CleanTech as a Career

The green in Clean Tech applies to corporate profits as well as creating a lighter global foot print. Finding the right opportunity can meet people’s social conscience as well as be a prospect for wealth creation.

Where to look for a job in CleanTech?

Find a multi billion or trillion dollar industry that has shown little innovation in the last 25+ yrs. Some general categories that are used can be Power, Water, and Materials.

Think about if consumers or corporations have changed how they value the product/service offerings. In addition there may be sweeping regulatory changes that force the implementation of new ways of conducting business.

For example in the Power Industry there is the emergence of Smart Grid technologies. They are one of the first steps necessary for new energy solutions (Inserts below taken from “The Emerging Smart Grid”)

North America’s Enormous Electric Power Infrastructure

The North American Power Industry comprises more than 3,000 electricity utilities, 2,000 independent power producers, and hundreds of related organizations. Together they serve 120 million residential customers, 16 million commercial customers, and 700,000 industrial customers. With about $275 billion in annual sales, the industry is one of the continent’s largest – 30% larger then automobile industry 100% larger than Telecommunications. North American utilities own assets with a book value of nearly $1trillion, roughly 70% power plants and 30% grid. The continent has 700,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, owned by about 200 different organizations and valued at more than $160 billion. It has about 5 million miles of medium-voltage distribution lines and 22,000 substations owned by more than 3,200 organizations and valued at $140 billion. The North American electric power industry will purchase more than $20 billion in Grid infrastructure equipment in 2005, nearly ¼ of the world wide total of $81 billion.

Smart Grid of the Future

1	20th Century Grid	21st Century Smart Grid
2	Electromechanical	Digital
3	One-way communications (if any)	2 way communications
4	Built for centralized generation	Accommodates distributed generation
5	Radial topology	Network Topology
6	Few sensors	Monitors and sensors throughout
7	“Blind”	Self-monitoring
8	Manual restoration	Semi-automated restoration and, eventually, self healing
9	Prone to failures and blackouts	Adaptive protection and islanding
10	Check equipment manually	Monitor equipment remotely
11	Emergency decisions by committee and phone	Decision support systems predictive reliability
12	Limited control over power flows	Pervasive control system
13	Limited price information	Full price information
14	Few customer choices	Many customer choices