2GreenEnergy Business Models and Strategies

In response to my request for a suggestion on new, untapped strategies and business models for 2GreenEnergy, one of my earliest subscribers wrote:

I have always admired your work and your skills. You are where you belong in CleanTech. It is just standing back and looking at the whole picture. Where was the world before Edison, the Wright brothers, and especially Ford? They, and many more, were all being told that their ideas wouldn’t work.

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.”  

The  president of a bank advising Horace Rackham (Henry Ford’s lawyer) not to invest in Ford Motor Co. in 1903. Rackham ignored his advice, bought $5000 worth of stock and sold it several years later for $12.5 million. Henry Ford struggled for years, went bankrupt several times, and had $223 in his pocket when his first componentized car came to market.

And I could go on and on. You and I are dealing with an ancient industry that is very, very slow to change and is dragging its feet all the way. Hopefully, there are others like you, Henry Ford and I who just hang in there and keep trying.

I responded:

I appreciate your kind and incredibly meaningful words; please accept my profound thanks for all your wonderfully supportive comments since the very beginning; I think you were one of my first 100 subscribers more than five years ago. Your friendship means a great deal to me.

Make no mistake; I’ll definitely keep at it.  All this is deeply rewarding to me.  I take solace in the fact that I know for a fact that I’ve done a great deal of good around here in terms of bringing people together, forwarding the cause of good ideas, getting folks to raise their voices against the tyranny of political corruption, etc.

There is no doubt that the world needs to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and I’m confident that we as a civilization will get there.  The question, of course, is how much damage we will have done in the process—and that is an unanswerable one.  I suspect that the moneyed elite will find a way to live through the scourge of climate change, ocean acidification, water and food shortages, loss of biodiversity – and even, for the most part, the damage to our lungs and other assaults to our health.  But the vast majority of humankind (not to mention other life forms) are facing a level of suffering on an unprecedented scale – and people like you and I are doing what we can to prevent our taking the brunt of it.

A bit of financial success in the near term will serve to accelerate my efforts; I’d certainly prefer to avoid the bankruptcies that Ford experienced. Being on the right side of an issue is good. Garnering the financial support required to affect big change is another.

Again, thanks.