Getcleantech at Cleantech Forum San Francisco
More than 600 interested participants from a dozen countries came to San Francisco to talk Cleantech and it seems that the evolving sector is better than ever – okay, not better than the mid-late 2000s but better than 2013.
getcleantech.com went to this industry flagship event to see if Matthew Nordan, as he concluded back in March 2013 was still right, “investment is stalling, LPs are hesitating, and cleantech VCs are thinning: Capital invested in other domains is showing a greater near-term return.”
Dissecting the crowd, I found about 70 companies whose primary purpose is the provision of capital with more than 55 at the venture level. Better than many conferences getcleantech has attended, there was about a 60/40 attendance split for men/women with about the same ratio for the speakers. That promising diversity ratio was improved by the large number of excellent volunteers for the CleanTech Group and the strong presence from the Nordic countries; but just to be clear, there were a lot of middle-aged white guys in dark suits.
And so many Canadians – easily 1/3 including the strong representation and sponsorship from Global Affairs and Natural Resources!
Electrical energy generation and storage are the themes that come to mind for many not in the industry and continues to be an important part of the conversations. With solar power at grid parity in many places, massive adoption of small distributed generation across the “Majority World” (what I learned is the new and correct term for the “developing markets”) and commercially available battery storage systems for homes and the entire grid, much of the physical work has been done.
Now software, data, analytics and other cross-sector technologies dominate the new push in the energy, water, sustainability, environment and resource technologies we loosely call cleantech. At least 30% of the presenters spoke directly on the subject area and more than 80% mentioned data analytics.
Some of the historically dominant themes of hydrogen, fuel cells, clean coal, and biogas have receded into the background.
About the only truly common undertone to the entire event, other than the complex political situation in the USA and the UK, was the desire to make Cleantech work on a MUCH BIGGER scale. Like other sectors with billion dollar “unicorn” valuations, venture and other investors want Cleantech to grow up and provide good returns at large scale – and so is born the fintech age of Cleantech. Innovative ways to connect people, ideas, projects and companies to finance at the “hundreds of millions” level is so 2017.
Supporting the acceptance and growth of Cleantech across the globe for more than 25 years now @getcleantech @isleutilities @blueworg