[Graeme]

Alternative-Energy Companies Grow Even as Others Falter

While many small businesses continue to struggle with tight credit and declining sales, one fledgling industry is seeing a boom in investment and sales growth: alternative energy.

Alternative-energy firms are reporting an influx of inquiries and business from a wide range of companies looking to increase their energy efficiency, especially from those that believe the Obama administration will impose stricter regulations requiring them to conserve energy.

So start-ups across a variety of areas -- solar power, biofuels and energy conservation among them -- are getting increased financing from venture capitalists and lenders at a time when other small companies are cutting back and being turned away by investors. And many are hiring more staff, boosting marketing efforts and expanding geographically.

Alternative energy "has been the brightest sector in venture capital over the last year," says Brian Fan, research director at Cleantech Group, an industry trade organization in San Francisco. "Everyone is thinking it's going to be a big priority of the incoming administration."

wsj

[heroineworshipper]

Why are those venture capitalists investing in green tech when they're supposed to be buying t-bills to fund mortgage bailouts?

[spiritof1976]

Why are those venture capitalists investing in green tech when they're supposed to be buying t-bills to fund mortgage bailouts?

Maybe the money is coming from the Gulf states?

Gulf Oil States Seeking a Lead in Clean Energy

A quick extract:

To hedge their positions, then, an increasingly sophisticated generation of largely Western-educated leaders in the Middle East are seizing on green business opportunities, by seeding research in faraway nations.

The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, announced last January that he would invest $15 billion in renewable energy. That is the same amount that President-elect Obama has proposed investing — in the entire United States — “to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future.”

And another:

In Saudi Arabia, the new state-owned King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, gave a Stanford scientist $25 million last year to start a research center on how to make the cost of solar power competitive with that of coal. Kaust, now in its first grant cycle, also gave $8 million to a Berkeley researcher developing green concrete.

And it has other agreements as well, with Caltech, Cambridge, Cornell, Imperial, La Sapienza, Oxford and Utrecht, to name just a few.

In November, the Qatari government signed an agreement with Britain’s visiting prime minister, Gordon Brown, to invest £150 million, or more than $220 million, in a British low-carbon technology fund, dwarfing the fund’s investments from home.

[Graeme]

Venture capitalist says U.S. losing green race

Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, whose early investments helped launch Google and Amazon, delivered a stark warning to Congress on Wednesday that the United States is on the verge of being left behind in the green tech revolution.

Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is betting billions on clean energy technologies, told senators that two of his firm's biggest investments were with foreign firms because U.S. companies did not have the most advanced technology. Of the top 30 companies in solar, wind and advanced batteries, just six are U.S. firms.

"Notice the trend here," Doerr told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "We won the space race with the Soviet Union. Now as (New York Times columnist) Tom Friedman says, we're in an Earth race with other nations to see who can invent the technology so that men and women can stay on Earth. And we are not winning today."

sfgate

[outcast]

But wait, according to the doomers we're not supposed to be able to develop alternative energy systems, particularly during major economic crises. We're supposed to be d00m3d. Could it be that the doomers are wrong (yet again)?