This post talks about the difficult transition between marketing to savvy early adopters and achieving penetration in the much wider mass market. There’s a big difference between what companies need to do to effectively sell technology products to early adopters and what they need to do to sell to the early and late majority of the technology adoption lifecycle; and this is what has been aptly and ominously called the chasm.
In discussions on the merits of distributed solar power too little focus has been given to the many important benefits that result from increasing the use of distributed solar power. These benefits accrue to both the utilities and presumably their rate payers as well and to society (and the tax payers) at large. This post summarizes a recent paper “Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain?” that attempts to give these benefits a tangible quantified value in order that the debate on the merits of solar power also begin to include this side of the cost / benefit analysis. A side that is all too often glossed over and largely overlooked.
This post asks the provocative question whether solar PV is really market ready yet. It goes on to suggest that it might be counter-productive for the long term growth of the sector to push solar photovoltaic adoption rates through the use of government subsidies, making the point that this may in fact be slowing down the adoption of needed innovation and process improvement that should ultimately make renewable energy more affordable.
Summarizes the new green jobs study by the Brookings Institute, noting that the study reports that the driving force behind the U.S. “clean economy” over the last decade has been emerging energy technologies. It is these dozen or so “hot” segments within the larger green economy where most of the growth has been concentrated. This suggests that, in order to build a cleantech economy, the U.S. should put primary emphasis on new, technology-intensive, energy-related sectors.
In this post Robert focuses on the green marketing gap, the perception gap that exists and results in most Americans perceiving green as an elitist phenomena. He outlines some of the principle problems that have caused this state of affairs to develop and argues that marketing should be geared to reinforcing the benefits that your product offers the planet.
This post explores the concept of an end-to-end ‘green’ power, water, and community eco-system based around mega-watt scale power and cooling requirements in a real world environment of limited financial resources and stringent system availability requirements. It suggests that huge power hungry data centers should consider incorporating on-site biomass electricity generation as an integral part of their operations systems.
Using a framework for creating sustainable site designs is one of the most realistic and effective ways for architects and other design professionals to create sustainable designs. Six fundamental concepts needed to be applied are explained in the post.
Few places in the U.S. are as well suited to developing renewable energy as the contaminated sites known as “brownfields.” But as communities from Philadelphia to California are discovering, government support is critical to enable solar and wind entrepreneurs to make use of these abandoned lands.
Many cleantech entrepreneurs are in the tough place we commonly call the Valley of Death. Stable, but underfunded, which they need for growth. If this describes your company, find out what you should do.
