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A boss of mine recently made the comparison between the growth of sustainability in the past two years as a potential business stream and the dotcom boom at the turn of the century. The analogy supposes a huge leap from a sector of the economy into new technologies and markets via a big idea (the internet will fundamentally change the way we communicate/ climate change will transform how we generate and supply energy) before they fully work out whether there's actually any money in it.
My company, similar to most media groups, piled into the internet back in 2000 time and got pretty burnt badly when we rapidly discovered there was no money it. A fear could be that without copper-bottomed business cases for going green many of the new entrants to the renewables/sustainable solutions market will suffer similar fates.
My bosses words were prescient as a piece in the Observer asks the question "Green tech: is it the new dotcom?" The thrust of the piece is that while there are some similarities with the internet boom many of the US firms jumping on the renewables bandwagon are on firmer foundations than the swathe if web start-ups that largely consisted of two or three long-haired blokes in a bedroom with a whizzy idea but minimum grasp of business basics. "Three guys in a garage can't do what we do," says John Langdon, director at US-based solar energy firm HelioVolt.
And elsewhere in the Observer there is more encouragement that the push into the energy market is surely not pie in the sky. Vincent Tchenguiz, something of a name in the property world, wants to create a £10bn environment fund in partnership with Corus owner Tata to target clean energy projects in India.
The analogy is is an interesting one but one would hope that rather than the crash experienced online the sustainable market may pause for breath before really going mainstream. The economy appears to be fluctuating so strongly and speedily it's a difficult one to call. But flipping it the other way round - if we all would struggle to live without the internet now, what's to say we won't (and can't) live unsustainably in five or even three years time?
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