize in partnership with NStar and the DOE, so get those business plans ready... Finally, 1.2 billion elephants??? A powerful visual.

Extremely pleased to note [self-promotion alert] that M2E Power has announced an $8mm Series A round of financing, led by OVP Venture Partners, and including participation by @Ventures, Highway 12, and existing investors. The Boise-based company is developing technologies for more efficient applications of electromagnetic induction -- which is at the heart of most generation technologies deployed today. The initial focus of the company will be on the development of motion-to-energy devices for consumer and military devices that could use their innovations for efficient micro-generation to supplement and replace batteries, so that basic daily moving around (walking, driving, etc.) could provide most of the power the device would need. Down the road, generators and motors of all sizes could significantly benefit from the technology. I need one of those M2E "batteries" for my cell phone immediately, Mr. Zander... In other news, Ernst & Young released the results of an interesting survey they did at their recent Strategic Growth Forum. What made it interesting was the prominence of cleantech among CEOs and other corporate attendees at a general business conference, not a sector-specific one. Key takeaways:

1. Around half of attendees reported that energy costs are driving their companies to take on cleantech efforts, and also that they expect energy costs to continue to have a big impact on their businesses over the next five years.
2. Half of those surveyed said that energy efficiency would have the most impact on their businesses, as much as solar, wind, etc. combined.
3. Two-thirds expect that market forces, not government regulations, will spur them to invest in cleantech initiatives.
4. Nevertheless, only 22% of those surveyed said that green initiatives are led from the C-suite level.

So the survey did a very good job of capturing the current mood in corporate America toward cleantech: It's for real, it's becoming a cost of doing business, but it's still not the very top priority. It's still a far cry from how things looked ten years ago when all such environmental initiatives were solely the responsibility of the EH&S department...