Sunday, February 8, 2009

Green & Clean Tech

This week (Feb 5th, 2009) I attended the Green&Clean show here in Menlo Park arranged by SD Forum. The overview of the event can be found in here.

First things First:
It was attended by over 100 people and had 6 panelists moderated by Greg Heibel from Orrick. The session continued from 6- 9 p.m. with some mingling at the beginning and tail end and was attended by an inspired audience. To me (someone totally green about green) it was a session worthwhile attending.

My biggest takeway was a high level on Obama/Biden Energy Plan. Here it is:

• Create five million new jobs by investing $150 billion over the next ten years.
• Within 10 years save more oil than we import from the Middle East and Venezuela.
One million Plug-In Hybrid cars – up to 150 mpg – on the road by 2015
• Ensure 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2012, and 25% by 2025
• Implement cap‐and‐trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050

You can read the full details here.

Ten Additional Things which I learned:
1. 2008 saw huge VC funding in Green & Clean. That money is still in the hands of startups!

2. City of San Jose has a huge green initiative. You can access it here.

3. California is uniquely positioned for Green & Clean because of Mojave desert and great Sun!

4. California uses 50% per person electrical power compared to national average.

5. Trying to explore Social Network & community technologies, I found about Positive Energy.

6. Researching about this show i found about this tool to track Clean Energy investments

7. Here is the link to Kleiner Perkins Green Initiative:

8. AB32 is a big deal.
AB 32 Bill requires that by 2020 the state's greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels, a roughly 25% reduction under business as usual estimates. The California Air Resources Board, under the California Environmental Protection Agency, is to prepare plans to achieve the objectives stated in the Act. Green House Gases include CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs and SF6 in the Kyoto Protocol.

9. This field needs Interactive Reporting.

10. Green Tech must make sense, watch Vinod Khosla.


I will eagerly await your thoughts.
Best Regards, Somnath

3 comments:

Raj said...

Very nice! I look fwd to more insightful blog entries from you. You could publish your blog to your FB account too.

Dhruba Borthakur said...

Cool! It woudl be nice if you can post it to FB, helps me follow it regularly.

Dhiman Bhattacharjee said...

Very nice posting, thanks for sharing. These are very good data points which underlines the current and future investment in clean and green tech. The big question to my mind is identifying opportunities for software applications that the green tech enterprises will need in their business and technology opertaions. My two cents in that direction:

1). Apps to manage the installations such as wind energy towers, solar panel installations etc.
2) Green tech centric data models that would support aggregation, storage and distribution of produced energy
3) Individual consumers to measure how much clena energy they are using vs how much of dirty energy
4) Enterprises to track their carbon foorprint across different entities including - factories, transportation, employees etc.