Live Blog from GreenNet.

Bob Metcalfe, Polaris Venture Partners looks to be a very charming speaker as he stitches together the notions of the internet industry and how that may be transposed into energy.
He quotes George Santayana “People who dont learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. And then memorably,” “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”
Funny.

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I stand corrected. Bob Metcalfe looks to be is a very charming speaker.

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Oh wow, he is the Metcalfe of Metcalfe’s law. Fellow students at Nicco Melle’s class take note! Also, he supports nuclear power- rare in the green world but very necessary!

Overall, he predicts that the new energy will have storage – and plentiful amounts of cheap and clean energy.

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Sun Microsystems has started an open platform around energy called openeco. Is this the Java experiment all over again? Will Sun be able to maintain control? and be the community to share energy consumption information? I think people need to check the website out!

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Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist, speaks against sector – based approaches to managing resources. How do we deal with the different dimensions and the networked effect of the various challenges we face.

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The Better Place representative speaks in visionary terms about how battery replacement infrastructure for electric cars is the way to the future. No mention is made of the low power intensity associated with batteries ie your car will never accelerate as fast as it does with gasoline.

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The Google Open Social seems a very interesting thing. But will this displace facebook?

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And now the Venture Capital Forum

Government focus is on companies which can start producing returns in a hurry – willing to open factories etc.

Navin- subsidies are good – icing on the cake but the real economic proposition is what venture capitalists look at. Steve however feels that Government is very important in the energy industry- for example mandates, CAFE standards for the car industry.

What companies will you stay out of?

Navin- Solar(maybe late stage) Biofuels, transportation to stay out of.

Erik – feels that solar is one of those industries which will be serially disrupted. Hence not go for incremental improvement.

Steve- still open to biofuels. no high capital intensive. no long payback periods.

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Ok my computer is dying – enough blogging for now. Thank you all.