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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I try to read VentureBeat whenever I can, to see what’s happening in the world of capital formation for start-ups in green tech.  Here’s an article that offers a summary of renewable energy trends that you may find useful.

It’s interesting how  many different prognostications there are about the adoption curve for renewables.  One reads some some really wild stuff.  I’m finishing up another white paper along the “tough realities” theme, which concludes with 10 top questions — none of which is really amenable to a hard and fast answer.

To me, all this  shows that the answer truly is “blowin’ in the wind.”  I.e., it’s a function of how fired up we get and demand solutions.  I’m reminded of Henry Kissinger recent statement, “If it weren’t for the wrath of the American people about our presence in Vietnam, we’d STILL BE THERE.”  (emphasis added) That’s an amazing thing for a political leader to admit, isn’t it?

Never think for a minute that you have no voice.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Both of yesterday’s lead stories in the WSJ re-assert Rupert Murdoch’s ultra-right-wing position that the public sector needs to refrain from setting energy policy that would affect private enterprise – even as the ecological toll of business-as-usual continues to escalate. In particular:

The front-page lead story “Climate Panel Faces Heat” is another in a long-running series suggesting that global warming is a hoax, engineered presumably by greedy climate scientists all grabbing for grant money.

“US Wants Report Card for Cars,” is the headline story in the second section, (“Marketplace”). It begins, “The government proposed labeling each new passenger car with a letter grade from A to D,” and points out how the plan is criticized in that the government is making a judgement as to the value of cars.

Wasn’t there a time a when newspapers just reported the news?

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Biomass

from biomass

by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

A friend of mine who is trying to raise public or private money for his extremely well-conceived electric vehicle start-up just wrote to me with words that ring true:

[We’ll be attending the] upcoming Annual Congressional Business Summit, and this is a point of focus for me right now. I don’t know what they will do, other than to hear them say, “Wow what a neat idea.”　 I guess I shouldn’t be a cynic, but the last 14 months have opened my eyes as to the two-facedness of Congress.　 They like to talk about how small business is the source of 80% of the new jobs, and then promptly deliver money to the large corporations that spend most of their time trying to make sure small businesses evaporate.　 Millions in campaign support and a veritable army of lobbyists seems to be working just fine.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

In response to my white paper on The Tough Realities of Marketing and Sales, a reader points out a few of the economic realities that, in his mind, supersede the points I make in the report. In particular, he notes that there is currently no true market economy for things like biofuels:

All Sustainable businesses have a particular feature: they are always evaluated on a payback or IRR basis. We are in an oil based economy and not on a Sustainable Economy. Biofuels and energy are not marketable by any company but the utilities or distribution companies in each case. You can get biofuels from many technologies, but at the gas station you buy oil, not biofuels. Probably if you look, you will find a huge law on biofuels and how they can be marketed that is everything but compelling for biofuels to be used. Taxes alone make the business tough and customers are wary about using biofuels even in low percentages … Either taxes are on the side of biofuels or they always need incentives and subsidies to be competitive.

The reader goes on to point out that the same lack of liquidity exists for electricity: (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

When my friend Paul Scott, co-founder of Plug-In America took a trip to Yokohama last June to test drive the Nissan Leaf, I never dreamed it would include a private lunch with CEO, Carlos Ghosn — and ultimately — a gig selling the Leaf at Santa Monica Nissan.  If you’re in town and want a great EV made by a team truly committed to the future of clean transportation, ask for Paul.  Tell ’em Craig sent ya.

See his blog post on the subject here.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

If you haven’t seen British comedian Robert Newman’s The History of Oil, I beg you: set aside 45 minutes and check this out.

I spend a great deal of my life looking for ways to express the imperative to break our addiction to oil, based on explicating concepts like peak oil and wars that are secretly about oil.  But I never dreamed that someone with an unimaginable level of understanding and talent had done it 100 times better than I could ever hope to.  Enjoy.

Thanks so much to frequent guest blogger Cameron Atwood for bringing it to my attention.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s a post on philosophy — relevant to our discussion as it deals with the proper role of government in defining policy and in our lives more generally. 

It happens to be the birthday of John Locke, 17th Century British “empiricist,” meaning that he believed that all knowledge is derived from the senses. He’s actually better known for his political philosophy; Locke was one of the first to assert that all people had different classes of rights, and that the role of government was to protect those rights. His thinking figured prominently into our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution about 100 years later — and for that, we all owe him our gratitude. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketI try to stay at least partially connected to the mainstream coverage of renewable energy and electric transportation – not so much because I believe there is truth there, but because I need to know what the mainstream consumers believe. This morning’s article in the Wall Street Journal on the Nissan LEAF was telling, for two reasons:

The author asserts, “Such a car would have been science fiction five years ago.” This, of course, is utter tripe. Until they famously killed the electric car over a decade ago, GM was making EVs that its customers absolutely adored. Some insiders report that the project was killed not because it was a failure, but for the precise opposite reason: it proved that the world had a huge appetite for electric transportation, and GM had no sincere interest in heading in that direction. At the same time, Toyota was having a similar experience with its electric RAV-4. When the decision came to recall and crush all the EVs, a maelstrom of protest arose, the remnants of which are still present in our conversations today. In any case, it most certainly completely untrue that the LEAF would have been science fiction five years ago.  Anyone trying to follow this subject with any level of precision and honesty has to wonder about the agenda that could drive revisionist history like this.

The other obvious point the author repeats dozens of times through the article is that the driving experience is a nonevent. “I can think of hundreds of ways to describe the Maserati’s ear-strafing exhaust, but I’m at a loss to describe the nearly mute and rheostatic squeeze-and-go response of the LEAF,” he writes. He goes on with similar language to describe the braking system, the turning, etc. – ensuring that any reader will feel like less of a person to purchase a LEAF.

Again, one wonders about the agenda here.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Biomass

I just got a call from a gentleman from Montgomery Street Research who asked a very good question: Is there a single, current document that lays out the state of the art in biomass-to-energy? There are so many wrinkles to this, but principally, I suppose, these two:

* Dozens of different technologies – any one of which could be appropriate to a certain kind of site and feedstock.

* Different levels of commercial viability depending (obviously) on the cost of feedstock and the price of take-off — but also on government incentives that would tend to make a project this more attractive – or less so.

Occasionally I come across something that looks perfect, only to glance down and see that it’s ancient. Anything more than a year old, I would suggest, is probably out of date.

If anyone can point us in the right direction, that would be terrific.

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