In his CleanTechies Blog post, Tom made a strong case that working on the supply side of sustainable agriculture is important at this stage because demand is strong.  He cited data showing strong consumer interest in locally grown food and their willingness to pay a premium for local produce.  I have seen similar data showing strong consumer interest in green/clean cars, energy, and other consumer products.  Tom’s argument can be made in each of these other industries.  The supply of sustainable transportation options is lacking.  Green energy is not available in sufficient supply.  Opportunities to make products & services more sustainable abound.  Tom and the many others who are working on solutions to the many constraints to sustainability should be commended and encouraged.

While I agree with the bulk of Tom’s post, there are three issues that may make focusing solely on the supply side of “green” a sub-optimal approach.

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I was at a drinks party last night and in conversation was asked what I did so I explained that I worked with Clean Tech businesses. To which I was introduced to the next group as an expert, which got me worried, very worried.

The very definition of what is an “expert” can be is somewhat confusing, Wikipedia for example describes it as part of its definition as:

“An expert can be, by virtue of training, education, profession, publication or experience, believed to have special knowledge of a subject beyond that of the average person”

Which automatically begs the question, so who is an average person?”

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The last few months have been very exciting for the CleanTechies team. What started with a first blog post by Ian has grown to a CleanTech internet portal, offering a broad range of features and functionalities.

Since then, we have published 65 blog posts on a variety of CleanTech issues – including the effects of the credit crunch, the impact of cheap oil, the promise of the Obama campaign as well as the state of the international solar market.  
Most of them we published in the last three months after Marco, Ceylan and Hilary got on board and – most importantly – more than 15 motivated industry experts joined the CleanTechies Blogger Team.  

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A few weeks ago I ran a blog regarding the allegations of fraud in the Spanish Solar Sector (news that was published several weeks later at GreenTechMedia.com). The story has since taken a few predictable turns (indignation, a period of silence, crossed fingers, etc) and has now reached the point that the National Energy Commission (CNE) is ramping up the pressure with legal and legislative measures. Specifically, the CNE intends on bringing punitive charges against solar developers who knowingly fabricated paperwork in connection with the September 30th deadline, surpassing what many thought would merely be a series of fines followed by acceptance of the grid connection. It appears that the authorities are taking this very seriously, and rightfully so. If solar is to be a force in distributed generation it should be as much for reasons having to do with transparency as for the simple nature of the technology. The authorities should be applauded on their hard line towards any malfaesance especially given the dismal reputation of the real estate sector.

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My previous article on the Vertical Farm Project received a number of thought-provoking comments from readers. Some of these dealt with food policy and international trade issues that I’ll be looking at in the weeks to come. For now, I would like to respond specifically to part of one very thoughtful comment made by Douglas Romig, a soil scientist based in New Mexico, who wrote:

I’d submit that the innovations we need are primarily in our attitudes about food: eat less meat, buy locally-grown food in season, join a CSA farm, and go organic whenever possible.

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It seems new smart technologies emerge by the day: smart plug-in cars, smart dishwashers, smart coffeemakers… The future will be Green, no doubt about it! For all the praises I have for the engineers and scientists that make it happen, I believe that this is the easy part of making the power grid smart. Implementation of the transformation will be the hard one.

Scale is an obvious challenge. Developed countries’ power grids have been built all along the 20^th century, requiring titanic levels of investments. Upgrades, retrofits and greenfield additions will require a comparable level of efforts. And time. Lots of it. For utilities, short term means 5 years. For my generation of impatient go-getters, used to have everything a click away, grasping this relation to time is a challenge.

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Despite an economy in a deepening recession, plummeting housing values, tight credit and rising foreclosure rates and unemployment, the United States may be on the cusp of a new housing mini-boom – or rather, a ‘mini-housing’ boom.  Of course we first need to stabilize the economy and create millions of new  jobs rebuilding our nation’s energy and public transportation infrastructure, but that’s an issue for another discussion.

State of US Housing Stock
Consumers, when they are once again able to afford a new home, are likely to embrace a new generation of homes that are smaller, sustainable, modular and less costly to own and maintain.  Researchers at MIT’s Department of Architecture House_n project foresee the next generation of homes as “a center for proactive health care, distributed energy production, commerce and learning.” Sadly, the existing base of homes is ill-suited to meet these needs, and are so poorly insulated that an estimated $16B of energy is lost each year through holes and cracks. House_n researchers add that:

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Coming into its own as a clean tech superpower, California is barreling full-speed ahead with sustainable mobility in spite of federal static and U.S. automakers’ morass.

The same day analysts worried Detroit’s Big Three might bail on cleaner cars without a bailout of their own, the Golden State celebrated a sweeping climate action plan to lower greenhouse gases and meet its self-appointed goal to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

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We thought you might be interested in finding information about CleanTech events on the CleanTechies website. Below, we put together a first overview of some upcoming conferences around the world. This is just a start, stay tuned as we will announce more events on this Blog.If you would like us to mention a particular event, please contact us or simply post a comment below. We will update this list to reflect relevant entries. This post has been updated to include additional events.

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Yesterday Q-Cells reduced their revenue guidance for Q4 by 25%, effectively implying there would be no revenues in December. This is just three weeks after being particularly upbeat during their investor conference call. Certainly the signs were there three weeks ago as well, but according to management, shipments of product (solar cells) were strong through November but in the last couple of weeks business slowed down dramatically.

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