A lot of stories worth tracking from the last week or so...
- Regarding solar technology, here's an interesting story about the amount of investing China is putting into building their domestic solar industry. Will that be an opportunity or a threat to solar companies elsewhere?
- Should have mentioned the California Clean Tech Open before. Many readers of this site will already be aware of it, but you can read more about it here and here. Terrific idea. Also, Xerox PARC has put out some more information about their own cleantech efforts. Get those business plans going! ...It's also a great sign for us expansion-stage investors for down the road.
- The team at the Cleantech Venture Network is teaming up with hedge fund investors Kurzman Investment Partners. It'll be interesting to see what this partnership looks like as it develops... Also, Kjartan has asked me to make sure and mention again what a great job the Cleantech Venture Network team did with last week's Forum, many kudos all around.
- Here's an interesting article comparing the energy technology market today to the telecom market of a few years back. The author mentions the emergence of distributed generation and energy storage technologies -- I'd also throw in remote monitoring and automated control of energy assets as a key enabling technology. (Thanks to Michael Leyba for pointing us to this article)
- We haven't mentioned geothermal energy much here, as for the most part (with some definite exceptions) there isn't as much entrepreneurial activity with these technologies as there might be for some others. But the industry is apparently expected to grow quickly, take note.
- Green laptops? The really interesting thing here is the use of renewable energy certificates (in this case, from hydro) as part of marketing for the products... A sign of an emerging marketing trend?
