The price of implementing clean energy by Tony Green

I read an article written by Michelle Kraus as a Special to the Mercury News titled,” Clean tech in the future but funding is another story” which talked about the challenges of investing in clean tech. The piece reported the credit needed to fund renewable energy projects, which are extremely capital intensive, has become a challenge with the struggling economy.

Many of the ventures, in spite of their fascinating technology, are not making any money, really profit, and contain no guarantees their technology is scalable, i.e. able to be adopted in large scale.

Unless a company enjoys access to wealthy people or banks willing to loan money into these ventures or provide an available line of credit surviving it may be difficult to get these businesses to generate enough sales to sustain them, let’s be honest, bootstrapping can only go so far.

The fact remains without the financial support the alternative energies need promising technologies and companies who can change the way we live such as Google, Cisco, and Microsoft might not become the companies they are today.
The reality is VC’s, angels and other institutional investors built Silicon Valley from its beginnings as much as the innovators who founded companies and their dedicated employees are the investors whose money to allowed these innovators to chase their dreams.

Now what? The current circumstances require innovative solutions to these problems be determined. Necessity is the mother and father of invention. People will find a way. Our energy future depends on it.