At the Red Herring spring conference, as the magazine reported here, several cleantech VCs including Bill Green (Vantage Point), Chuck McDermott (Rockport), and Nancy Floyd (Nth) talked about how far behind the U.S. is falling when it comes to clean energy technologies.
As usual, Bill, Chuck and Nancy have it right, and in fact this trend has been easy to see for a while now (see this 2001 MSNBC article, for example). In 2002, Japan-based PV manufacturers made 251.1MW of solar panels; Europe-based manufacturers made 135.1MW; and US-based manufacturers only made 120.6MW. In terms of wind power, Germany has over 15GW of installed capacity, first in the world; the U.S. is tied with Spain at down around 7GW or so.
But while things may be growing faster overseas than here at home, they're still growing quickly here too. And once one looks outside of energy generation to other clean technologies such as clean water technologies, clean manufacturing, intelligent energy efficiency technologies, etc., U.S. cleantech markets look very robust indeed.
