Will global warming end up a profit chill?
Interesting to note the trend of firms (Terra Firma and EDF) spinning off their renewable / sustainable business units to ride the “green wave”
Whilst I am a firm believer in and supporter of the renewable energy / sustainable living movement, my markets head does keep whispering in my ear “beware of tulips”
Hey Nigel, interesting first few posts (thanks to JP for the link) ….. and I suspect there’s a large constituency with similar thoughts. Looking forward to future posts. I’ve recently “crawled feebly” into my 40’s after almost twenty years in high tech for large multinational corporations …. with sustainability, “off-grid living”, greater local community focus and the like featuring increasing in my thoughts. Had my spirits lifted by a tip from Euan Semple for Tom Hodgkinson’s book “How to be Free”. Smile inducing …. supporting the anarchistic fantasies of a bourgeois boy
Well worth a read! Travis Bradfords “Solar Revolution” is also worth a look.
We are starting to see some interesting business models around solar (http://renu.citizenre.com/index.php?p=svc_overview) where capital is starting to flow into distributed infrastructure. Grid connection still an issue. The energy storage piece is such a key gap …. looking forward to the future conversations on this. Regards, David.
David Quinn said this on April 11, 2007 at 2:07 pm
David – very interesting regarding the Citizenre.com link. I was looking at a similar business model where the capital cost (or “adoption hump” in MBA speak) was borne by the energy vendor and the client essentially enters into a forward / leasing trade with the energy vendor. The next stage was micro-trading of capacity (excess and needs) as entioned by Sean in his response to one of my other posts.
Governments go someway toward this in terms of legislation supporting tax breaks and price buy-back guaranteesfor excess local generation.
Interesting area of risk to invest in potentially…
Nigel said this on April 13, 2007 at 3:57 pm