One of the business plans I support is a breakthrough in wind turbine construction, essentially rooted on getting the same production as today’s design, while using significantly less materials, thus cutting costs substantially. But in my quest to help them raise the investment capital they need to move forward, I’m running into investors who are unsure of
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Renewable Energy
I subscribe to a great number of free online newsletters that cover cleantech at a fairly broad level, and though I certainly don’t read every word, I do glance through them. If you have a spare minute, I would ask you to check out this article from SmartGridNews, and tell me what you think.
What do the cleantech companies ElectronVault, SEaB Energy, and BlackGold Biofuels all have in common? Female executives at or near the top of the food chain.
Marissa Mayer, the recently appointed CEO of Yahoo, drew a lot of attention because of her gender and the fact that she was pregnant when she took the position at a major company.
It’s no wonder she stood out: females make up a relatively minuscule 4 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives . And a pregnant CEO is even rarer: while some of those female CEO’s have had children prior to reaching the top spot, Mayer might have been the first ever pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 company .
But in my experience working with the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program, the idea of a female executive is positively unremarkable—even a pregnant one.
“I can’t tell you how many high profile women I’ve met in this space,” agrees Linda Maepa, a Caltech grad and chief operating officer of ElectronVault, a manufacturer of battery systems that can be used to efficiently store and distribute energy. “I think there’s something about the intersection between renewable energy and long-term problem-solving that draws women. For example, the head of the battery program at GM is a female, as is the founder of battery technology company Boston Power.”
Maybe Linda’s on to something here, because our next exec also plays in that same intersection. Sandra Sassow heads UK-based SEaB Energy, a provider of on-site containers that generate renewable energy from waste. Like many others, she was drawn to clean tech by the idea of improving on the status quo and giving back to the planet—all while taking a company from startup, to first products, to first revenues.
Does successfully growing a business leave time for family? Absolutely. Sassow says: “I have four children (three daughters and a son), and I have worked full time all throughout. I hope I am a good role model for my three daughters especially, as they face some of the same challenges that I have faced.”
Emily Landsburg, CEO of BlackGold Biofuels—another renewable energy company focused on generating energy from the fats, oils, and greases in wastewater—is hopeful that people will see that there is no conflict between being a C-suite executive and being a mother. “If I had Googled ‘pregnant CEO’ two and half years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, I would’ve gotten a blank page of results,” says Landsburg. “That’s pretty sad. We need more visibility for female CEOs so that we can get to a point where people don’t give a second thought to the fact that a CEO is a female or is pregnant.”
Fortunately, these three women are doing their part to move things in that direction simply by leading their companies to success. The sooner we reach the point Landsburg describes, the better. Not just because studies show that companies with a high representation of women on their top management teams have better financial performance – but because the problems that cleantech is looking to solve are too big not to draw upon all the brightest available minds in the workforce.
And while ElectronVault, SEaB Energy, and BlackGold Biofuels might not be Yahoo-sized at the moment, keep watching this space: you might just spot the next Marissa Mayer.
If the notion “he who lives by the subsidy dies by the subsidy” is true, then oil, gas and nuclear companies must be dying a thousand deaths.
“A Sad Green Story,” the recent New York Times article by David Brooks, is way off the mark with where we need to go as a country and as an entire planet. Now is not the time to malign investments in
The public relations machine that works so hard to generate doubt about climate change and the extreme weather events it causes must have its hands full at this point. 2012 was a year in which the United States had no winter, a March with most of the country above 80 degrees F, floods in its three largest rivers, a horrific drought all summer, and
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently shut down an anti-wind power ad run by the Trump Organization and Communities Against Turbines Scotland on the grounds that the picture and text of the ad were misleading (see the Treehugger piece here).
The ad (reproduced below) said “Welcome to
As one can imagine, the law firms that work for the renewable energy industry are quite busy in helping their clients navigate the issues that surround the development of major projects, whether they’re in solar, wind, biomass, etc. The large law firm Stoel Rives specializes in this space, and was good enough to speak with me at length at last month’s
Here’s an important white paper that my friend Tim Kingston just sent me, that frankly, I’m unlikely to read.
Say what?
It’s on a financial issue, master limited partnerships (MLPs), that I’ve heard plenty about over the last two meetings of the Renewable Energy Finance Forum,
We’re so politically polarized about energy, it’s news when we’re not.
Exceptions exist, of course, but generally one side identifies with fossil fuels, the other with renewable energy. And energy efficiency seems to be the lucky orphan left out of the pick.
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient
The pace of wind energy development on public lands is picking up. Interior Ken Salazar announced this week that the Department has reached its goal of authorizing 10,000 megawatts of renewable power on public lands with the approval of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project site as suitable for wind energy development. The Project is
The World Bank and the Government of the Netherlands provided support to a Mongolian program aimed at bringing solar power to the country’s nomadic herders. The project, called “Renewable Energy and Rural Electricity Access” (REAP), was funded by a US $3.5 million grant from the International Development Association (IDA), a US $3.5 million
With October now upon us, data providers are beginning to issue their preliminary analyses of cleantech investment in the third quarter of 2012 that just closed. This quarter, the Clean Energy pipeline service of London’s VBResearch is the first to weigh in, counting cleantech venture capital & private equity investment (excluding buyouts) as approximately $1.7 billion.
Data from other providers, like Dow Jones
While at most conferences on solar energy, people talk about the BoS (Balance of System), at the SOCAP 12 conference held last week in San Francisco, it was all about the lessons learned from the BoP (Bottom of the Pyramid)—or the world’s largest, poorest demographic. That’s not only because the many renewable energy businesses working in developing
Interconnection standards are the legal rules and procedures for “plugging” a renewable energy system into the power grid. With oversight from their regulators, utilities have traditionally determined which systems may connect to the grid and how arduous that process is. As you can imagine, interconnection standards that are unclear, full of