Alternative Energy No Longer Just For Tree Huggers

For someone who’s been involved with alternative energy since 1990, it has been amazing to watch the dramatic shift in the public and business discourse that has occurred in the last year or so. Today, businesses talk about how they are going to make money from alternative energy not just save the world (as if that wasn’t enough!).

By way of example, my first job out of college was working on designing and building the first prototypes of the REVA electric car in 1996. Now, more than 10 years later, this company led for many years by the passion of Chetan Maini has evolved into the largest electric car company in the world and attracted investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Manufacturing cars in Bangalore, India, they are exporting them around the world including the EU and the US.

It’s obvious in retrospect, but the real tipping point in the discourse on alternative energy has been An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. “Clean tech” has even become an investment focus of venture capitalists in the US and abroad. Dow Jones even has a set of “sustainability indices” tracking a company’s greenness and we all know that when Wall Street finally pays attention, so does corporate America. We are by no means at the beginning of the green revolution…just the tipping point.