I spent most of yesterday evening helping out at the California Clean Tech Open. Each of the six category winners got a “Start-up in a box”, which is $25k plus another $25k worth of pro-bono legal, marketing, and accounting services. The room at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was packed wall-to-wall with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and hangers-on like me. If there’s anywhere else to be in the clean tech scene I’d sure love to see it; the whole thing felt like ground zero of the New New Economy.
The entire world at any given moment consumes 14TW of power (yes, trillionwatts every second). By 2050, the world will be consuming twice that much. Even with conventional energy sources that demand is nearly impossible to meet. Without terrible wars, rampant poverty and complete environmental meltdown, meeting that demand cleanly is an outright fantasy unless we have something like a Clean Industrial Revolution. Seeing the brainpower in that room last night gave me new hope that revolution might actually happen.