The Cleantech Group hosted its annual gala in Washington D.C. yesterday to reward the top-100 private companies. The ceremony marks one of the most difficult years for the cleantech sector. I talked to Richard Yougman, Managing Director for Europe and Asia at the Cleantech Group, and reviewed the big trends this year.
The Cleantech Group has one of the most advanced tools, the I3 platform, to track M&A and VC investment deals in cleantech. It regroups diverse sectors such as renewable energy, transportation, water, etc. "Energy efficiency is getting stronger and stronger in the portfolio" stated Richard Youngman, "Paybacks are relatively fast". Here are my top-5 picks for cleantech companies that have not been acquired or gone IPO. Energy efficiency is well represented with three of the top spots.
Higgs boson discovery has been confirmed,
and two papers have been recently published in the Physics Letters B issue of
September. It was no small task. The articles start with a list of hundreds of contributors
around the world. The news made international headlines in July; almost fifty
years after Peter Higgs predicted a new particle to explain how other elementary particles acquire mass.
The long-sought boson is extremely complicated to observe. It
involves a global computing network to massage the vast amount of data
generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. Most of
the researchers are actually in the US, and they are connected via the Energy
Sciences network called ESnet. I decided to interview Bill Johnston from Berkeley Laboratory. He led the transformation of ESnet from “plumbing”
to a “service” to the scientific community. Fasten your seatbelt! We are on for
a ride at the frontiers of science and networking.
The implied value proposition that eating organic products is healthier has been put in question by a recent study from Stanford University. Researchers from the Center of Health Policy analyzed data from 237 previously performed studies, and concluded that there is little evidence of health benefits from organic products. The study is coming under fire by organic associations and medical experts who are fighting to inform customers about healthier choices.
The Cornucopia Institute in Wisconsin denounced that Stanford's spin on organics is allegedly tainted by biotechnology funding. Particularly alarming is the fact they could have purposefully cherry-picked data two months before an important vote in California on a new law (Prop 37) that would require labels on Genetically Engineered (GE) products. The food & beverage industry is a $1 trillion market and a battle ground between brands that want to be labeled (organic) and those that don't (GE).
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