Biofuels

Schwartz is GoingGreen

After a long hiatus in which I took a couple of trips and battled a sinus infection, it's great to be back in the saddle on Renewablog. Not to mention I returned with exciting news.

Schwartz has partnered with AlwaysOn to sponsor and represent the GoingGreen event. GoingGreen has become the premiere cleantech industry event focused on green financing, venture capital and emerging growth companies in solar, wind, green IT, sustainability, biofuels, etc.

GoingGreen kicks off what will be an action-packed Fall for the renewables market,  as PVSEC Europe, GoingGreen, greenXchange Xpo and Solar Power International (the artist formerly known as Solar Power 2008), all take place between Labor and Columbus Day week. If the other conferences have a line-up like GoingGreen (Raj Atluru and Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Ajit Nazre, Ray Lane, etc.), we are in for one great stretch of conferences. One topic that is sure to be top of mind? The expiring renewable tax credits and the impact that a change in Washington will have on industries like solar, biofuels, wind and hydro.

If you attend the events, let us know what you think. I've been waiting for this stretch all year long.

Posted by Jason Morris on August 1, 2008 at 3:51 PM
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Sometimes Simple Point is Most Critical

When posting on a blog it is sometimes easy to overthink your topic and gloss over some of the really simple topics that are incredibly critical. This dawned on me when reading a post by John Gartner at MarketingShift.

His post is about how Green has reached mainstream levels in terms of buzz according to Nielsen research. He gives some useful information throughout the brief post, but John's simple yet critical point is his last one: "Companies have to develop a marketing message that is genuine and not condescending to the desirable demographic."

This is a critically important point for a couple of reasons:

1) We have reach the second stage in green hype. The first stage was the embracing of Green by hype watchers as the next big thing in business and lifestyle. The second is an age of backlash and skepticism driven by fear that it will be adopted, along with general pushback by media and others who will say that adoption is not nearly matching the Stage-One hype. A lot of the media out there right now is focused on the inefficiency of solar, the negative impact of biofuels and freak windfarm fires. This makes it a prime period of time for green washers to get destroyed by media and the general public. Hence, why John's "genuine" statement is important.

2) People sometimes overlook that communications and marketing can come across as condescening. Look at the presidential campaign. You have the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barrack Obama trying to spin every little piece of information or data their way, to the point that it sometimes gets insulting to the viewer.  An Editorial in the NY Times this week accused them of thinking the American people are a bunch of "rubes."

This is how I feel sometimes about green marketing--that is so superficial and transparent, it does more harm than good. So the simple message is: Be genuine and don't condescend. If you have to fool someone or oversell your greenness, it won't appear green to your audience, it will be transparent.

Posted by Jason Morris on April 25, 2008 at 6:41 AM
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Quick hits: Thin Film market overview, Green gadgets, Geothermal

Some musings as we head into the last weekend of winter darkness:

-The AP did a great overview of the thin-film market and some of the benefits of non-silicon based solar cells yesterday.

-Global Solar Energy opened a new plant yesterday that will eventually make it one of the largest CIGS thin-film production facilities in the world. One blog discusses how First Solar has to date, gotten off almost scott free in terms of competition and how the new plant could change that. As I've said in the past, the more successful the industry is as a whole, the better, as the marketing and lobbying power of the industry needs to grow rapidly. *Disclosure: GSE is a Schwartz client.

-Word is that geothermal is getting investor attention and beginning to take off. This is very interesting because the government is also boosting its investment in geothermal in the FY 2009 budget. Others getting a boost? Solar PV, Wind and Biomass. The news is not quite as good for tidal energy.

Finally, a cool round-up of money-saving, green gadgets on CNET.

Enjoy your 47-hour weekend!

Posted by Jason Morris on March 7, 2008 at 9:56 AM
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The Word from WIREC: Day 2

So I am going to have to report back on how WIREC day two went in a future post as our meetings today took us to locations off site, but still some interesting tidbits I didn't get to yesterday:

-One business development executive at a solar concentrator company said that he got in "very early" on sponsoring and exhibiting at WIREC, giving him a large booth size and prime location alongside the big boys (BP, Chevron, etc). If you are a green marketer with a gambler's mentality, there is definite risk and reward to taking this approach. He saw enormous reward as they were front and center to anyone entering the expo. A solid relationship with ACORE also helps.

-On which shows should you gamble if any? The best shows are obviously ones in which there are other local key audiences that can be leveraged in case the event is a bust. If you can schedule some local meetings/drop-bys off site, you can still end up with qualified prospects from the travel associated with an event. DC is a great location since there are a lot of companies with headquarters in the area, as well as a media and government-rich audience with whom you can network. The San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and New York are also good locations. Anything beyond those markets can be tough depending on your vertical focus.

-From a speaking perspective, it can be tough to justify the time and expense to present at an unproven event. Nothing is worse than having your executive speaking to a room of six unqualified attendees who don't ask questions. Therefore, while taking a chance on exhibiting costs can be prohibitive, so is the credit capital cost of sending your executive to an unknown conference.

-I met with an investment company (hybrid of an investment fund and a venture firm) that actually sees the renewable energy world very similarly to the way that green marketers and marketing/PR firms see the industry. Solar and wind are the most mature, with biofuels, hydro power and others a bit further off. That is not to say that companies in those markets cannot benefit from government relations, public affairs and PR, but those campaigns would be built around early mindshare, driving investment and and educating the market. Solar and wind tend to be the companies in a position to commpete on a product basis.

-WIREC was not very well attended from a media standpoint, but there was a young analyst firm exhibiting, Emerging Energy Research. It is interesting to see some of the boutique firms beginning to pop up offering advisory services to vendors of renewables and consulting services to commercial and government organizations. Who will be the Green Gartner?

-The most interesting item to come out of the WIREC show? How much government money there is that can be invested in renewable companies, but how few companies understand how to tap it. Government relations seems to be the great untapped market opportunity for a lot of renewable companies. It is money that requires no diluting of equity, no forfeiting of intellectual property rights and no decision as to whom you sell the product. If I were a VC concerned about becoming over invested in one of my portfolio clients, this would seem a like a great option since my equity stake and value would only be positively impacted by bringing on the government as an investor. With $152 million going into solar and $53 million (approximately) going into wind, GR seems like a great place to get a significant ROI.

Here endeth my WIREC visit. Off to Dulles to complain about the lack of midday direct options to the West Coast.

Posted by Jason Morris on March 5, 2008 at 2:50 PM
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The Word from WIREC: Day 1

Tuesday marked the first day of WIREC and it was an interesting start. Some observations:

-Kudos to the WIREC folks for doing a much better job than some other conferences at having an efficient registration system. At Solar Power 2007 in Long Beach, a colleague and I stood in line for more than 90 minutes for badge pick up (we pre-registered) and ended up missing a meeting as a result. WIREC knew the event would be well attended and they prepared accordingly. It took about four minutes to get our badge.

-While photovoltaic (PV) solar was the rage at Solar Power 2007, solar concentrators seem to be the most prevelant technology at WIREC. Sopogy, SkyFuel and Abengoa were a few of the concentrator companies exhibiting, albeit with slightly different strategies and target markets. Global Solar Energy was one of the major PV manufacturers present (*disclosure: GSE is a Schwartz client).

-Wind and solar are again the most dominant technologies on display in terms of commercially available products. Also well represented are biofuels, biomass and firms looking to service those companies (legal firms, government relations, etc.).

-Big kudos to ACORE for sponsoring a free lunch and again to the WIREC folks for having enough seating.

It'll be interesting to see if the traffic picks up a bit more tomorrow and to see what companies are saying regarding the ROI of exhibiting. There are obviously a lot of these events popping up around the country and abroad, and finite green marketing budgets need to know which events are worth the growing costs.

Posted by Jason Morris on March 4, 2008 at 11:40 PM
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Quick hits: Mr. Morris goes to Washington

Some quick hits before I hit the road....

• It's been a very busy week as I prep for a trip to WIREC in Washington D.C. The Washington International Renewable Energy Conference is a gathering of renewable and cleantech companies of all types. It just so happens that WIREC is taking place just as the wind lobby gets together in Washington for a major push.
• WIREC also coincides with the House's passing of renewable energy legislation that would increase oil company taxes and extend renewable energy credits (via Earth2Tech). Not everyone is convinced that the legislation will get signed.
• Everyone has seen solar and wind really take off over the past two years. What's next? Well, if you follow the money it could be biofuels. Mascoma got $50 million in funding. It will be interesting to see if 2008 is the year new fuels really start coming to market ... maybe 2009 will be the year we see the changes in infrastructure to support those fuels. In any event, the market is about to get noisy for you biofuels marketers.
• But let's be honest ... the markets of all renewables will explode in the next year as we have the perfect storm of increasing demand, huge rounds of financing and an anticipated change in the political climate for renewables.

I'll be sure to report some of the interestings things I see and learn at WIREC. For those attending the event, safe travels.

Posted by Jason Morris on February 29, 2008 at 10:46 AM
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Practicing What We Preach; A Greener Shade of Schwartz

You may seen the news this week that Schwartz has officially announced a Renewable Energy and Green Practice. Some folks will be shocked that this is something that we are just announcing since we---like some other firms---have been talking about it and executing on it for more than a year.

We were tempted to put our stake in the ground in early 2007, announcing to the world that we were making a concerted effort to build out the practice and that we were ready to help cleantech companies achieve their PR goals. We were even more tempted as we executed Green campaigns for clients like Rackable Systems, McNamee Lawrence, Shawmut Design and Construction, and CheckFree. It was tough to resist making noise when we began working on pro-bono projects, like the San Francisco Waldorf School and the Business Council on Climate Change (BC3), and commercial projects, such as AgileWaves.

So why did we wait? Well, clients always ask us when they should announce a new product or service offering. Our response is usually, "If PR is the only driver of the announcement date, we should wait until you have a compelling story around the product or service, including customers that support the fact that what you are bringing to market is truly differentiated."

The news is not that we are entering the Green PR world. It is that we have a differentiated services offering, including aggressive media and government relations, that is already helping our cleantech clients achieve their business goals. The news is that we are taking what is our single biggest core competency--helping emerging growth companies facing heavily entrenched, better-funded competition level the playing field through PR--and applying it to a market that needs it more than perhaps any other technology market in history.

Renewable energy companies face significant challenges, many of which I have blogged about the past. They face one of the largest and most entrenched industries in the world in the form of traditional energy (oil, gas, coal, etc), as well as the marketing and lobbying arms of numerous industries that don't like being regulated (auto, utility, manufacturing).

They also face very steep, well-funded competition within their own markets now that VCs around the world are sinking eight and nine-figure rounds into companies in solar, wind, fuel cells and biofuels. They also face large corporations in other markets who have begun developing and acquiring their way into renewable energy.

Bottom line: This is the ultimate David versus Goliath story and a story in which we are relishing the opportunity to play a part. We now have officially been cast in a role and are packing a pretty big slingshot.

Posted by Jason Morris on February 5, 2008 at 11:45 AM
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GM: Greenwashing or Green with Envy?

The practice of Greenwashing has made lots of news lately, as some companies overstate their commitment to green practices and the FTC threatens to investigate. I'd like to think it's a case of marketers not being fed accurate information versus marketing and PR intentionally trying to mislead the public, but until some internal memos make their way public, we'll likely never know.

I've been seeing a lot of General Motors ads recently pushing that company's commitment to green technologies, from greater fuel economy to hybrids, from biofuels to electric. Most will say that history should dictate a great deal of skepticism with regards to how committed GM actually is to greening their product line, pointing to the short-lived infatuation with compact cars among U.S. automakers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

That said, the economic, ecological, geopolitical and social benefits of going green have never been better publicized, and I think the growth of Toyota and Honda have slapped U.S. automakers with a dose of harsh reality.

I am cautiously optimistic that what GM's CEO says in this CNET interview is true and that American auto manufacturers are committed to creating products that deliver the aforementioned benefits. Let's hope this is not a case of the largest U.S. auto company greenwashing the public in hopes that the market will again eventually favor the gas-guzzling behemoths that dominated the market over the past decade. Unfortunately, some suspect this is the case and will likely not believe Detroit can be green until they drive the proof.

Greenwashing is a foolish practice if done intentionally. It is analogous to a company claiming to have great data security only to find out later that the company was lax and suffered a breach. The PR damage of being accused and/or found of greenwashing is much worse than the likely benefits of making false claims about practices. It betrays the number one rule of marketing and PR: tell the truth.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of companies out there likely partaking in greenwashing, meaning we will likely see more of it in 2008 than ever before. 

Posted by Jason Morris on January 30, 2008 at 12:15 PM
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U.S.: The Renewable Energy Melting Pot?

Germany is #1 in solar. The U.K. intends to be #1 in wind. Brazil has long been #1 in ethanol. The U.S.? Does being first in failed attempts to adopt a national renewable energy strategy count?

The recent passing of the energy bill by Congress and subsequent signing by the White House put an exclamation point on what has been a stalled effort to get aggressive renewable energy initiatives adopted at a national level. Stalling by utilities and some energy giants also hasn't helped.

In the meantime, different geographic regions and emerging-growth companies have really led the charge in terms of developing their own programs and investing in various approaches.

Texas will be first in wind. The southwest and California likely in solar. And like California, some coastal states will likely bet on the power of the tides. New England may be a hybrid, with wind and tidal power on the coasts and some solar power inland.

While I don't excuse the federal government for failing to advance renewable energy research, adoption and strategies, it may not be a bad thing that states have taken the lead. After all, we are talking about the country with the fourth largest land area in the world. A country so vast that it doesn't make sense to say "we are going to be first in X, because it is the best option for the entire country."

Truth is, the only thing that the U.S. should eventually become first in is consumption of renewable energy. It should serve as a melting pot of renewable energy, as it has served as a melting pot of cultures for hundreds of years.

Posted by Jason Morris on January 28, 2008 at 8:15 PM
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Where have you gone, Michael Douglas?

This weekend, my wife and I were getting ready to watch a movie when I saw The American President on TNT or TBS (is there a difference?). This is the one where Michael Douglas plays a widower, single father and a first-term president. He meets and begins dating a lobbyist (played by Annette Bening) from a environmental group. The climax of the movie is a press conference where Douglas says that he is going to send aggressive gun control and climate legislation to Congress--two separate pieces of legislation that he was using as bargaining chips--while ignoring any negotiating he has already done with House and Senate members on the bills. The global warming bill he supports is a 20% reduction of green house gases by a certain date.

Now, I've seen the movie a dozen times (sadly) and it remains one of those guilty pleasure, Saturday afternoon movies that I will likely watch again (it has Michael J Fox, Richard Dreyfus and Martin Sheen as well...great cast). However, something struck me this time when watching it.

I knew that the environmental legislation pushed by Bening's character was a central plot component, but what struck me was that this was a topic for a movie released in 1995. That is 12 years ago now, going on 13. This amazed me because I would never have guessed that climate change has been a mainstream topic for that long. Maybe it is because I thought the debate was still centered on the ozone layer then or because gas was under $2 per gallon. In any case, I was shocked. Yet, it still seems as though we are only now scratching the surface of coming legislation, technology, etc.

What it also made me realize is that David Roberts of Gristmill is right: the world will be a much different place in 2020 when we are nearing the first date in many carbon emission-related bills currently under discussion.

Consider that in 1995 Bill Clinton was a first-term president. Solar was a niche industry with little VC or private equity investment and certainly no $200 million rounds. The Dow hit 5,000 for the first time. Yahoo! was founded. Biofuels, fuel cells and ethanol weren't part of the everyday lexicon. CFL stood for Canadian Football League, not a type of light bulb. There was no Internet bubble or tech recession.

Amazing, no? Given the amount of investment in and marketing noise around renewable energy today, I am willing to bet that things will advance a bit more quickly over the next 13 years, with or without Michael Douglas leading the charge.

Posted by Jason Morris on December 12, 2007 at 9:16 AM
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