Published in conjunction with 'Big Oil and Cleantech', June 2013, by Cleantech Investor

Total: active cleantech corporate venture investor

French oil company Total has been very active in the cleantech corporate venture sector in recent months. The company’s corporate venture division, Total Energy Venture (TEV), which was founded in 2008, has invested in several start-ups and two funds: Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital and Demeter.  TEV’s investments focus on companies with innovative renewable or alternative energy technologies, oil and gas energy efficiency, energy storage, waste valorisation, greenhouse gas reduction, industrial water and sustainable mobility.   

14 June 2013

by Andrew Mitchell of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation

Venture Capital is broken – at least according to a report last year by the Kauffman Foundation. This was certainly a talking point in Washington DC at the US Department of Energy’s National Business Plan Competition on 12 June 2013. Indeed, someone even dared to mention a “cleantech nuclear winter”. The facts are that in all sectors since 1997 less cash has been returned to investors than they originally invested – which makes negative interest rates from the European Central Bank seem not so insane!

But go figure. If I had a big enough bag of money I would invest in each one of the six finalists pitching at the US Department of Energy’s National Business Plan Competition. With absolute confidence that at least one of them would return all the money back, and more. Add to this the confidence from Andrew Chung at Khosla Ventures that corporate venturing is going to save cleantech, there is no nuclear winter and, as David Danielson said, the world has passed the 400ppm CO₂ milestone, so we have to make this work.

Related articles by Andrew Mitchell:

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Winner of the “People’s Choice” award at the US Department of Energy’s National Business Plan Competition

Related articles by Andrew Mitchell:

Clean Energy Ethnocentrism? It’s no joke

No "nuclear winter in clean tech

All video pitches:

Bearing Analytics

Bioadhesive Alliance Inc

Inviroment

Picasolar

Pyro-E

SiNode Systems

The China CleanTech Index rose strongly in May 2013 to continue its strong performance for the year. Over the month, the Index outperformed all but one of its four benchmarks.

The China CleanTech Index rose from 38.3 to 42.7 over the month of May recording an 11.4% gain. This compared to the NEX gain of 12.5%, the CTIUS gain of 3.9%, the Shanghai Composite gain of 5.6% and the MSCI loss of 0.3%.   

The China CleanTech 20 also recorded a good gain for the month of 7.9% although behind the wider Index showing that there is strong growth amongst some of the smaller stocks in the Index.

The Index performance is ahead of all of its benchmarks over the last six months recording an outstanding 42% gain.