Demystifying the Stimulus Package – the state and the entrepreneur’s perspective.
Feds
Matt Rogers, the special assistant to Steven Chu at DOE, has to disperse $1.2 billion per week for the next few months in a combination of grants and loan guarantees. He has to do it with transparency and has to do it fast. Kind of like Brewster’s Millions.
This type of government energy-related largesse can bring out the best in entrepreneurs and it can also bring out the crazies. Certainly this is a bonanza for lobbyists, D.C.-based lawyers and anyone with grant-writing experience (see Jeff St. John’s coverage of that portion of the program).
State
In addition to the Federal viewpoint we heard from representatives from the State of California and from the entrepreneur’s perspective.
The state panel had a few interesting points:
“The checks may get written in Washington but it gets built locally. Every dollar spent passes through the lens of regulators in 50 states,” said Tim Newell of US Renewables Group, and the moderator of the state panel.
According to Newell, total spending from the feds will be about $160 billion. “The size of the renewables market is about $100 billion so the federal government is really doubling down on the entire renewable market,” he said.
Will Semmes of the California Department of General Services told the audience of about 250 entrepreneurs and investors: “If you have identified something interesting and a source of funding – bring those deals to us.” He also recommended that people visit www.recovery.ca.gov for more details on how California is going to obtain and execute on the billions of federal funding
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs were also invited to share their success and horror stories with the crowd.
Tesla Motors’ Diarmuid O’Connell, the VP of business development, spoke a bit about Tesla: “The companies mission is to develop mass market EVs over time.”
O’Connell spoke of the funding and political lessons learned along the way. “It is a long game,” he said.
“If you haven’t got the relationships in place you’re going to have scramble to get them. It’s a very personal business,” he added.
Joshua Bar-Lev, VP of Regulatory Affairs, at solar thermal power tower hero, BrightSource provided another entrepreneur’s take on getting government funding.
BrightSource has 2200-megawatts of solar power under contract scheduled for delivery over the next seven years and was one of the first new renewable energy firms in the regulatory loop. They realized that the stimulus bill was a jobs bill not a technology bill and they highlighted the number of jobs their company and its’ projects would create. The “tremendous story” to tell was about jobs.
Bar Lev said that in lobbying for their funding, “The smartest thing we did was we realized we needed to come in with all the different constituencies. So we brought in PG&E, Google, Madison Dearborn, and GE.”
“It was shocking to see congress working effectively,” Bar-Lev confessed.
