My friend Tom Rand has a short but no less interesting video filmed during a presentation he gave recently in Toronto. Rand helped build a “green hotel” that emits a quarter of the emissions of a comparable hotel. The workhouse behind this approach is geothermal, and Rand said it can be done in a way where energy savings exceed the monthly payments on a long-term low-interest loan. Now, the key is to get that cheap loan. Rand said it’s up to the federal and provincial governments to backstop such loans and mandate the banks to lend the money. It would help, he added, if use of this technology was mandated where it was appropriate. This, as Rand says, is low-hanging fruit that we’re simply not picking. Instead, with each new building or home we build we’re letting this ripe-for-picking fruit fall on the ground. Rand, it should be pointed out, is behind another move to have the government sell green bonds that would help fund these kinds of projects, or backstop the low-interest loans required to do them. It’s all perfectly logical, but I guess politics is never as logical as it could be.

Click here to watch the short video.

Joe Romm’s Climate Progress has a lengthy post on the benefits of creating a public green bank that could work with the private sector to ease the transition toward a clean energy economy. The post is actually reproduced from the Center for American Progress, which praises proposed amendments to the U.S. Waxman-Markey bill that would create a clean energy bank within the Department of Energy. According to the amendments, the Clean Energy Deployment Administration, or CEDA, would direct loans, letters of credit, loan guarantees, insurance products and other financing options to support clean energy production, transmission, storage and other projects that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions or save energy. The administration would take a “portfolio investment approach” and “ensure no particular technology receives more than 30 per cent of the total funding available.” And all of this would be on top of existing loan guarantees and incentives offered by the feds.

Sounds like something Ontario could use, because even though our new Green Energy and Green Economy Act is an ambitious and progressive piece of legislation, and even though a newly proposed feed-in tariff program offers a huge incentive for developers, I’m still not convinced there won’t be a capital constraint that will ultimately slow down development. This is particularly true if, as the Ontario government has said, it wants to encourage community co-op and First Nations projects. I would even argue the federal government should consider creating such an institution, but that is not likely to happen under our current Conservative government, so no point in asking. (more…)

Worldwide cleantech venture investments were up 38 per cent to $8.4 billion (U.S.) in 2007 2008, according to the Cleantech Group. Companies in the United States raised $5.8 billion, or 68 per cent of the global total, up 56 per cent compared to 2007.

China was up 22 per cent on the year. Germany was up a staggering 217 per cent. Israel, not to be outdone, was up 224 per cent.

And Canada? Shamefully, cleantech companies from my home and native land only managed to raise $159 million from 14 disclosed financing rounds, down 58 per cent from 2007. Of the countries mentioned by the Cleantech Group that saw a fall in 2008 investments, Canada performed the worst — the others were the U.K., which fell by 11 per cent, and India with a 20-per-cent decline.

I’m bummed. I know there’s huge talent in this country, smart entrepreneurs, game-changing ideas and a solid stable of cleantech ventures — just look at the list of companies that have been funded by Sustainable Development Technology Canada over the years, and more seem to emerge by the day. Where are the champions from the financial community? Academia? Government? The high-profile talking heads ready to promote the best and brightest that Canadian, Ontario, or Toronto cleantech has to offer? Where’s the branding? The chest-thumping?

I need a glass of wine.

Maybe I’m going on a tangent here, but I can’t help but see this as an early sign of Dutch Disease, which happens when there is a reallocation of resources from high-tech service and manufacturing industries to the exploitation of natural resources, particularly as the prices of those resources rise. The Canadian government’s obsession with rapid oil sands development, the run-up last year in the price of oil, and the lack of serious attention to high-tech innovation, including cleantech, does fit that bill. It seems like the rest of the country is being gutted to support a one-trick pony, which is a blessing or a curse depending on whether you’re riding the pony or not.

I recall a speech by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-chief executive of Research In Motion, back in March 2006 in Toronto. “Our oil resources can only carry us so far. What are we going to do after they run out?” asked Lazaridis. “What happens if there’s a major breakthrough and we’re no longer as dependent on oil as we have been in the past? What will we do? Will we have made the wise research investments, industrial investments, infrastructure investments to prepare Canada for a world without oil?”

In a word, no. These latest cleantech investment figures, IMO, are but one example of this neglect.

Ontario Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman has told me he is looking into launching a “green bond” in the province that would, at the very least, help finance community-level renewable energy projects. He’s been investigating the idea with Finance Minister Dwight Duncan and I expect, if they go through with it, they’ll launch something early this year. The question: How big will they go? Will they limit it to smaller community projects or open it up as part of a major stimulus package to help finance larger green infrastructure projects?

Clearly, the green bond idea has merit. So much so that the World Bank launched its first green bond back in November with Scandinavian bank SEB. “Tackling climate change is going to take immense resources that will only come from a well-orchestrated flow of public and private finance,” said Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank Group. “This transaction is an important early effort to show one way in which this can be done. We hope it demonstrates that private citizens can safely and profitably invest their savings today while also helping provide a better world for their children.” (more…)

My Clean Break column today is a mini-profile of Alan Salzman, the CEO of VantagePoint Venture Partners and, I should add, a fellow Torontonian. Salzman, who did his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto (University College) decided in the early 1980s to lay roots in California so he could join the “entrepreneurial wave of innovation” that would evolve into Silicon Valley. In 1996, after a number of successes as a venture capitalist under his belt, Salzman co-founded VantagePoint and has proved a key player in the success of many high-tech, Internet and biotech companies. His big focus today, however, is cleantech. VantagePoint has funded Tesla Motors, Miasole, BrightSource, Better Place and a number of other promising cleantech ventures. Salzman talks about his decision to go big with cleantech, trends that are driving transformation of the energy and transportation sectors, and how the current global economic crisis could — but won’t necessarily — delay this transformation.

Despite having lived in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years, Salzman’s family still lives in Toronto. He has also retained his Canadian citizenship (I forgot to ask him if he still loves hockey).