Corporate investors make green technology a multi-billion dollar industry
Recent investments in green technology will make oil obsolete in the near future.
Corporate investors in search of green technologies are set to create a multi-billion dollar industry in the next five years , as regulatory, corporate and consumer pressure to go green mounts on businesses.
The vast amounts of capital invested in the sector are all in the hope of finding the Holy Grail of green technology: products that are cheaper to make without the use of oil.
As Steven Lang who heads UK and Ireland's Cleantech acknowledges, "We've seen major amounts of capital flowing into clean energy and clean technology, and governments increasingly want to use the sector as a driver for international competitiveness."
Green technology investment is also being affected by recent energy legislation- especially 2010's feed-in tariff which allows businesses to profit from generating clean electricity to sell to the national grid.
This will no doubt be the greatest financial incentive in the United Kingdom for corporate investors to invest in green technology. Early-stage investment in green technology is still a considerable challenge for corporate investors.
Venture capital for green technology is no different from other unproven technologies: PetroAlgae specializing in algae-fuel has lost US$66 million in the last three years with no revenues; electric vehicle company Tesla has lost US$38.5 million in the second-quarter; Codexis, a company specializing in enzymes used in biofuels, has lost US$3.9 million this year following from a US$2.9 million loss last year; and A123 systems specializing in lithium batteries has lost US$34.2 million in the second-quarter.
Despite obvious losses, investment in new energy-efficient infrastructure technology is predicted to rise, especially cooling and power systems.
Rather than new technology, improvements to existing technology such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), equipment power supply units (PSUs) and power distribution units (PDUs) will help in reducing power loss.
This new technology will take advantage of free-cooling systems (using air and water to channel outside temperatures), and liquid cooling. Investment will be important in the automation and integration of IT equipment.
Green technology will also include the shift to virtualization. Analyst Eric Woods predicts that green data centers will be the way of the future, "Energy-efficiency is bolstering the case for moving to a virtualized environment.
Further down the line, we will see more innovations around energy efficiency in processors, servers, storage and network equipment." Green data center measures are predicted to reduce energy consumption by 20 per cent by 2015.
The majority of the virtualization process will use cloud-based computing systems.
"We expect to see more companies looking to outsourcers, private cloud providers and infrastructure-as-a-service companies to offload not only the IT operational burden but also an element of their carbon emission responsibilities," Woods predicts, "Also where the data center remains an in-house enterprise capability, the internal IT team will need to match the service levels and efficiency metrics offered by a new generation of cloud-based services."
This will not only reduce the IT operational burden, but speed up the transformation of virtual data as a whole.
Author: Edurne Scott | Climate Action
Image: Biggunben |Flickr
