With the rapid development of clean-energy technologies, what will our lives look like in the next 20 years? Are we going to be plugging in our cars soon? Will we have a smart meter in our home that tells us our washing machine is leaking?
These questions were posed at the end of a panel on clean energy at last week’s Private Equity Analyst Outlook conference. The panelists – a venture capital investor, a private equity investor and an energy lawyer – each gave their answers, as transcribed below. (For more coverage of this panel, check out this story in VentureWire about how strategic investors will be a major driver of clean-technology investment.)
Tucker Twitmyer, managing director, venture firm EnerTech Capital
From an end-consumers perspective, we think it looks remarkably the way it does today. People are just not interested in managing their daily energy consumption. They want to turn to switch on, wonder how the miracle happens, and enjoy all the benefits of cheap and available energy. And that actually informs a lot of what we do in our investing. In the end, the utilities win. They are regulated monopolies for some very fundamental reasons. And what you will see is – we think, not so much in-home displays – but the ability of central management and control through the electrical wires to reach down and observe and see those new solar arrays – we think hybrid cars more than pure electric – to see all those various things at the edge of this massive network and be able to integrate their vision and their decision making around these millions and billions of devices, as opposed to today where really the only thing they’re integrating is the large central power plant. So the changes will occur back to the core on the infrastructure side much more so than down to the consumer. But we’re all going to love our flat screen TVs and everything else in 20 years.
To read the full, original article click on this link: What Will Our Clean-Energy Future Look Like In 20 Years? - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ
Author: Scott Austin
