Article and Photo by Lewis R. Hom

On a sunny Thursday afternoon, dozens of entrepreneurs brought their green business ideas to the Googleplex to vie for money from venture capitalists and angel investors at the Clean Tech Open Green Building Innovators Symposium. 120 businesses were represented in the categories of waste management, energy efficiency, green building, renewable energy, smart power, and transportation.

As each of the panelists - an academic, an architect, and venture capitalists - discussed how far the green buildings industry had come and how much farther it still had to go, one felt a certain amount of camaraderie with the rest of the innovators. Everyone wanted to green the world with energy efficiency, waste management efficiency, renewable energy, transportation solutions, and so forth. The looming question was this: how can we make this profitable? How can we bring environmental services to the people and at the same time, be competitive in the marketplace and make a profit?

With some, it was fairly obvious. As venture capitalist Josh Green (who actually did not change his name when he entered the industry) noted, technology is the true gamechanger in the industry. Many businesses had developed some kind of innovative new green piece of technology, whether it was a new kind of scooter for commuters or photovoltaic roof shingles made from recycled materials, and were trying to market it.

Others, though, offered innovative energy solutions. One company of system integrators had plans of being able to build a resource monitoring system to show the energy usage of every room in a house, optimize energy usage with respect to utilities prices, and put it all on a nice web interface. Another one developed a comprehensive business model for making daily recycling runs to businesses using high-throughput materials like Starbucks and Jamba Juice at a profit.

Green products have the unfortunate image of being more expensive and sometimes inferior to conventional products. These innovators seek to redefine the image of green. Being green is not about making sacrifices for the sake of the environment; it's about improving and innovating so that the technologies of the future will be more efficient and perform better for cheaper. Professor Kunz, from Stanford's Center for Integrated Facility Engineering noted that in less than two decades, the businesses we see in the Yellow Pages will be replaced by totally new, green ones. When "green" means cheap, efficient, and high-performance, then green tech will crush the entrenched incumbents in the industry.

Some of these business ventures will succeed. Others will fail and move on to other things. With ideas this crazy and out-of-the-box, some failure is inevitable. However, I'm sure that I'll be seeing at least a few of them go on to redefine their respective industries. Overall, it was great to be in the thick of the energy and spirit of green innovation.

Labels: energy efficiency, green, green building, greenbiz, renewable energy, sustainable

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