When industry giants such as GE, Toyota, and Sharp and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are making multibillion-dollar investments in clean technology, the message is clear. Developing clean technologies is no longer a social issue championed by environmentalists; it's a moneymaking enterprise moving solidly into the business mainstream. In fact, as the economy faces unprecedented challenges from high energy prices, resource shortages, and global environmental and security threats, clean tech—technologies designed to provide superior performance at a lower cost while creating significantly less waste than conventional offerings—promises to be the next engine of economic growth.

In The Clean Tech Revolution, authors Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder identify the major forces that have pushed clean tech from back-to-the-earth utopian dream to its current revolution among the inner circles of corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street trading floors, and in government offices around the globe. By highlighting eight major clean-tech sectors—solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, the smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration—they uncover how investors, entrepreneurs, and individuals can profit from this next wave of technological innovation. Pernick and Wilder shine the spotlight on the winners among technologies, companies, and regions that are likely to reap the greatest benefits from clean tech—and they show you why the time to act is now.

Groundbreaking and authoritative, The Clean Tech Revolution is the must-read book to understand and profit from the clean technologies that are reshaping our fast-changing world.

Scaling Up Manufacturing and Driving Down Costs

Above the tree-lined streets of Pasadena, California, in the sleek, open-air offices of high-tech start-up incubator Idealab, a team of researchers is huddled around a strange-looking device that concentrates the light of the sun and generates on-site electricity. Bill Gross, Idealab's founder and the CEO of upstart concentrating-solar PV company Energy Innovations, beams with the nerdy excitement of a computer programmer who's just created a nifty chunk of code or a biologist who's uncovered a new genome. "The economic potential for solar is enormous," says Gross. "Within a decade, solar will reach price parity with other energy sources." His vision is to replicate Idealab's rooftop, where a dozen solar-concentrator demo units track the sun from dawn to dusk. He wants Energy Innovations units sprouting on commercial and industrial roofs around the world, providing low-cost, efficient, distributed electric power from the sun.

Gross, whose Idealab hatched such Internet winners and losers as Citysearch, eToys, Overture, and Tickets.com, is now in a race to develop his solar technology and bring it to market before other firms, such as Practical Instruments, SolFocus, and Solaria. He firmly believes that the future belongs to those who can help solve two of our world's most pressing issues, energy and water—global access to clean, reliable, and abundant sources of each. His solar technology company—which aims to use relatively inexpensive mirrors to reflect the light of the sun onto expensive high-efficiency solar cells—raised more than $40 million in 2005 and 2006, with hopes of putting its first commercial products onto rooftops in 2007.

Energy Innovations represents just one of the many technological developments taking place in the rapidly expanding solar industry. These developments include everything from incremental improvements in the most abundant form of solar electricity—silicon-based solar PV—to new nonsilicon forms of solar electric generation, including nanotechnology-based innovations and CIGS (copper, indium, gallium, selenium). The variety of emerging solar electric technologies and applications demonstrates the richness of opportunity in an industry expanding by more than 30% per year since the mid-1990s.

What does this mean for investors, entrepreneurs, and others who want a piece of the growing solar pie? The solar business, once the domain of back-to-the-earth zealots and government and corporate research labs, is now being embraced by nimble, visionary entrepreneurs with access to capital, skilled management, and business acumen. Also joining the race are established multinationals such as Applied Materials, GE, and Sharp—companies that are basing their future, at least in part, on corporate spoils in the solar industry.

Rapid Fire

Part of the growing interest in solar power has to do with the sector's astounding growth rate. In 2000, the total annual manufacturing output of all solar companies was about 300 MW. In 2005, solar industry manufacturing output rose almost fivefold to more than 1,500 MW of solar PV modules and surpassed 2,000 MW in 2006. That's enough electricity-generating capacity to serve two cities the size of Atlanta for an entire year.

The entry of multinationals and large, well-funded, publicly traded solar companies into the space provides opportunities for individual and institutional investors to put money into some of the more promising companies and developments. In 2005 and 2006, for example, solar companies such as SunPower and China's Suntech Power Holdings had successful initial public offerings on U.S. stock exchanges and global giants such as Applied...

Ron Pernick is cofounder and principal of Clean Edge, a leading clean-tech research and publishing firm. He has coauthored more than a dozen reports on clean technologies, coproduces the annual Clean-Tech Investor Summit, manages Clean Edge's stock index products, and consults for governments, corporations, and entrepreneurs. Pernick is widely cited in the media and lectures at industry events and universities. He lives in Portland, Oregon.