The Toronto Star has a pair of business articles on businesses that aim to make money through environment technologies. Energy Reporter Tyler Hamilton looks at Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner who has a number of thoughts on what ideas are useful and which are toys. The article states:
He calls conservation a "nice habit." He refers to hybrid cars as "great" but incremental. Biodiesel he considers "completely irrelevant." Solar PV is "sexy" but immaterial, partly because it's an intermittent source of energy, similar to wind. And while he sees an important role for new battery technologies, "to call that a climate change solution is an environmental hallucination. "I think we should stop playing with toys," says the self-described pragmatist, who never hesitates to engage in online debates with environmentalists and idealists who believe solar rooftops and wind power can wean us off coal. "If you're not solving 50 per cent of the problem it's not material."
His solutions including solar thermal plants that concentrate heat from the sun with mirrors enhanced geothermal power, tidal power and next-generation, ultra-high-voltage DC transmission technologies and infrastructure to bring this power to distance cities that need it.
While Khosla is quoted as dismissing biodiesel, he is not against all biofuels. He has an article in the October 2006 Wired Magazine discussing his biofuels investments.
A second article by Tyler looks at the growth of Concord, Ontario -based Hymotion Inc. which produced third-party battery packs to turn hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius into plug-in hybrids that can travel for short to medium distances on battery power alone.
Hymotion was purchased in May by MIT spinoff A123Systems Inc. which develops high-power lithium ion batteries and is currently one of the battery companies vying to supply battery packs for GM’s Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. The article does not state if Hymotion is currently using A123Systems batteries in its products.