Silicon Valley Is Back In Cleantech. Will This Time Be Different?

Silicon Valley Is Back In Cleantech. Will This Time Be Different?

Share to Linkedin In the early 2000s, Silicon Valley funded cleantech with little understanding of the traditional industries that were supposed to want its innovations. After losing billions of dollars, major Silicon Valley VCs decided that cleantech and VC must be incompatible"”until the recent flood of easy ESG and impact capital changed their minds. In 2020, investors piled a record $17 billion into 1, 009 cleantech firms. But there is chatter about whether cleantech VC will work "this time." The cleantech resurgence is vital because the world does not yet have the technologies to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Today's cleantech investments will determine whether climate change can be limited to 2° C above preindustrial levels"”the point beyond which the risks become more severe and unpredictable. So why did cleantech venture capital (VC) collapse in the 2010s, and will "cleantech 2. 0" turn out better? When I started investing in cleantech in 2001, Silicon Valley needed a new bright, shiny object in the wake of the Dotcom Bubble. Solar, biofuels and hydrogen fuel cell technology began to garner attention. But "cleantech" didn't really exist. We joked that people thought it was a new dry-cleaning technology. All that changed