GigaOM » Mohr Davidow

VantagePoint curbs cleantech fund raising due to lack of interest

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:27:03 +0000

Venture capital firm VantagePoint Capital Partners, which made one of the most aggressive bets on backing cleantech startups, has stopped raising a planned $1.25 billion fund to put into cleantech companies due to lack of support from limited partners (the pensions and big investors that put money into venture capital funds), according to a report from Dow Jones VentureWire. VantagePoint started raising that fund (VantagePoint CleanTech Partners III) in late 2010.

It’s no surprise that LPs are growing cold on the sector. I discussed this with a panel of investors late last year at the VERGE conference. Salzman tells VentureWire that the reality from the LP community was: “show us the money.” Other firms that have pulled back (slightly or a lot) or changed their strategy to focus on green IT include Mohr Davidow, NEA, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Kleiner Perkins.

VantagePoint had a few wins, but it also has had many losses. On one hand VantagePoint backed Tesla and Solazyme, which both went public. But the company also backed firms like MiaSole, Serious Energy, Tendril, and Better Place, which have struggled. Bright Source was planning on going public but pulled the IPO in the 11th hour.

Salzman embodied the aggressive all-in approach of cleantech investing. He told me in an interview in late 2011 that “when it comes to greentech investing, it’s basically all or nothing.” And instead of becoming more cautious when the market cooled following the 2008 recession, Salzman and VantagePoint seemed to double down.

VentureWire asked Salzman whether focusing VantagePoint on cleantech was a mistake, and Mr. Salzman told them: “I wouldn’t admit it if it was.”

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Cleantech is dead, like the Internet was in 2000

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:36:52 +0000

Throughout 2012, I’ve often heard entrepreneurs and investors working on technologies like clean energy, smart grid, electric cars and even biofuels, talk about the future of the term “cleantech.” It’s an umbrella term that describes very disparate sectors and was created to explain an investment class that has become less attractive to investors over the past 18 months. So, will cleantech as a term die, or morph into a new term? Or will it survive and stick as the preferred name to classify companies looking to address a coming era of resource constraints?

That question was at the heart of my discussion with three cleantech investors at the VERGE Conference this week. I had the opportunity of getting to spend an hour chatting with Josh Green, partner with Mohr Davidow, Rodrigo Prudencio, Partner with Nth Power, and Mitch Lowe, partner with digital green accelerator Greenstart.

Lowe had a great quote at the beginning of our discussion: “Cleantech’s dead in the same way the Internet was dead in 2000.” Essentially, the work done in the late 90′s for the internet laid the foundation for today’s massive internet ecosystem, and for cleantech, Lowe thinks the last 8 years have similarly laid the foundation for the future of cleantech. Limited partners may not have seen terrific returns over the past 8 years, said Lowe, but he thinks we’re now entering an incredibly exciting time for investing in cleantech, and specifically for digital green technologies.

Check out the rest of the video, and hear our in-depth discussion on the future of cleantech innovation, entrepreneurs and investors.

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Biochemical & biofuel startups unable to IPO, continue to raise funding

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:24:15 +0000

Two startups developing methods to turn biomass, like plants and waste, into fuels and chemicals have just closed large rounds of financing from venture capitalists. Genomatica, which makes green chemicals announced it’s raised $41.5 million in a series D round, while Solix BioSystems, which turns algae into biofuels and chemicals, says it’s raised $31 million in a series C round.

About this time a year ago, biofuel and biochemical startups were aggressively seeking to go public. Amyris, Gevo, Solazyme and KiOR were all able to have public debuts within the past two years. But these companies’ stocks, and their long timelines for delivering their biochemicals and biofuel products, have mostly disappointed. KiOR is trading at $7.19, down from its IPO debut of $15 per share; Amyris is trading at $3.31, down from a debut price $16 per share.

While Genomatica announced its new funding on Thursday, it also filed a withdrawal form, removing its planned IPO. Genomatica filed for a potentially $100 million IPO a year ago. In the filing Genomatica sited “current market conditions” as the reason for withdrawing the IPO.

Genomatica’s new funding comes from Alloy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow Ventures, TPG Biotech, VantagePoint Capital Partners and Waste Management (disclosure: Alloy Ventures is also an investor in GigaOM). Genomatica has now raised at least $125.7 million.

Solix BioSystem’s new funding was led by I2BF Global Ventures, and previous investors include Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd., or SAIL, Valero Energy, Southern Ute Alternative Energy, which manages clean power investments for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Bohemian Investments and Infield Capital.

According to the Cleantech Group biofuels and biochemicals received 14 percent of venture funding for cleantech in the second quarter of this year. New biofuel companies are barely getting any funds, but more established firms continue to be able to draw down capital. Algae company Sapphire Energy closed $144 million in the second quarter of this year, while waste and biogas company Harvest Power closed $112 million.

Genomatica creates organisms that can turn sugar or synthesis gas into a variety of products, from chemicals for plastic to transportation fuels. The sugar or syngas comes from plants, wood chips or trash rather than the more traditional method of using crude oil or natural gas. Genomatica’s first product is 1,4-butanediol, or BDO, which is made from using sugar-eating E. coli, and is used for making things like spandex, running shoes and plastic auto parts.

Solix BioSystems has developed bioreactors that grow algae to turn it into fuels and chemical feedstocks, and more recently it decided to also commercially grow the algae. Solix says it will use the funds to start producing and selling its product commercially.

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The other reason for oil dependency

Adam Lesser — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:57:36 +0000

This article originally appeared in the cleantech section of GigaOM Pro, our premium subscription research service (subscription required).

When thinking about the rising price of oil, folks in cleantech tend to think in terms of transportation fuels and what can be done to replace them with renewable and clean sources of energy. And with good analysis from the likes of UCSD’s Tom Murphy showing that in 2004 oil production slowed and failed to increase much despite prices tripling, finding alternative fuels is key. But what most people don’t realize is that a chunk of the crude oil that goes into an oil refinery doesn’t end up anywhere near a car’s fuel tank. It ends up making chemicals.

A higher margin product

In 2011, the global market for petrochemicals was worth over $3 trillion, approximately the size of the entire U.S. government’s budget, and the feedstock for producing those chemicals is petroleum. About half of that market is commodity chemicals that are low margin, but the other half is higher margin specialty chemicals like polymers that comprise plastics or substrates for pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The biofuels industry is working on producing transportation fuels through a process whereby a carbon feedstock like woodchips or sawgrass is fed to microbes to produce oil. But most of the biofuels companies that IPO’ed last year have been crushed in the market, and Amyris recently decided to scale back its biofuels production in favor of, what else, but manufacturing the specialty (and higher margin) chemical squalene.

So as some biofuels companies try to pivot toward specialty chemicals, which are lower volume and smaller market but with better margins, it’s worth taking a look at the potential to use microbes to manufacture chemicals from a feedstock other than oil.

Finding the right bio-chemical

I recently caught up with Charles Eggert, the CEO of Boulder, CO based OPX Biotechnologies, a bio-chemical startup that has raised $65 million from a number of VCs including energy focused Altira Group and cleantech friendly Mohr Davidow. OPX Bio is targeting the $10 billion global market for petro-acrylic, an ingredient in everything from paint to diapers, by generating the first biologically produced acrylic, so called “bio-acrylic.”

Eggert is unsurprisingly bullish on the bio-chemical market. He points out that while less of the oil going into a refinery comes out a petrochemical than comes out a fuel, petrochemicals have much greater value in the market. Specialty chemicals have disproportionate margins and value, which is what makes them attractive. He also takes some solace in the fact that the massive scaling issues that have hampered biofuels are somewhat less of an issue for lower volume specialty chemicals and that many common chemicals from pharmaceuticals to amino acids are already produced biologically.

On the cleantech end, biochemicals are renewable, presuming you can access a widely available feedstock whose growth doesn’t harm the environment and doesn’t compete with the food supply as corn based ethanol does. But more importantly the process of using microbes to produce biochemicals doesn’t require heat and pressure, which are both needed in petrochemical processing. The bacteria that OPX uses operates near room temperature.

Eggert says that producing bio-acrylic results in 75 percent less greenhouse gas emissions versus producing petro-acrylic. Additionally, large companies like Procter and Gamble have ambitious pledges, like targeting the replacement of 25 percent of all petroleum based materials with renewable materials by 2020. P&G is a significant buyer and seller of specialty chemicals for everything from detergents to cosmetics, and the option to buy greener bio based chemicals could be an attractive option.

For a feedstock, OPX is currently using sugar, either from corn or Brazilian sugar cane. But ultimately the industry will need a non-food based sugar, often referred to as cellulosic sugar, which is derived from biomass materials like switch grass or energy cane. Multiple companies, from BP to DuPont, are working on building large scale plants that can derive sugar from biomass sources.

Eggert told me that at commercial scale, making bio-acrylic is cost competitive with petro-acrylic. OPX will need to build a commercial scale plant and prove that it can get the same yield it’s produced at smaller scale, the critical scaling hurdle that every biochemical or biofuel company faces. It also has a joint development agreement with Dow Chemical, the largest U.S. producer of petroleum based acrylic, which Eggert reports is seeing demand from its customers for renewable biochemicals.

The building of a final production plant can often run a couple of hundred million dollars. “It’s not cheap,” says Eggert. “Which is why you need to make sure your process, your microbe, your engineering design are as efficient as they can possibly be.” And for the benefit of the biochemicals industry, let’s hope that the scaling goes faster and more smoothly than it’s gone for biofuels.

Images courtesy of OPX Biotechnologies and Amyris.

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TeuxDeux: A Simple and Elegant To-do Service

Imran Ali — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:00:28 +0000

Recently, I’ve been pondering the role that lists play in my life — from Twitter’s “playlists of people“ to Umberto Eco’s thoughts on lists as a cultural tool for “facing infinity” to my own ideas about the use of “someday list” for lingering tasks — which should perhaps never be part of to-do lists anyway.

So it was with great excitement that I found Digitizd’s recent post, “9 Tools for Simple Productivity,” which highlights Fictive Kin‘s TeuxDeux, a bare-bones, elegantly designed and eminently usable list-based task manager, which also incorporates a “someday list.” (The post also discusses Ommwriter, a tool that was recently covered here at WWD).

TeuxDeux orients the user around days of the week, rather than the traditional task and priority view of most to-do applications. Each day is displayed as a column on a horizontally scrolling carousel; underneath each day is a simple text field and a list of things to do that day.

The simplicity and elegance of the user experience is striking and immediate — a running list of days, one-click editing and a separate list of “someday” tasks.

Though the user experience and clean design is wonderful, TeuxDeux is missing a few useful features — a mobile app or desktop widget would be useful, and I would like to see a lightweight API, or even an RSS feed. It seems however, that the constrained feature set is actually part of the value of TeuxDeux and such distraction-free and simplicity-driven applications are always welcome with its team.

Coincidentally, I just discovered that Netscape luminary Marc Andressen practices a “3 x 5 To Do List“ methodology, writing out three tasks he wishes to accomplish each day, constraining his goals to only those with the highest importance.

Such boundaries and constraints could actually enhance services such as TeuxDeux even further, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the service develops and, in turn, how it affects my own productivity.

Do you use TeuxDeux? Does the constrained feature set enhance its value?

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WWD Reader Profile: Jennifer Woofter, Sustainability Consultant

Simon Mackie — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:00:50 +0000

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Jennifer Woofter and I run Strategic Sustainability Consulting (SSC). We’re a boutique consulting company that works with small- and medium-size organizations that want to “go green.” I spend about one-third of my time on billable sustainability consulting work (green audits, carbon footprinting, coaching and training) and about two-thirds of my time running the business — made up of three in-house staff, between four and six interns, and a freelance network of more than 450 sustainability experts.

What’s a typical day like for you?

I’m a night owl, and since I usually go to sleep in the wee hours, I’m rarely awake before 9 a.m. Since I work from home, that’s not a problem — I just walk downstairs to my office (stopping in the kitchen for a cup of coffee) and am ready to work by 9:05. I try not to schedule any meetings until 10 a.m., which gives me just enough time to check email and catch up on my RSS feeds before diving into the day. I focus on client work in the morning, then work in the afternoon on business development. My evenings are spent with my husband and two puppies in front of the TV, where we play “dueling laptops” as we both try to cram in as much additional work as possible in between episodes of “House Hunters” and “Chopped.”

What gear and software do you use, and why?

I have a desktop computer (Dell Inspiron) for daily work, a laptop (HP Pavilion) for evening work, and a new netbook (Toshiba NB205) that I use when I travel specifically because I get over nine hours of battery life. Tech gadgets that I use frequently include a webcam for videoconferencing (Logitech Quickcam), a digital voice recorder (Sony IC Recorder) for keeping track of my crazy ideas, and a Flip Mino HD camcorder for shooting quick video. I have a special relationship with my iPhone that I think might threaten my husband.

On the software side, I use GoToWebinar at least once a day for web conferencing (staff meetings, client presentations, and our weekly webinars and online training). I use Audacity for SSC’s podcast interviews with sustainability experts, and we put up video through our newly created YouTube channel. Our entire company uses Skype for instant messaging and telephone, and I use Tweetdeck to manage my Twitter account (@jenniferwoofter). I’m a huge fan of 5 pm project management software, Highrise for contact management and Google Docs.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

Set up a remote back-up system that allows you to synchronize file-sharing between different computers. I was spending a huge amount of time before each trip (whether it was a coffee meeting in the next town or a week in Hawaii) copying files that I thought I might need onto a flash drive for use with my laptop. Not to mention the time and confusion of sending files back and forth to my remote team — we were never sure who had the most recent version of a document we were collaborating on, and Google Docs only goes so far. A couple of months ago we switched over to Dropbox, and it was like the clouds parted and angels started singing. Not only is it 100 times easier to manage our workflow and document control, but I don’t have to worry about backing up my materials since it automatically does it for me.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

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Compete on a TV Game Show From the Comfort of Your Xbox

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:20:09 +0000

Quick: What’s the newest hybrid sensation that combines video games, television programming and social aspects? Is it:

X: 1 vs. 1oo on Xbox Live
A: Twittering With The Stars
B: Donkey Kong’s Digg for Dollars

If you said “X”, then you’d be right. Of course, savvy Xbox players might have been tipped off since the X, A and B controller buttons are used to answer questions in the Live version of 1 vs. 100. Microsoft launched the game in late May, but I just got around to participating in a session last night. Players simply show up at the pre-scheduled “on air” time and play for free. In my 30-minute episode, over 15,000 people were logged on and collectively we were “The Mob.” Each of our Xbox Live avatars were shown in the mob and we could even control our virtual selves to a point; pressing the Y button repeatedly shows excitement, while moving the left stick can be used to taunt.

Unlike the original television show, you can answer questions incorrectly and still stay in the mob. You don’t, however, gain points for wrong answers and there are incentives for speed as well as answering consecutive questions correctly. The more incorrect answers in the mob, the more points you earn with a correct answer. Questions are answered in sets of 10 and during the commercial break, you can see how you stack up by viewing your stats.

I was pitted against three formidable opponents last night, which is a nice touch. Without some small group context, it’s easy to get lost in the mob and the game would lose some competitive feel. It came down to the final and 37th question but I just edged out my live opponents to win bragging rights in our quartet. With an Xbox Live headset, you can voice chat with your three opponents, but I felt it to be in poor taste to brag about my informal win. (OK, I did jump around and scream wildly, but I had the mute button on.)

Microsoft’s Xbox Live version of 1 vs. 100 has essentially created a live and exciting game-show feel. But it’s virtual, so you don’t have to worry about wardrobe or sounding like a goofball in front of millions of people. The controls and concept are simple, yet I could see myself tuning in and playing on a regular basis just to see how well I did against the thousands of other participants. Given the simplicity of it, I wouldn’t be surprised to see mobile versions of this, and possibly other game shows in the near future.

Kevin C. Tofel is co-editor of our sister site jkOnTheRun.

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The Last Frontier for P2P VOD: Your Patience

Janko Roettgers — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:00:32 +0000

Imagine you’re watching a movie via Internet-based VOD, one of those flicks you choose purely for the action scenes. Problem is, the dialogue is horrendous. What do you do? Skip ahead, of course. Such skipping can be a major technical challenge, however, especially if your VOD provider uses P2P technology to deliver its video streams. But five researchers from Spanish ISP Telefonica and UC Irvine have come up with a way to solve this problem.

The gang of five have developed a system called “Kangaroo” that promises to deal with jumpy VOD viewers by improving the architecture of the underlying P2P network. Kangaroo was field-tested during the 2008 Olympics, and its technology was presented at the 8th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems in Boston last week. While the details of this technology are admittedly a bit geeky, they help to ~~understand~~ illustrate why previous P2P VOD efforts like Joost and Babelgum failed and why smaller providers like Global Media Services/GridCast and MediaMelon need big content partners to make P2P work.

Jumping back and forth within a movie can be tricky even for traditional VOD providers that don’t use P2P. Chris Albrecht’s recent Amazon HD VOD test demonstrated this well; Amazon’s service had numerous problems with its video quality after a jump, and each skip took a long time.

Try to make a similar switch in a P2P environment, and you’re gonna have a host of new issues. P2P tends to work best if many users watch the same thing more or less at the same time, or if newer viewers can access cached content from others that are already halfway into the movie — something the UCI and Telefonica researchers call a “cascade of peers.” Introduce skipping to such a system, and your neat caching cascade suddenly goes out of the window.

This is where Kangaroo hops to the rescue. The system uses a tracker server similar to the one used by BitTorrent to help peers find each other and make sure everyone gets their fair share of bits and bytes. However, Kangaroo’s tracker goes a few steps further, keeping track of not just which part of a video each user is watching at any given time, but which parts of a video they’ve already watched. Those are pretty resource-intensive tasks, which is why Kangaroo uses some hash table magic as well as a few educated guesses to avoid constant communication with those jumpy peers.

Kangaroo was tested in a lab environment with thousands of simulated peers, as well as with several hundred users, during the 2008 Olympics. The researchers were also able to use some internal data from Telefonica’s own VOD service, consisting of 65,498 VOD sessions, to get a sense of how people really use these services. Turns out that 90 percent percent of viewers do 10 or less jumps within a movie — a number the folks behind Kangaroo think it can handle.

So how about other P2P vendors? Both Joost and Babelgum ditched their P2P VOD efforts in recent months and went back to server-based video streaming. When asked whether those impatient, skipping viewers may have had something to do with the change in direction, Telefonica researcher and Kangaroo co-inventor Parminder Chhabra replied that Joost and Babelgum probably had a similar approach for skipping content as part of their proprietary P2P solutions.

However, good algorithms only get you so far. “At every jump operation, you have to quickly find new peers with whom you can share data,” Chhabra explained. “These systems work better if there are a large number of simultaneous users of the system.” We all know that Joost wasn’t exactly the popular kid when it relied on its external app, which is why users ended up getting a lot of their content from Joost’s servers, despite its P2P architecture.

In other words, there are two components necessary to making P2P VOD work: Good technology that is capable of dealing with lack of patience on the part of the viewer, and good content that will lead to more viewers — and potentially much less skipping.

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Why I Jumped on the Blu-ray Bandwagon

Liane Cassavoy — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:00:25 +0000

I did it. I broke down and bought a Blu-ray player. In the middle of the worst recession of my lifetime, I spent nearly $300 on a gadget that I didn’t really need. And you know what? I love it. But not everyone is ready to make the jump to Blu-ray. So what’s holding them back? And what pushed me over the edge?

The biggest factor for me was image quality. Since I made the move to an HDTV more than a year ago, I find myself increasingly unable to watch anything else. I tried to watch Tuesday’s Celtics-Bulls game on a 13-inch SD TV. By the time it ended, my eyes were watering and my head was pounding — and it would have been a lot worse had the Celtics not pulled off that overtime win.

I’ve been spoiled by my HDTV and I freely admit it. So when I would sit down to watch my regular old DVDs on my big-screen TVs, it always seemed that something was missing. And I have to respectfully disagree with the people who say they can’t see a difference between regular DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Without a doubt, I notice a difference.

Price was pretty important, too. In fact, the falling prices on Blu-ray players were what initially caught my attention, even though I ended purchasing a mid-range player for about $300. And you don’t even have to spend that much. You can now find a decent selection of players for around $200, and many experts expect those prices to fall even further.

Futuresource Consulting, a UK-based market research firm that tracks the sales of Blu-ray players, notes that prices for the standalone versions fell by 15 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and expects them to fall by another 25 percent in 2009. “We will see sub-$100 players, perhaps not this year, but definitely by Q4 next year,” Futuresource’s Andy Watson says. His company expects 12 million Blu-ray players to ship globally this year, a “significant increase” over 2008.

So why buy now if prices are only going to drop? But that’s the quandary with any technology purchase, though, isn’t it? And it’s not the only reason people are holding off on making Blu-ray player purchases. Blu-ray discs are pricier than standard DVDs, typically costing a couple dollars more. Even a Blu-ray subscription to a service like Netflix will cost you an extra couple of dollars per month. Not everyone has an HDTV, either. And not everyone cares about image quality the way I do.

And then there are the people who think that Blu-ray is a stop-gap technology, that your Blu-ray player is another gadget destined to be gathering dust in your garage. Maybe they’re right. Maybe we’re headed for an all-broadband, all-download and streaming world, one in which HD movies are sent directly to your TV. A world where you don’t have to wait for the coveted red Netflix envelope to land in your mailbox.

But that world isn’t here yet. I got a good five years out of my DVD player before I relegated it to backup status. Will I get that long out of my Blu-ray player? Maybe. But I’m not going to worry about it. Instead, I’m going to be enjoying the true HD picture of my Blu-ray player. What about you?

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Oh Happy Day: Cleantech Players Cheer Draft Energy Bill

Josie Garthwaite — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:00:26 +0000

In a word, the draft energy bill unveiled yesterday by House Democrats, is “terrific.” That’s according to Erik Straser, who leads cleantech investment for Mohr Davidow Ventures. “Who knows if this will resemble what actually gets passed,” he said, “but we actually have a roadmap here for how to get to a 21st century energy infrastructure.”

The roadmap itself, a sign of Congressional leaders’ commitment to clean energy and energy security, Straser said, has value for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and policymakers. Straser doesn’t think it will dramatically change the investing landscape, or become the dominant influence on strategy, but he said it will inform industry players.

One company, Coulomb Technologies, has a lot of reasons to like the proposal. After all, it includes new funding for electric car charging infrastructure and smart grid technology, and Coulomb makes electric car charging stations that allow utilities to decide when cars juice up. “It’s refreshing to see politicians acknowledge that this (smart grid and electric cars) is the right technology,” said Coulomb CEO Richard Lowenthal. So what’s not to like?

Just one thing, in Lowenthal’s view: Why are these buildouts still called demonstration projects? While he praised Waxman for showing a “certain technological understanding” on the connections between energy security, renewables, clean cars and the smart grid, he also said, “It’s time for the real show now.”

With something like carbon capture and storage, there’s no way around the fact that the technology has never been deployed at commercial scale, let alone tested over the course of decades or centuries during which the emissions will theoretically be sequestered. How about electric cars, which draft authors Edward Markey and Henry Waxman have proposed supporting with “large-scale demonstrations,” supported by investments in charging infrastructure?

According to Jeff Sharp, a spokesperson for Markey’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, the point of the electric vehicle and infrastructure spending in yesterday’s draft is to “kickstart a program that will create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” regardless of the terminology. Technologies that are already on the commercial market, but in limited applications (such as Coulomb), as well as those in earlier stages of development could qualify. (Sharp also urged companies and individuals to weigh in on the legislation if something strikes them as problematic. You can do that by contacting your representative in Congress or via the Commerce and Energy Committee web site.)

Sharp said Markey sees the bill as a way to get more fuel-efficient vehicles to market, and fast. Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars.org, agreed when I spoke with him yesterday. He called the draft “ambitious, comprehensive and very pragmatic,” praising it for what he sees as a recognition “that rapid market penetration is the only way to get plug-ins soon enough to have an impact on climate change and energy security. If they dribble in in hundreds of thousands or even a million, it’s insignificant.”

Coulomb rival Better Place, which aims to develop large-scale networks of electric car charge points and battery swap stations, has certainly caught a few eyes on Capitol Hill. (Note: We’ve contacted Better Place and will update with the startup’s comments we hear back.) Markey and Waxman’s draft calls out battery exchange as an example of electric car infrastructure. “Other nations, including Israel and Denmark, are investing in this technology, and America can’t afford to fall behind in clean technology jobs,” Sharp said — noting countries where Better Place plans to build networks.

Of course, Markey and Waxman’s bill now enters a phase of debate and horsetrading in Congress. And as Straser said, what goes into law could be very different from what the two chairmen have put into their draft. Still, it’s a sign of exciting times for cleantech. Two years ago, Straser said he could not imagine seeing a proposal to deploy clean technology at the scale seen in this draft. “As a cleantech investor,” he said, “I’m pleasantly surprised that we’re moving this fast.”

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