Will Green Pay Enough To Stay Keen?
by Miki Saxon
How real is green biz? We read about it all the time. Pundits debate the talk vs. the walk; CEOs worry about the “carbox” effect; and investors try to understand the impact.
Google “green business” and you get over 3 million hits and green was the primary subject at the Davos World Economic Forum this year.
“No doubt green is a central theme in Davos this year, where more than 2,500 participants from 88 countries are meeting to discuss key global issues. Some 20 sessions —many of them private—are dedicated to environmental issues. … “Evolution is not a response,” cautions Simon Mulcahy, head of information technology industries at the World Economic Forum. “Big behavioral changes need to happen now and technology is a fundamental game-changer.”
Green tech, also called clean tech, was a major subject at the Stanford Summit, too, and its increasing visibility and potential is taking a significant chunk of dollars invested.
How good will the returns be? Emanio CEO KG Charles-Harris, who attended the Summit for me, has a personal slant on the subject.
“When I co-founded HURD (the private investment vehicle of Norway’s Fred. Olsen family in alternative technologies) in Scandinavia in 1996, this was an unusual area to invest in.
Our strategy was to focus on what we perceived to become major constraints in the coming decades; clean air, clean water, cheap renewable energy and cheap protein.
Most people we interacted with, especially in the US, were incredulous that this was something we believed would provide a strong ROI. We persisted in our strategic focus and during the years I was there we had an IRR of more than a thousand percent each year.
At the time it was a well kept secret. Now, however, investing in clean tech and renewable energy is becoming so mainstream that the days of unusually high returns are over.”
Are they? As green tech goes mainstream and the market matures will the returns remain significant?
If not, will the innovators and their backers walk away from the problems?
Image credit: jsyvrsn
