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Investment in clean technology suffered a particularly pronounced fall in Europe during the recession and has failed to recover since, research has shown.
Over the past five years Europe’s global clean energy lead eroded compared to other parts of the world. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in 2007 42% of the world’s clean energy investment took place in Europe compared with just 25% today. During the same period Asia Oceania almost doubled its share of overall investment, Bloomberg said.
Meanwhile analysis of venture capital investments in the final quarter of last year by the Cleantech Group showed that North America accounted for almost two thirds of total venture capital investments in the cleantech sector in this period, with Europe and Asia Pacific accounting for just 19% and 18% respectively.
The Carbon Trust announced last month that it was launching a $5 million fund in partnership with General Electric aimed at supporting cleantech businesses in Europe. Jamie Vollbracht of the trust said it would be aimed at incubating businesses developing environmentally-friendly technology that needed early stage, pre-venture capital funding.
Vollbracht said the UK was a “hotbed of innovation and talent”. He said investment in clean technology had been hampered by two factors, a drop in investment during the recession and the withdrawal of appropriate regulatory support. The government was criticised heavily for cutting feed-in tariffs for solar power at the end of last year.
Vollbracht said the trust intended to “pick the best” start-up and small companies to support. “We can’t say how many we’re going to get from the UK, but Britain is certainly very strongly placed,” he said.
The Carbon Trust has also awarded a total of £1 million to four British organisations developing fuel cells – Imperial College London, University College London (UCL), Runcorn-based Acal Energy and Sheffield’s ITM Power. The money will help the universities to develop a fuel cell that could be produced by high-volume manufacturing techniques, reducing cost. Acal and ITM are to join forces to create a high-power, low-cost fuel cell.
Ben Graziano, technology commercialisation manager at the trust, said it was possible that thousands of commercial vehicles could be powered by fuel cells by as early as 2017. “We’re not talking about tens of thousands of units sold, but perhaps a few thousand,” he said. The year 2017 marked a “best estimate” of when fuel-cell technology developed as a result of backing by the trust might find its way into vehicles, Graziano said.
He added that Britain had a very strong scientific base for the development of fuel cells. “In terms of polymer fuel cells, I do think it’s fair to say we have a leading position.”
Acal was offering a potentially “quite radical solution to bring down costs”. Imperial and UCL used high-volume techniques in PCB manufacture to create a new kind of fuel cell. Some experts believed the two universities’ work could represent the biggest breakthrough in fuel cells since the 1980s.