Stephen Marcus's blog

The market drivers for investing in recycling and waste management technologies have been getting stronger over the years. Yet data shows venture capital investors have been shying away from the sector.

Source: Cleantech Group Venture Capital Database

Despite that it accounts for 3 percent of global emissions, shipping has largely been exempt from emission reductions requirements to date.

The lack of interest in reducing emissions from shipping has also been expressed in the venture capital community. Germany-based SkySails – a maker of towing kite propulsion systems for today’s modern maritime shipping industry – received $10.3 million of venture capital funding way back in 2006. California's KiteShip, pursuing a similar idea, won an award at the California Cleantech Open, also in 2006. Since then SkySails, in particular, has been making gradual commercial progress.

The transition to a low carbon economy will lead to a more decentralised energy infrastructure whereby energy will be generated from far more locations – such as from domestic roof-top solar panels. This contrasts with the current infrastructure which entails electricity being generated and distributed from a few centralised power plants.

If you couple this with the fact that many of the main sources of renewable energy generation are intermittent, then one cannot escape the conclusion that the amount of energy-related information that the world will need to process is going to jump to unheard of levels.