A friend of mine recently said that cleantech is going to be bigger than the Internet. I’m always on the lookout for leading indicators, so that got my interest. Kleiner Perkins was the canary in the coal mine example my friend pointed to. They were recently profiled in Fortune magazine. They’ve moved completely into cleantech and away from the Internet. Having just raised $1.2 billion for “Green” investments. John Doerr thinks cleantech is a $6 trillion industry. Big bets by some really smart people. Bets that have been ramping for a while. I’ve been hearing about cleantech for some time but always thought of it as 10 years out. The Fortune article plus my friend’s vehemence however got me to take a quick look. What can we make of that statement “bigger than the Internet”? That’s a rather large statement. One leading indicator or at least baseline would be VC investment. According to a recent PwC and the NVCA report on Q2 ’08 VC investments, cleantech investing garnered $884 million in 65 deals while Internet investing was $1.5 billion on 238 deals. So Internet early-stage investing is alive and well and hasn’t been surpassed by cleantech yet. Though that doesn’t mean cleantech won’t be “bigger than the Internet” as this data point doesn’t really speak to velocity nor long-term opportunity.  Interestingly, the two largest VC deals for the quarter were cleantech, $132 million and $115 million and cleantech has had the greatest growth as a sector in the past 5 years.

So how else could we gauge the potential? Realistically we won’t know for quite some time. But it’s clear that cleantech is on a tear and ripe for outside the herd potential. Course we’ll also see if it goes through the same bubble, bust, real-potential cycle.
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