Working with David Anthony wasn’t always easy, but it was always inspiring. His tone, his cadence, and these pregnant pauses he always took when he spoke were more suggestive of a Zen Buddhist than your typical type-A venture capitalist. His patience was one his defining characteristics.

At his core, David Anthony was a teacher who happened to also excel at investing. David used to love speaking at conferences and lecturing around the world. He taught courses at various universities such as, From Idea to IPO, at the New York Academy of Sciences, which taught scientists how to commercialize their technology. DA, as he liked being called, was a voracious reader who synthesized information about the numerous disciplines endemic to cleantech faster than just about anyone I have encountered. He would then love to transmit that information anyway he could: in articles, newsletters, phone calls. Like I said, a natural teacher.

David possessed a calm assurance and expected those around him to succeed. Oftentimes, that confidence was infectious. At the same time, he was willing to admit his mistakes. One time DA approached me with the idea that 21Ventures should post a section featuring portfolio companies that had failed. As a marketer I was horrified at the idea, and successfully talked him out of this. In hindsight, DA’s willingness to admit that not every company he worked with turned to gold was just the kind of self-effacement that inspires loyalty and confidence.

David practiced meditation, traveled the world constantly and sat on the board of numerous cleantech companies (some startups and some established companies). He did all of this despite the fact that he was legally blind. It was a fact that he would never shy away from. To the contrary, I recall once he told me that he wouldn’t necessarily want it back – even if this were possible. Incredulous, I asked him why not. “Because it helps me do my job better,” he said. “To be a VC and vet all of these ideas and companies you have be a good listener.”

This recent video clip of DA speaking on a panel at a cleantech investing conference in Israel (where DA had invested in four cleantech companies), demonstrates his poise and thoughtfulness. I’m pretty sure that’s the last public speaking engagement he participated in before his untimely death.

Due to DA’s seeing impairment, I used to help him pen some of his articles to industry publications such as these articles for GigaOm. When David would approach me with a topic for an article he wanted to write, it was always with conviction. Some of his more memorable assertions were that despite their good intentions, the Obama administration blew it with their promise of $73 billion dedicated to the cleantech sector.  He used to say, “It’s very difficult for those of us who regularly invest in cleantech to pick winners. Why should the government assume they can?”  David posited that hedging their bets would have been a better strategy. “Instead of giving $500 million to one company, why not give $10 million to 50 companies?”

David also believed that in order for utility scale renewable energy generation to win, it would need better storage solutions, due to its intermittency.

David was a big believer in selling clean technologies to China and India, which he saw as ideal markets for clean technology because of their government’s stated goals and their economic, political and social needs. He firmly held that grid parity for renewable or clean energy made the most sense in these emerging markets where they still need to make considerable capital investments just to keep up with demand, as opposed to the U.S. where a ‘balanced grid’ exists. He always believed that great technology and disruption would come from the west but he was betting that those technologies would be sold to China and India.

During the time that I knew him, DA had his share of ups and downs, successes and failures. Yet as I reflect on his legacy I see a person who loved his work, was a natural teacher and had an infectious passion for changing the world through cleantech. It was only a few weeks ago that David told me that he wanted to spend the rest of his life “solving the world’s greatest problems”.  At the time neither of us knew how short that life was going to be, but I can tell you that his impact, through teachings, investments and thoughtful management will be felt in the industry for many years to come.

David Andrew Goldman is a friend and colleague of David Anthony’s. He works at The Cline Group where he is a vice president and cleantech practice leader. david.goldman@theclinegroup.com. Yehuda Solomont also contributed to this article. Yehuda is an independent marketing consultant living in Jerusalem.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Anthony led investments at a venture management firm called 21Ventures, which has provided seed, growth, and bridge capital to over 40 tech companies, mainly in the cleantech space. As Fortune’s Dan Primack explains it, 21Ventures didn’t raise a traditional venture fund, but would identify startup investments and bring them to high-net-worth individuals or family offices for investing.

Anthony worked closely with investor David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust, which back in 2008 was the third-most active venture fund investing in cleantech according to the Cleantech Group. However Gelbaum seemed to have started to pull back on cleantech investments in late 2009, and told me in a rare interview in February 2010 that he had lost money in cleantech and hadn’t had any exits then (though back then he was still optimistic).

Anthony wrote a variety of columns for GigaOM over the years, and I’ve interviewed him several times about his investments starting back in 2009. The last time I heard from Anthony was last September 2011, when he was working with home solar startup OneRoof Energy, which just recently raised more funding.

Here’s the last three articles Anthony wrote for us and an interview I did with him:

• A new energy storage option: gravity power
• The energy storage story
• Everybody loves clean energy but no one wants to pay for it
• And an interview I did with Anthony in the Summer of 2009: How to win at cleantech investing: milk stimulus, raid labs, befriend David Gelbaum

It’s not a secret that cleantech has proven to be more difficult to invest in than many had anticipated. Particularly when investors compare it to the web ecosystem and exits like Monday morning’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Part of the problem with cleantech investing is the long timetables for a lot of the startup investments.

Regardless of whether 21Ventures’ cleantech portfolio has had successes or exits, I think it’s important to list out some of the investments, so we can look at the collective amount of innovation that was under development by 21Ventures led funds. Anthony was passionate about cleantech innovation, as well fighting climate change and supporting environmental causes.

Anthony received his MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in 1989 and a BA in economics from George Washington University in 1982.

Some of 21Ventures supported startups:

AeroFarms: AeroFarms is a New York-based startup that develops tech-heavy urban farming processes. Anthony told me he thought that advanced farming techniques were an under-invested area where his firm sees promise. AeroFarms presented at the WSJ Eco:nomics conference recently and was voted the #1 company that investors would want to put $1 million in.

OneRoof Energy: OneRoof Energy develops and owns home solar rooftop installations and recently closed more funding.

Gravity Power: Gravity Power makes a gravity power module that uses a very large piston that is suspended in a deep, water-filled shaft and a return pipe connecting to a pump-turbine at ground level. As the piston drops, it forces water down the storage shaft, up the return pipe and through the turbine, and spins a motor/generator to produce electricity. To store energy, grid power drives the motor/generator in reverse, spinning the pump to force water down the return pipe and into the shaft, lifting the piston. The company just created a Germany-based subsidiary. (Bill Gates and Bill Gross recently invested in a gravity energy storage play).

Magenn Power: Magenn Power makes high-altitude wind turbines. I haven’t heard about this company in years.

ETV Motors: An Israeli lithium ion battery cell startup founded in 2008.

Graphene Energy: Graphene Energy is an Austin, Texas, based-startup that has been developing a technology using graphene, which can produce at least twice the storage capacity of commercially available ultracapacitors. Ultracapacitors have ultra-fast charge and discharge times, but lag far behind batteries in terms of the amount of energy they can store. Graphene Energy was an ARPA-E finalist, but I haven’t heard from these guys in awhile.

Axion Power International: Axion Power has developed a lead-acid/carbon energy storage tech that blends ultracapacitor technology with old-fashioned lead-acid batteries. The problem with ultracapacitors for electric vehicles has been low energy density; next to batteries, the amount of power ultracapacitors can store per kilogram doesn’t measure up. But they do excel in charge time and lifespan. Ultracapacitors can handle far more charge cycles than lithium-ion or lead-acid batteries, and they recharge quickly. The company is public on the OTC bulletin board and not profitable.

GreenRay Solar: GreenRay makes a solar microinverter, which places an inverter on each panel, instead of the more traditional central inverter set up. The market for microinverters is growing, and Enphase Energy recently went public.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

The latest developments with Knoodle include:

• You can now add surveys, quizzes, video and audio on the fly at the time you create a presentation, instead of toggling to another screen to pull them in.
• The ability to drag-and-drop multiple files for easy bulk uploading.
• The ability to fine-tune slide syncing: If you have the time code, you can type in the exact time you want a slide to appear in your video or your audio track.
• A new feature to manage your presentations so you can see all the presentations you’ve created in a single viewing window to help streamline the editing and publishing process.

According to the Knoodle folks, today’s workplace looks like the Web: social, integrated and on-demand. There is an increasing need for fast knowledge sharing, particularly with the rise of virtual companies. And learning within virtual teams must come from everyone regardless of location, role or function. Everyone has the responsibility to be both teacher and learner. The demand from virtual companies is that the tools they use resemble social tools: they are more familiar and easier to adopt and use. The challenge when using a holistic, social approach to knowledge sharing and information flow, within a virtual or dispersed team in particular, is to manage the chaos. Tools must be pervasive, organized, and offer some measure of control and preferably with a dashboard view.

So where does Knoodle fit in to this concept of holistic, social learning? It’s easy to implement, even for people who are not professional producers of presentations. You can create content on the fly or take pre-existing content, including slides, audio, graphics and text, straight into the Knoodle application. If everyone can capture their knowledge from the field, from their home offices, from their cubicles, and make it readily available to the rest of the team, there is less “silo-ing” of information and learning.

Pricing is flexible and based on customer needs and required hours per month in terms of viewing of presentations. You can ramp up your plan or downgrade it based on actual usage. If you export your video presentations, viewing is done out of the Knoodle system so doesn’t count against your subscription plan.

How are you capturing knowledge within your organization to foster social learning?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Media in the Enterprise
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

Batteries are not environmentally or financially the best solution for grid-scale storage. Pumped Storage Hydro (PSH) — the only GW-scale storage technology deployed — and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), with only two plants in operation globally, have given good results. But the construction of these energy storage options is costly, time consuming and wrought with environmental concerns.

So what’s the alternative? The answer may actually lie in digging deep rather than building up.

Pumped storage hydro uses gravity to store energy that is sourced from the grid by raising water to a higher altitude, creating potential energy. That potential is then converted to electricity when the water returns to its original level, passing through a turbine on the way. Storage capacity can be increased by adding mass and/or the storage height. An ideal site for pumped storage hydro would provide:

• a large elevation difference between two reservoirs (hundreds of meters or more);
• high power potential (1000 megawatts or more);
• large energy storage capacity (4 hours or more at rated power);
• negligible adverse environmental impact;
• proximity to power transmission lines and a major electricity market, such as a city.

Unfortunately, such ideal sites for pumped storage hydro do not exist.

However, a new technology now being developed exploits widely available analogous sites, using the proven technological components of pumped storage hydro in a completely new way.

Gravity Power Module

The figure above illustrates the basic design of the “Gravity Power Module” or GPM, which is being developed by 21Ventures portfolio company Gravity Power. Full Disclosure: As is the case with any venture capitalist like myself, there is some self-serving message here.

The GPM uses a very large piston that is suspended in a deep, water-filled shaft, with sliding seals to prevent leakage around the piston and a return pipe connecting to a pump-turbine at ground level. The piston is comprised of pancakes made from concrete and iron ore for high density and low cost. The shaft is filled with water once, at the start of operations, but is then sealed and no additional water is required.

As the piston drops, it forces water down the storage shaft, up the return pipe and through the turbine, and spins a motor/generator to produce electricity. To store energy, grid power drives the motor/generator in reverse, spinning the pump to force water down the return pipe and into the shaft, lifting the piston. Hundreds of megawatt-hours per shaft can be stored with high efficiency, since pump-turbines have low losses and friction is negligible at modest piston speeds.

Tackling the cost issue, economic operation of the GPM system depends heavily on the construction cost of the shaft, which is surprisingly low. This is because the GPM system will require less excavation per storage capacity than many existing pumped storage hydro facilities and because that excavation can be automated. A small footprint and unobtrusive operation will allow multi-shaft installations to be constructed even in dense urban areas.

Advantages include: modularity; use of existing technology; environmental compatibility; flexible siting; fast permitting; rapid construction; low cost per megawatt-hour; long lifetime; high efficiency; and a short time from project start to revenue.

The pump-turbine is capable of ramping from zero to full power in less than twenty seconds and has a broad power range, making GPMs technically superior to gas turbine power plants for ancillary services such as frequency regulation. Larger GPMs built in arrays can replace gas turbine peaking plants, providing a substantially lower levelized cost of energy (LCOE), and can replace intermediate power plants at comparable LCOE. The general parameters of two GPM installation types are listed below.

To really satisfy the world’s growing utility-scale energy storage needs, a technology must:

1. Provide hundreds of megawatts for several hours, per installation, with the dynamic operating characteristics required by the grid. Many storage technologies could do this, in theory. So far, only PSH and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) have.
2. Achieve a competitive cost. Again, only PSH and CAES have met this goal, and few other technologies appear likely to.
3. Be deployable on a truly gargantuan scale. The International Energy Agency, in its 2008 Baseline scenario, estimated a worldwide need for over 250 GW of new coal-fired and gas-fired power plant capacity, per year, from 2005-2050. Avoiding an environmental catastrophe will require replacement of much of this with renewable generation and storage. Many current storage technologies will have beneficial roles to play, but none of them can achieve this goal.

The GPM can achieve all three.

GPM construction is less complicated than conventional power plants and uses commodity materials with local labor, making them suitable for fast, wide deployment in both developed and developing countries. Market penetration rates will be constrained only by the availability of trained construction crews and project financing. No new equipment factories will be needed for at least the first decade of deployment.

The availability of massive electricity storage will free renewable generation from one of its most challenging constraints—variability.  And because that storage can be constructed in place of conventional power plants, the incremental cost will be very small, perhaps even nonexistent. Wind and solar can provide the energy to fuel the world economy, and advances in energy storage capabilities such as the gravity power module will help.

David Anthony is the Managing Partner of 21Ventures, LLC, a VC management firm that has provided seed, growth, and bridge capital to over 40 technology ventures across the globe mainly in the cleantech arena. David Anthony is also Adjunct Professor at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) and the NYU Stern School of business where he began teaching technology entrepreneurship in 2009.

Related Content From GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Top 10 Greentech Companies of 2010
• 7 Things That Spell Growing Pains for Greentech in 2011
• Green IT 2011: China Marches Towards Greentech Dominance

Venture capital is the fuel that drives innovation in many sectors vital to the health and growth of the US economy. As a cleantech venture capitalist, I am in a unique position to understand the circumstances threatening American innovation and with it, the U.S. economy.

Since the 1970’s, the role of venture capital has been to nourish entire new industries, including biotech, software development and online retail. In 2008, VC-backed companies employed 11% of the private sector work force – over 12 million people.

Cleantech needs as much venture capital support as it can get. It is an emerging industry aimed at solving the biggest problems such as climate change and our dependence on foreign oil. However, many of its products and services are still not commercially viable. The only way an industry with no immediate revenue stream can build the technology of tomorrow is through investment. Direct government support can only go so far, and it is the venture capital and angel community that will pick up the slack.

Recently, VC investment in cleantech companies has skyrocketed reaching $5.6 billion last year. If the VC industry implodes, cleantech falls with it.

The U.S. government, under the leadership of the Obama administration is undermining the green economy by a). misappropriating government stimulus money aimed at job creation and b). levying unfair taxation on the venture capital community – the very source within the private sector that generates job growth.

Stimulating job growth can only be achieved when the government is willing to support those sectors of the economy that hold the promise of growth like renewable energy and cleantech. It is a known fact that the biggest players in the economy fall behind the small, more nimble players when it comes to innovation and job creation.

Take the automobile industry, whose propensity to ship jobs out of the country has laid waste to cities like Detroit. The industry’s stubborn refusal to innovate, which has even been documented in film, brought it to the brink of collapse recently.

Yet, when push came to shove, the government stepped in to save these dinosaurs with enormous wads of taxpayer cash. Additionally, policies like Cash for Clunkers were designed to augment their bottom lines. The federal government even took control of 60 percent of General Motors.

Why pour federal dollars into propping up companies that refuse to innovate? Is this not a misallocation of resources at a time when so many new, pioneering companies are desperate for support? In 1998, both Google and eBay were tiny companies with fewer than 30 people working for them. Had it not been for venture capital (and the federal government’s support of these VCs), those startups would have faded away into obsolescence.

The Missed Opportunity In the Stimulus

Looking at the stimulus package today, one can see that it was a missed opportunity of gigantic proportions. $80 billion in stimulus funds were dedicated to cleantech – in effect making the government the country’s largest venture capital firm. Yet, instead of using this massive investment to encourage a new crop of innovators, the majority of the funds were funneled to big corporations.

To keep our economy strong, we must invest in America’s long-term competitiveness. Government support must be directed at small startups and research universities – and not at the big fish. This approach has worked for the country in the past, and it can work again today.

We must return to the days when American innovation flourished thanks to government-sponsored research conducted by universities and national laboratories. The federal government typically invested between $250,000 to $2 million on seed projects encouraging venture capital firms to step in and invest in the best and most promising of the government sponsored ventures.

This goes all the way back to the post-WWII period, when Vannevar Bush convinced Harry Truman to continue government support for science and technology research during peacetime. As a result, we got the Internet, Yahoo , Google, Fairchild Semiconductor and a long list of successful companies.

Taxing Innovation – A Case of Mistaken Identity

Not only is the government failing to support tomorrow’s innovators, it is also taking misguided steps to deter others from doing so as well. The recent “Carried Interest” bill that passed the House of Representative’s vote last Friday is emblematic of this approach by the federal government. The bill’s most grievous problem is that it lumps venture capital funds together with hedge funds and private equity funds.

With all due respect to the anti-Wall Street atmosphere in the country right now, hedge funds and venture capital have nothing to do with one another – aside from the fact that both speculate. But while hedge funds speculate on virtual instruments like derivatives, venture capital funds speculate on real companies with the promise of jobs resulting in measurable benefits to our economy. Moreover, hedge funds use leverage while venture capital firms use their own capital. The economy is suffering because of the high degree of leverage characteristic of the financial services sector.

Unlike private equity funds that buy companies, break them apart and sell off the assets, venture capital investment creates goods and services and puts jobs back into the U.S. economy. I still recall one of President Obama’s promises prior to winning the election in 2008 – job creation. Venture capital has done as much (if not more) to drive innovation and job creation in this country as the federal government.

The government wants to tax venture capital as part of a proposed hedge fund tax reform. The Baucus‐Levin legislation now circulating in the House and Senate and it’s new carried interest tax hike represents a 157 percent tax increase over the next three years on growth capital investment. The new legislation proposes to treat 50 percent of “carried Interest” as ordinary Income and 50 percent as long-term capital gains in 2011 and 2012. By 2013, the tax treatment for carried interest would be 75 percent ordinary Income and 25 percent capital gains which would raise the effective tax rate to more than 38 percent.

Due to the financial crisis of 2009 and 2010 however, venture capital has shifted to safer bets and, as a result, far less seed capital is available for early-stage innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs. Over the coming year, there is a good chance that the $30 billion venture capital industry could permanently shrink to around $15 billion. A move to level new taxes on them at this time, when the industry is already on the edge, is a move to stifle innovation. The new proposed tax on VC’s is punitive and ill‐conceived. This will discourage risk taking required to start, grow, and save American companies.

Clipping the Angels’ Wings

The government also wants to level new taxes on “angel investors” – individuals who invest in startups and entrepreneurs. At the same time, new legislation will impose additional regulation on these individuals, ostensibly to “protect” them from bad investment choices like those that brought down the housing market. The reality is that the legislation makes it much more difficult for firms like mine to solicit investments from high net-worth individuals.  It deprives a class of smart and self-made millionaires from tax benefits their higher net-worth neighbors will enjoy.

Angel investors are people with a high level of understanding and sophistication, and are responsible for most of the initial investments in startup companies today. Leveling new regulations and taxes on them is likely to shrink this source of investment in our economy.

It’s still not too late to change the course. Our country can no longer afford to prop up the big boys, while leaving the little guys to fend for themselves. With economists like Paul Krugman proposing additional stimulus spending, we must be quick to learn the lessons of the first stimulus plan. And there is still time to design tax codes and regulations that encourage, rather than discourage, innovation.

American innovation is our greatest resource, and nurturing it is the only way we can maintain our lead over fast-developing countries like China, India and Brazil. Mr. President, the country’s innovators are counting on you to make this right, before it’s too late.

David Anthony is the Managing Partner of 21Ventures, LLC, a VC management firm that has provided seed, growth, and bridge capital to over 40 technology ventures across the globe mainly in the cleantech arena. David Anthony is also Adjunct Professor at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) and the NYU Stern School of business where he began teaching technology entrepreneurship in 2009.

David received his MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in 1989 and a BA in economics from George Washington University in 1982. He is an entrepreneurship mentor at the Land Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 2002, David was awarded the Distinguished Mentor of the Year Award from Columbia University.

David blogs at David Anthony VC

Image courtesy of 21 Ventures, and courtesy of dcJohn’s photostream.

For more research on cleantech investing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

China is now the leading manufacturer of solar panels in the world, and last year became the world’s largest producer of wind turbines as well. According to one recent report, China is now poised to surpass the West in virtually all areas of clean energy, including transportation technologies, advanced batteries, solar water heaters and even next generation nuclear and “clean coal” technologies.

China’s pull is so strong these days that it has even begun attracting cutting edge firms away from places like Silicon Valley. And its geopolitical aspirations are equally ambitious. This month a plan for a transcontinental high-speed railway, from Beijing to London, was revealed. It no longer seems improbable that, as a 26-year-old Chinese engineer told a New York Times reporter recently, “China will lead everything.”

All of this is occurring, despite the fact that China is a one-party system without elections or democratic institutions. How did this most capitalist of communist states, known until recently as one giant sweatshop, take such a profound lead over the democratic West?

Or, to put it another way, what in the world would motivate a government to build a model green economy from scratch, when it doesn’t even have to worry about being voted out of office?

Here’s a clue: A 2007 World Bank study found that air pollution kills three quarters of a million Chinese every year. This number so embarrassed the Chinese government that it prevented parts of the report from being released to the public. Although things have improved somewhat in recent years, clean air remains a scarce commodity in Chinese cities and pollution-related diseases are still the leading cause of death in China.

China also faces food security issues. With 20 percent of the world’s population living off of 7 percent of the world’s arable land, a hectare of land in China must produce enough to feed 10.3 people (compared to 1.6 in the U.S.). Yet, while the population continues to grow, China’s supply of arable land is dwindling, due to soil degradation and water pollution.

Add to this the additional 300 million people that are expected to crowd into China’s urban areas over the next 15 years, and an expanding middle class, and it becomes quite clear that the number one threat to the health and well-being of Chinese citizens is pollution and environmental degradation. And anything that threatens the well-being of hundreds of millions of Chinese is also a threat to the stability of the regime.

Enter cleantech. Ostensibly an excellent means to clean up the environment while putting some of those hundreds of millions of city dwellers to work, the Chinese government has clearly identified the green economy as a key element of its survival strategy.

According to the above-mentioned study, the country is set to pour a whopping $400 billion into clean energy and green technologies over the next five years. That’s well over twice what the US will be spending, even with the greener elements of the Obama Administration’s stimulus package.

As an undemocratic country, China does not have to waste time arguing over policy, budgets and the usual partisan battles. And as a rapidly developing country, China is able to “leapfrog” outdated development models and technologies in favor of new and innovative ones.

For example, one of China’s most serious environmental problems, air pollution, is due to the country’s heavy reliance on coal-burning power plants, a technology as old as the Industrial Revolution. While the government has demonstrated its ability to clean the air using short-term solutions (especially ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics), it is one of the world’s first early adopters of “clean coal” technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, that may end up cleaning up coal’s mess over the longer term.

High-speed rail is another good example. Until only a few years ago, China had no high-speed rail service whatsoever. But when its transportation limitations began to hamper its manufacturing capacity, China decided to create, from scratch, a massive network of high-speed rail lines. That was in 2004. Today, China has the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network, with 42 lines expected to be in operation two years from now.

Such an extensive transportation network will make China that much more economically competitive. But, as Stephen Gardner of Amtrak told the New York Times: “The sheer volume of equipment that they will require, and the technology that will have to be developed, will simply catapult them into a leadership position.”

So, while no red-blooded American would suggest that the West abandon democracy for a China-inspired one-party system, the unique conditions that make China a cleantech forerunner will be difficult to challenge. China’s decisive investments along with its swift policies that help its investments bear fruit should — and can — serve as a guide to Western governments if we hope to keep up with China.

David Anthony is an experienced entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and educator. Since founding 21Ventures in 2004, the firm has provided seed, growth, and bridge capital to over 40 clean technology ventures across the globe. David Anthony sits on the board of a number of 21V portfolio companies including (partial list) Advanced Telemetry; BioPetroClean, ETV Motors, and Variable Wind Solutions. David also serves on the board of directors of several publicly traded companies including Axion Power International, Inc. (OTC: AXPW); Clean Power Technologies Inc. (OTC: CPWE) and ThermoEnergy Corporation (OTC: TMEN).

For more cleantech financing research check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

Images courtesy of jeancliclac’s photostream, Matthijs Koster’s photostream, Kiwi Mikex’s photostream, and Shell’s photostream