The clean tech green energy sector is hurting badly – along with the rest of our economy. A lot of promising new firms are on life support finding it very difficult to raise desperately needed venture capital. We need to be laying the foundations for future growth now and there is no time to waste, I would argue that this is a paramount issue of national security, that it is not just about jobs or being “green”, but that it is an urgently vital necessity for our country’s future security. This is not an optional choice; it is not a luxury, a nice to have kind of thing; this is the very life blood of our country, of our industrial society. An industrial society needs energy and lots of it. America needs to urgently begin a national crash program of investing in domestically controlled renewable energy supplies, such as wind and solar right now while we still have a little breathing room to begin laying the foundations for a new American energy economy. It is a matter of national security.
A solar power plant construction will brings 200 green jobs to Denver. Annapolis will build a clean-energy industrial park. Feingold announced stimulus funds to create green jobs inWisconsin. Ohio hopes to offset job loss by investing in alternative energy and providing incentives to business. The Los Angeles building retrofit program is designed to boost green jobs.
There are four strategies you can use to get a green job within your own company. Green initiatives are gaining popularity and companies are increasingly launching green initiatives. They are likely to try to hire someone from the inside before looking for someone from the outside. Find out how you can get on the top of the list for consideration for these exciting career opportunities.
Smart meters, which are meters that are hooked up to a network so that they can deliver information about current usage in a timely manner, are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Smart meters will enable real time energy decisions in response to current conditions. They form a critical cornerstone of the smart grid; in fact in many ways they are the “smart” in the smart grid. This opens up a whole slew of new opportunities for smart software developers and smart entrepreneurs [no pun intended] to build the software applications and services to support and to add value to these new smart networked grids. What kinds of software opportunities exist in this newly opening sector?
Many people in the software industry have heard the buzzword cloud computing. Cloud computing promises to revolutionize how computing is done and huge investments are being made by the major players in the industry to stake out a portion of this sector. The infrastructure that underlies the cloud is a massive energy consumer. What is needed is for the idea of a green cloud to also catch on within the industry. A green cloud is cloud computing that uses intelligent power management and cooling to minimize its energy needs for some given level of service.
The United Nations has issued a Global Green New Deal Policy Brief by economists in the run of the G20 meeting of world leaders in London in early April. Among the findings of the brief is the assertion that investing one per cent of global GDP, or around $750 billion, into five key sectors could be the key to a Global Green New Deal.
What is the green economy? It promises a future more harmonious with nature, more attuned to the kind of tomorrow that is lying ahead and it also projects a sense of hopefulness and prosperity. The green economy is a rapidly growing and increasingly important sector in the overall economy generating more than a trillion dollars in revenue and employing many millions of people. It embraces such diverse industries as renewable energy production and electric energy distribution, energy efficiency and storage, organic agriculture, green transportation and green building.
The continued global financial crisis has been hurting the green economy. The sudden and very sharp drop in the availability of capital has dried up needed new investments and funding for new many green economy projects and businesses. Because many green or clean tech businesses are in an early expanding phase of their growth, they have been especially hard hit by the current dearth of capital. Quite a number of green firms are at serious risk of failure because of this capital starvation.
The economic recovery package contains $78.6 billion in clean energy, energy efficiency, environmental and green transportation funding. There are also energy-related tax incentives. Prior to signing the bill, Obama spoke of how the United States can now convert crisis into opportunity, like making the country more energy efficient, and how he would like to see the nation’s amount of renewable energy doubled in the next three years.
