Nancy Floyd is the founder and managing director at Nth Power, a venture capital firm established specifically to invest in clean energy startups.
Solar, energy efficiency, smart grid and advanced transportation all feature in Nth Power’s portfolio. Keep reading →
Nancy Floyd is the founder and managing director at Nth Power, a venture capital firm established specifically to invest in clean energy startups. Floyd began her career as the first professional recruitment of a woman at the Vermont Public Utilities Commission. In 1982, Floyd founded NFC Energy Corporation, which developed over $30 million in wind projects and sold the company, generating a 25-fold return within three years. She then went on to help found a telecoms company, which was sold to IBM in 1987.
Nth Power now has $430 million under management and successfully exited investments through nine M&As and four IPOs since the firm started investing in 1997. Keep reading →
A new model of venture capital investing is emerging in the clean tech sector, moving away from subsidies and traditional investor exit strategies to a focus on intellectual property value and partnerships.
“It is the case that the venture model of entering and exiting in two to three years doesn’t work in [clean tech] and it never has,” Flagship Ventures CEO and Managing Partner Noubar Afeyan told Breaking Energy recently. “Investors were looking for a formulaic path to making money, but it is IP value and partnerships that both validates the underlying business and provides a liquidity proxy for a possible exit.” Keep reading →
US venture capital investments in cleantech rose 12% in 2011 despite strong headwinds from slow global economic growth, political deadlock in Congress and Europe’s debt crisis, according to the MoneyTree report released today by PwC and the National Venture Capital Association.
Both dollars and deal volume increased in 2011, bringing the year’s total to the highest level ever recorded at $4.3 billion across 323 deals, compared with $3.8 billion going into 289 deals in 2010. Keep reading →
Clean energy remains the new kid on the block for an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels for electricity generation both currently and for years to come. As the sector develops along with newly emerging technologies and falling costs, venture capitalists and other early-stage investors have seen enormous potential.
That potential has been regularly stymied to date by a number of factors, ranging from the specific like the financial crisis to the heavily regulated nature of an industry with reliability as its primary goal. Keep reading →
The first in a two-part series in which Breaking Energy asks a leading venture capital specialist about the intersection of two of the hottest parts of the economy today. Both are also are major contributors to hopes for increased hiring and accelerated tecnology innovation.
Q: What is the state of the venture capital industry, particularly in the energy sector, at the start of 2012? Keep reading →
A Silicon Valley smart grid startup is gunning to lower the cost of demand response by 90% while increasing efficiency 30%.
Palo Alto, CA-based AutoGrid was founded by Stanford University professor Amit Narayan. Its most recent hire is smart grid pioneer Chris Knudsen. Knudsen, who formerly ran PG&E’s Technology Innovation Center, joins as chief technology officer. AutoGrid has already attracted marquee investors including Foundation Capital, Voyager Capital and Stanford University. What’s more, it is leading a $4-million grant project funded by DOE and the California Energy Commission to investigate “highly dispatchable and distributed demand response for the integration of distributed generation.” Keep reading →
Renewable energy’s future is now in the developing world, analysts at accounting giant Ernst & Young claim, as cost-conscious and indebted industrial economies focus on investments like smart grid that can slow demand and cut costs.
After a robust decade driven first by concerns about climate change and eventually-foiled expectations that a global price on greenhouse gas emissions would emerge followed by heavy central-government subsidies for renewable energy projects seen as promoting energy security and job growth, the renewable energy sector is moving into a “revolutionary” new phase, a new E&Y report indexing renewable energy country attractiveness says. Keep reading →
The venture capital industry is dialing back expectations for 2012 to reflect sustained instability in both political outlooks and across markets dealing with continued financial turmoil.
Venture capitalists have been central to launching many of the technologies that form the basis of the ongoing smart grid and clean energy revolutions in the business, but diminishing investor interest in initial public offerings and a flight to safety by worried investors protecting dinged portfolios are weighing on the sector. Keep reading →
