cleantech
Home About Contributors Research
cleantech insights

Water: Week in Review

artipatel
by | March 21st 2012
Posted in Water

It was a big week in US water regulations, with the US Coast Guard announcing a new rule regarding ballast water and the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission giving preliminary approval to controversial nutrient-limiting regulations.  Hopefully these new regulations don’t cause any grappling, as did the new California state requirement mandating most users exercising a water right to submit precise water measurements on a monthly basis.  Continue reading for details on these news stories and more.

M&A/ Partnerships

  • Global healthcare company Merck formed a three-year, $1.5m partnership with Safe Water Network to improve water supply in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
    http://www.water-technology.net/news/newsmerck-and-safe-water-network-partner-to-improve-water-supply-in-india
  • Imbrium International Ltd and Australia’s Humes Water Solutions have expanded their strategic business relationship, with Humes becoming a licencee of Imbrium’s Jellyfish filter for stormwater treatment.  The agreement grants Humes the exclusive right to manufacture, sell and distribute the Imbrium Jellyfish technology for stormwater treatment throughout Australia.
    http://www.filtsep.com/view/24649/humes-licences-imbrium-jellyfish-filter-technology/
  • Oasys Water announced that Select Energy Services, LLC, (SES) a provider of engineered water to the oil and gas industry, will be the exclusive operator of Oasys’ technology in the Permian Basin for a 24-month period.  SES will use Oasys Water’s Membrane Brine Concentrator to treat high saline produced waters from hydraulic

    • …

Read More 0

Water: Week in Review

artipatel
by | March 15th 2012
Posted in Cleantech Investment Insight, Sector Insights, Water

Water companies had quite the showing in 2011 cleantech acquisitions, with Ecolab’s acquisition of Nalco (~$8.4 billion) and CKI’s acquisition of Northumbrian Water (~$4 billion).  The trend continues (albeit, on a much smaller scale!), as Mueller Water Products announced it is selling US Pipe to Wynnchurch Capital for nearly $90 million in cash.  Details on this story and other news items can be found below.

M&A/ Partnerships

Read More 1

A Smarter City is Not Enough: Better Brains, Better Hearts

Greg Neichin
by | March 5th 2012
Posted in Cleantech & IT, Geographical Insights

Most of us are well aware of the problem.  The world’s population is moving faster than ever into urban areas – 75% of the world’s people will be crammed into cities by 2050.  Many cities are already bursting at the seams and in the decades ahead we will face increasing resource shortages as we struggle to keep up with the basic power, water, waste, and transportation demands of these emerging mega-cities.   These are challenges on a truly epic scale.

Not to worry you say, there’s an app for that!

As they have in industry after industry, information technologists are rushing to the rescue heralding the age of the smart city. There are glowing editorials devoted to the promise of “Big Data” and how, with enough computing power (fueled by renewable energy of course!) we’ll be able to analytically crunch our way out of these problems.

New York City has received praise from the digerati for the city’s BigApps contest where public data is being made available for curious and motivated web developers.  Last week, the good people at the TED Prize announced that this year’s $100K award will be split up amongst the 10 best, individual ideas for empowering …

Read More 1

Nothing rotten in the state of Denmark: the Danes top 2012 list of countries best at fostering clean innovation

Whitney Michael
by | March 2nd 2012
Posted in Cleantech Investment Insight

This week Cleantech Group and WWF published Coming Clean: The Global Cleantech Innovation Index 2012. This first-ever report of its kind looks at cleantech innovation by geography:  where entrepreneurial cleantech companies are growing today and where they will spring-up over the coming years.  Download this report for free.

The report concludes that Denmark, followed by Israel, Sweden, Finland and the US provide the best conditions today for clean technology start-up creation.

The first global cleantech innovation index

In absolute terms, without factoring in economic size, the United States leads in many measures of cleantech innovation: the country has the greatest public cleantech R&D budget, the greatest number of cleantech start-ups and investors, as well as the most venture capital, private equity, and M&A deals in cleantech.

However, when weighted for economic size, the US’s dominance falls into fifth place.  Thirty-eight countries were evaluated on 15 indicators  related to the creation and commercialization of cleantech start-ups.  The index measures each one’s potential, relative to economic size, to produce entrepreneurial cleantech start-up companies and commercialize clean technology innovations over the next 10 years.

Cleantech Group published this report in partnership with the WWF, one of the world’s largest and most respected independent conservation …

Read More 0

The power of global partnerships: You best be a believer.

Greg Neichin
by | March 1st 2012
Posted in Cleantech Events, Cleantech Investment Insight, Corporates in Cleantech, Geographical Insights

Over the past twelve months it has become quite in vogue, to the point of cliché, to discus the importance of partnerships to the development of the cleantech sector.   What started out as a handful of initiatives by major equipment manufacturers, utilities, and service providers to better engage with early stage companies has now become a full fledged movement of cleantech partnership gospel.

If partnerships are indeed the new cleantech religion, we’re about to host the year’s biggest revival in San Francisco.  Appropriately themed, The Power of Global Partnerships, our upcoming Cleantech Group Forum, March 26-28, will bring together corporate executives, investors, and entrepreneurs from around the world to discuss why the power of partnerships is not an empty pleasantry, but rather an indispensable guiding mantra for company’s both large and small.

If you have not yet registered or you are still a skeptical, non-believer who thinks that all of this talk of partnerships is nice and fuzzy, but doesn’t have real tactical bite, here are my top 5 reasons, why partnerships really, truly, sincerely-I-swear, matter to the growth of the cleantech sector.

1) Partnerships bring access to customer relationships: Most cleantech markets are brutally hard to enter.  …

Read More 0