How the Economy Is Changing Clean Energy

Al writes "The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted $100m in funding from China."

Comments

Re:CO2

[ArcherB]

When there is more CO2, plants do better.

Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.

Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".

So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.

I suggest you do the same.

Falcon

You mean like this study. Let me quote from it:

"Most studies have looked at the effects of carbon dioxide on plants in pots or on very simple ecosystems and concluded that plants are going to grow faster in the future," said Field, co-author of the Science study. "We got exactly the same results when we applied carbon dioxide alone, but when we factored in realistic treatments -- warming, changes in nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation -- growth was actually suppressed."

In other words, higher levels of CO2 really did cause all plants to grow more, until they started screwing with other environmental variables based on what they THINK a future atmosphere (and temperature) will be like. In other words, they screwed with the gas and baked the plants in the oven until they stopped growing so they can say, "See, GW is bad!"

So when you say, I should do the same, I already did.