There were plenty of yuks today at the AlwaysOn Nordic Green Conference at the expense of reindeer, unpronounceable Scandinavian companies, and the worthless U.S. dollar. Somewhere in that mix were Sand Hill Road VCs looking for new opportunities and Nordic startups looking to defrost with some stateside funding.
Beyond a communal love of Ikea furniture, California and the Nordic nations share a penchant for cleantech. Much as California leads the U.S., the Nordic nations lead the EU when it comes to renewable energy. The purpose of this conference was to connect the executives of Nordic clean energy companies large and small with American venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and energy execs.
But there are plenty of barriers between the two cleantech communities. “It’s very hard for European Union money to go to America and difficult for U.S. government money to go to Europe,” Thomas Koch, CEO of TK Energi, a Danish bioenergy company, lamented. “We need partnerships on both sides to make that easier.”
There have already been several American-Nordic cleantech partnerships. Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place has signed an agreement with Danish DONG Energy to build a battery-swapping and car-charing infrastructure in Denmark. Danish biotech giant Novozyme is using funds from the U.S. Department of Energy to improve the efficiency of their celluslases, a partnership made possible because Novozyme has an American business.
Noticeably absent at the conference were the Nordic VCs. We’ve seen a few instances of Nordic venture firms funding American cleantech startups. Norway-based Convexa Capital led a $28 million round for thin-film solar startup Innovalight, while fellow Norse Renewable Energy Corp. invested $40 million in San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based Mainstream Energy, a residential and commercial and solar installer.
Also missing were reps from the Nordic wind energy giants, like Vestas. Bruno Lund Perdersen, head of windpower at Danfoss, said that this was likely due to the fact that wind energy is such a mature market in Nordic countries.
In the end, it really might be the strength of the Euro that was the genesis of this conference. Sure, the EU’s regulatory framework is more stable than the U.S., but the all mighty dollar Euro is the language of venture capitalists.

{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/04\/22\/cleantech-goes-nordic\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_a3f318124441a8f6661e7c9a1b7bd6ef","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}