A decade after the high profile bust of cleantech 1.0, venture-backed firms are again flourishing. We need them to succeed. Will they?
Lost in a stupor of déjà vu, I rang the intercom buzzer a second time. I had the odd sensation of being unstuck in time. The headquarters of this solar startup looked strangely similar to its previous offices, which I had visited more than a decade before. The name of the company had changed from 1366 Technologies to CubicPV, and it had moved about a mile away. But the rest felt familiar, right down to what I had come to talk about: a climate-tech boom.
A surge in cleantech investments, which had begun in 2006 with the high-profile entry of some of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists, was still going strong during my first visit, in 2010—or at least it seemed to be. But a year later, it had begun to collapse. The rise of fracking was making natural gas cheap and abundant. US government funding for clean-energy research and deployment was falling. Meanwhile, China had begun to dominate solar and battery manufacturing. By the end of 2011, almost all the renewable-energy startups in the US were dead or struggling to survive.
The list of eventual casualties included headline grabbers like the solar-cell maker Solyndra and the high-flying battery company A123, as well as numerous less well-known startups in areas like advanced biofuels, innovative battery tech, and solar power. How, I was wondering, had CubicPV survived when nearly all its peers had failed?