Things have settled down here a little at Terra Infirma Towers after the most busy (and it has to be said lucrative) month in our history. I've said before that with companies feeling the pinch from falling orders and soaring oil prices, this is not a bad time to be offering cost-cutting services. The great thing about cutting material resource use, as opposed to human resources (hate that term), is that it doesn't cut your capacity to deliver products and/or services so as the economy recovers you're not floundering behind.

Of course companies can go beyond simply reducing environmental costs and start exploiting environmental business opportunities. Now you might think that this is a risky time to do so, but both the Guardian and the Times are reporting a surge in green investment and I hear the same from contacts in the banking industry.

Just don't think you can stick a green label on a duff product and expect it to succeed. Plenty have tried and failed. And I keep meeting more of them.

Labels: energy efficiency, green business, investment, waste minimisation

New Energy Finance is reporting that "Clean" energy investment almost hit $150bn last year - up 60% on the year before.

Their press release states:

Among the key factors pushing this numbers sharply upwards in 2007 were government policies around the world to promote renewable power and cleaner fuels, oil prices approaching $100-a barrel and rising corporate and investor awareness of the opportunities in clean energy.

One of the themes of 2007 was geographic diversification. Western Europe and North America continued to enjoy sharp increases... but the momentum spread out to include other developed economic regions such as Eastern Europe and Australia.

Even more significant was the pick-up in activity in emerging economies, with China moving strongly ahead with projects in wind, biomass and energy efficiency, Brazil seeing huge investment interest in its sugar based ethanol sector, and Africa starting to see renewable energy and efficiency as partial answers to its power shortages.

Interesting stuff. Obviously the Low Carbon Economy is still in its infancy, but if investment continues to rise at this scale, markets will stabilise and the uptake of renewables and energy efficient technologies will start to become the norm, rather than the exception.

Labels: energy efficiency, investment, low carbon economy, renewable energy