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In one particular sector of cleantech--the big, sexy alternative energy grouping--the struggles of the US economy spell interesting challenges for the future of investment funding. While the sector as a whole is expected to continue to do well, alternative energy has built-in a number of hurdles that make it more difficult to secure funding at the start-up level, made worse by the recent credit issues on th market.
 Alternative energy projects tend to need significant amounts of capital from the beginning in order to get off the ground properly, mostly because their competition is well-heeled and entrenched, but also because most of these projects need to be done in large scale in order to compete. Individual solar panels are not so expensive or hard to sell to scare away funding, for instance, but installations in scale to challenge current coal-fired or nuclear power plants are. Again, an individual wind turbine would not be that dramatic an investment, but they need to be installed as part of massive wind farms in order to reap the benefits and stand as a threat to the current energy paradigm.
Putting that kind of money in, on technology with relatively short track records, can be daunting.
Which is why creative solutions are required. For instance, Google.org--the philanthropic extension of the information giant--plans to help start-ups with the millions they need to bridge the "valley of death" referenced in the Reuters article above. Most cleantech offerings won't need that kind of heavy support, as they'll be able to grow in a more typical fashion, but alternative energy is a special case, and certainly one that deserves that special support. If something is ever to be done about fossil fuel dependence at the grid level, it will require impressive action.
One sector that may well be recession-proof seems to be green building. Growing at a dramatic rate, the blog Green Chemicals suggests that green building could itself continue to expand even if the economy contracts. In fact, this is the likely vector for all of cleantech and the general green revolution, the challenges of alternative energy notwithstanding. In many ways, there's too much excitement and far too much momentum in the movement for a recession to reverse the current trends, or even slow development all that much. The pressures that have brought clean-and-green to the fore are still in place, and growing too quickly, for consumer insecurity to make invisible.
So some corners of the movement may have to get creative about funding, but as Google has shown, there's a willingness out there to get the job done and make the changes we're living through viable.
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