Years ago when I was much younger and contemplating starting my own dot com company, I sat down with a successful and experienced entrepreneur who had built more than one business from scratch. This particular entrepreneur was also a former Marine, so he had earned his grey hairs and steely look in more than one way. I shared my ideas with him and he gave (more…)

A little over a year after 10 cleantech companies were awarded their “Best in Class” distinctions at the 2011 Global Cleantech Cluster Association Later Stage Awards, the firms have collectively secured $462.24 million in funding and project contracts, with additional funding undisclosed. Most recently, Best in Energy Efficiency winner Albeo (more…)

Every year around this time since 2007, as executive editor of a leading global cleantech research and news service, I’ve contributed to predictions on what to expect in the year ahead in cleantech.

We’ve kept that tradition alive here at Kachan & Co. We don’t claim a perfect track record, but we’ve been eerily prescient and nailed some biggies a (more…)

Eilat Eilot, Israel’s international yearly event in the renewable energy arena, is underway now in Eilat. The event kicked off with EnergyVest, the investment summit of the conference, on November 26th.

We spoke to one of the organizers of the event, Ophir Gore, Director of the Renewable Energy and Alternative Fuels Department at Israel NewTech. (more…)

The bubble has burst. The hype and euphoria of 2008 and 2009 is a distant memory. Fueled in part by the externality of the stimulus handouts from the stimulus package, and the (now fleeting) spike of natural gas and oil prices, cleantech has experienced its own mini dotcom era now followed by a dot bomb phase.

The politicization of Solyndra, the fracking revolution (more…)

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 (more…)

Eric McAfee is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist, founding and funding companies in renewable energy, oil and gas, agriculture, networking devices and enterprise software. Given that level of success, I tried to absorb every word of his talk at last week’s Renewable Energy Finance Forum. (more…)

Clean energy innovation in the United States is moving to financially friendlier shores—like China

Looking at 2011 VC investment figures, it seems like the cleantech industry in the United States is doing just fine. According to the Cleantech Group, a market intelligence advisory group based in San Francisco (more…)

ACORE, which stands for the American Council on Renewable Energy, was established in 2001 and is a non-profit organization in the United States that remains solely focused on increasing the speed of adoption for renewable energy technologies into the American mainstream society. ACORE, which is based in Washington DC, offers a platform for a large variety (more…)

It’s easy to become discouraged about cleantech when headlines focus on one company after another that fails to make it work. Frequently the issue is not technology, but rather management, the supply chain, or the business model. Cleantech companies often have the added burden of creating value where there was none before. Being visionary is riskier than (more…)