Heres a great introduction to the world of Cleantech and Energy tech coming straight from the Cleantech Venture Forum:

Coming out of last week’s Cleantech Venture Forum, it’s pretty clear that cleantech (and relatedly energy tech, which is not a 100% overlap, as regular readers of this site will understand) is fast becoming a mainstream investment area for VCs, in part driven by LPs’ interest.

In terms of energy technology investing, Rodrigo Prudencio of Nth Power was kind enough recently to share some of the data that his firm is tracking. As part of a recent presentation he gave at Rice University, Rodrigo showed how US energy technology VC investments are at $1.7B so far in 2006 — compare this with $0.9B for all of 2005, or with the $500mm expected this year in VC investments in Web2.0.

Here is also a nice recap of what happened at the Cleantech Venture Forum.

If I were to summarize the conference in a few sentences, they would be:

* Cleantech as an investment thesis and asset allocation is now mainstream. Some institutions are still skeptical, but they’re becoming rare.
* More money is coming into the space, but the quality of dealflow being tracked still exceeds this nicely.

Evan Bartlett :: Sep.28.2006
Angel Investor