To boldly go where no green technology has gone before
The growing concerns about climate change are opening up golden opportunities for scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to come up with ways to reduce the harmful effects of old technologies and to find alternative energy sources.The problem, however, is in identifying the right ideas and in bringing them successfully to a nervous market. At the same time, established industries and commercial companies must recognise that global warming presents a business advantage as well as a risk to be managed.
“Only business can build a low-carbon economy,” Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, said. “Business is all about seeing ideas and growing them. Businesses have the resources, the people, the technical skills to make things happen — and they have channels to market.”
Delay, a former Shell executive, believes that start-up companies with a low-carbon idea face a four-stage journey if they are to be successful. “The first stage is to make sure that the technology is robust, has the potential to break into a difficult market, will be cheaper than existing technologies and will be viable in the long term without a subsidy,” he said.
Companies must have a management team “up to the task” of taking the project forward and of recognising when and if they need to seek investors or a parent to develop it to its full potential. The final stage is to keep abreast of regulatory changes that might benefit or threaten the project.
“It’s a bit like the Wild West out there,” Delay said. “Low carbon is a lot more complex than the ordinary business world. Winners and losers are more difficult to predict.”
The Carbon Trust is an independent company set up by the Government to work with the private and public sectors to cut carbon emissions and develop new technologies. Among the green projects it supports are second generation biofuel production, solar cell technologies and industrial chemical processes. It has also provided funds for National Building Technologies, a supplier of sustainable building materials and insulation systems.
Adam Workman, of Carbon Trust Investment Partners, says that the intention is to identify opportunities, finance them, and get them to the stage where a bigger investor might run with them.
In the initial excitement over low-carbon technologies, inventors and entrepreneurs were naive in their approach to investors. David Sneddon, at the venture capital group Scottish Equity Partners, said: “Three or four years ago, most of the clean-tech proposals we looked at were from visionaries and not practical, but now proposals are more bedded in realism.”
Plenty of scope remains for further clean solutions. Sneddon said: “We have invested in CamSemi, of Cambridge, which targets the power electronics market, focusing on energy-saving. If laptops, desktops and mobile phones can be made to work faster and more efficiently, power consumption will be reduced.”
The need to solve the “standby” power problem is also under investigation and might require the redesign of consumer goods such as washing machines and televisions.
Delay identifies fuel-cell technology and bio-mass as further areas ripe for development. He said that fuel cells are a very clever way of turning hydrogen into electricity but need to be made more widely available. There are also opportunities to extract energy sustainably from things such as algae that can be burnt or pressed to provide oil.