The Clean Economy (part 1)

Sandy Waters
Examiner.com
Jun 20, 2009

A recent report on the Clean Economy by the Pew Charitable Trusts developed by the Pew's Center on the States (PCS) an organization that works to advance state policies that serve the public interest, produced a solid report detailing the state of the clean economy. There are several points of interest to businesses in North Carolina and the greater Raleigh/RTP area related to the emergence of a stronger clean economy. The first point is the clean energy economy as currently defined cuts across fivecategories: (1) Clean Energy; (2) Energy Efficiency; (3) Environmentally Friendly Production; (4) Conservation and Pollution Mitigation; and (5) Training and Support.

While the report indicates specific jobs and businesses will changein the coming decades, the five categories ofthe clean energy economy will likely not. Essentially that provides a platform to measure the growth in the clean economy forfederal, state and local policy makers and theprivate sector to track investments, jobs andbusiness creation, and growth over time.

A second point of the report shows jobs created in the clean economy were mostly centered around conservation and pollution mitigation companies. Job growth in each of these areas is another aspect. Yet the commercials and advertisements to increase consumer awareness seem to indicate at sometime in the future more jobs and growth potential will be in clean energy and energy efficiency. For small businesses and companies to invest their time and energy would actually seem to indicate today that environmentally friendly production would be the best investment. In other words, make green products to ride the consumer wave.

Another point of the report addresses more specifically the pattern of job growth in states like North Carolina, and like we learn more the hard way rather than in schools, all things are relative and need to be compared to others such as our neighbor states around us. We care currently below the national average for clean economy job growth as shown in the chart even with slightly higher venture investments. One of our neighbors reported no recordable venture investments during the period, yet their job growth rate is more than double that of NC.

Specifically, North Carolina has opportunities and can probably do a lot more than it has to stimulate business and the creation of new companies related to the clean economy. At the moment the jury is still out on real job creation and growth from the nationwide $6 Billion private venture fund investments mostly in energy efficiency and clean energy areas. A lot has gone into the R&D of photovoltaic energy and perhaps not enough investments in tapping in to the existing and available intellectual property tech transfer from the Department of Energy and engineering schools.