Will Coleman, Partner Mohr Davidow Ventures Will Coleman is a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, focusing on energy and cleantech investing. Prior to MDV, Will worked in Washington, DC as a legislative director for a renewables coalition building state and federal level coalitions to support renewable energy legislation, and as a consultant to private equity and project finance clients focusing on the energy sector. Will has also worked for GE Wind in the commercial operations group, Xseed Capital, and Academic Partners.
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Will is on the Venture Fund Advisory Board for the ASE, which operates the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and is on the advisory committee for the California Energy Commission’s Alternative and Renewable Fuel and Vehicle Technology Program. Will also sits on the board of the Clean Economy Network, and has participated on the advisory boards of the CEC Biofuels Working Groups in 2004 and the WGA’s low carbon transportation working group in 2006. Will has a MBA and a MS in Energy & Resources from UC Berkeley, and an AB from Harvard University. While at Berkeley, Will founded the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative (BERC) and the Center for Energy & Environmental Innovation (CEEI).
and still on a declining curve is really amazing. It means we’re really at a tipping point when it comes to solar deployment.
Do you think dubious green marketing has tarnished the glimmer of green?
I
don’t know if I’ve gotten a sense of people being ticked off about it, but I think there is some frustration and I think the frustration is just because people are impatient. This is not a social media application where one out of ten takes off like a rocket ship and the rest fail miserably. In green and clean technologies, we’re investing in fundamental IP and technology that takes time to develop and deploy. People expected these technologies to be completely transformative by now: to change the entire structure of the economy and provide a huge number of green jobs. But that was a false premise.
G
reen and clean technologies will be tremendously transformative, particularly over the course of the next decade or two, but the politics have to get out of the way and let it happen. If you think about what happened, private investment in the sector was steadily increasing. Then an enormous amount of hype was spawned by the stimulus package and the unprecedented number of dollars targeted to green technologies. In order to get these supports passed, the politicians basically went out there and said, “This is going to save us. This is the next big thing.”
However, only a portion of those dollars have actually hit the street. If the dollars haven’t materialized yet and if deployment reality is slower than promised, then people are going to be frustrated. Most of this is driven by politics not by people inside the green economy or inside clean technology failing to make progress.
What holds the greatest potential for a turnaround?
S
olar. Solar has hit a point of maturity, scale, and velocity that there is increasingly opportunity in and around the existing value chains. Which is very exciting.
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mart grid. I think a lot of infrastructure has been deployed through utilities and public funding but there’s a huge amount in the smart grid which has a lot more to do with networking and traditional communications networks. These areas are beginning to take off, particularly now that the capability is unlocked at the meter level and through expanding communications networks. You’re now seeing a huge number of applications and benefits being built in on either side of the meter. Whether that’s customers being able to manage their loads, or utilities being able to manage their networks, there’s a lot that’s being done and I think that’s going to be a really interesting area over the next 5 to 10 years.
S
torage. A lot of work has been going on in energy storage domain.