Be sure to check out "Here Comes the Sun" in the November issue of Business 2.0 now hitting the newsstands. The feature written by my colleagues Michael Copeland and Tom McNichol (and edited by the wombat) takes an in-depth look at the solar gold rush now on in Silicon Valley. I love being a magazine editor, but one of the frustrations of working at a monthly in the Internet age is finishing an edit of a good and exceedingly timely story and then waiting weeks before it gets into readers’ hands.
Click on the link above for the full story. Here’s an excerpt:
The rapidly expanding alternative-energy economy promises to shake up the way power is produced and consumed as profoundly as Silicon Valley’s computer and Internet companies upended global communications and commerce in the late 20th century.
The signs of world-changing transformation are everywhere: Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Valley solar startups pursuing technological breakthroughs to make sun power as cheap as fossil fuel. Three of the largest tech IPOs of 2005 were for solar companies, including San Jose-based SunPower, a spinoff of chipmaker Cypress Semicond
uctor (CY).
Other old-line Valley tech companies are also jumping into the market. Among the most significant is Applied Materials (AMAT). The world’s largest chip-equipment maker will begin producing machines to manufacture solar wafers, laying the groundwork for an industrial infrastructure that should lower the cost of producing solar cells. For the first time in many years, high-tech manufacturing plants – yes, factories – are being built in Silicon Valley.
Why the gold rush?
Solar is not the only alternative-energy
source generating interest in the Valley: Biofuels, fuel cells, and
hydrogen power are all attracting their fair share of investment. But
solar energy has just the sort of oversize potential that the titans of
tech saw in computing: a free and practically inexhaustible power
source that rises every day.
Fears about global warming have
triggered public and political demand for renewable energy, which is
expected to become a $167 billion global market by 2015. In September,
California enacted landmark global-warming legislation to force the
state’s largest industrial polluters to reduce their greenhouse-gas
emissions 25 percent by 2020. The new law will likely lead to the
creation of a California carbon market, allowing clean-energy producers
in the world’s sixth-largest economy to sell carbon credits to
polluters who can’t or won’t reduce their spew. A similar regional
market is being developed by New York and six other Northeastern states.
California
is also committing $3.2 billion to fund a drive to install solar panels
on a million rooftops by 2018, and a November ballot initiative backed
by Silicon Valley heavyweights such as venture capitalists Vinod Khosla
and John Doerr and Google (Charts) co-founder Larry Page would tax Big
Oil to provide $4 billion in funding for alternative-energy research,
programs, and startups.
"There
are huge forces at work right now," says Sunil Paul, an Internet
entrepreneur turned alternative-energy investor. "With the subsidies
that are already in place in California, and markets for carbon credits
emerging, you have the perfect conditions for innovative companies to
capture a piece of the $1 trillion U.S. electricity market. As a
startup you have a massive number of customers to go after. And as an
investor, it not only makes straight-ahead business sense to put money
into these companies, but you can also be excited that you are doing
something that’s good for the planet. That is a powerful combination."
To read the entire story, click here.
Green Wombat 
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