Title: Making clean tech cheap, as well as green - The Boston Globe

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Making clean tech cheap, as well as green
Winning over consumers is key to success

By Erin Ailworth
Globe Staff / March 9, 2010

It’s called clean technology’s “competitive conundrum’’: how to get people to pay for cleaner energy when electricity produced from traditional sources like nuclear power, coal, or natural gas costs less.

Today, several industry specialists plan to address that question at GoingGreen East, a clean technology conference designed to bring together executives from green technology companies with investors and other players.

Organizers at the online media firm AlwaysOn Network expect to draw 450 to 500 participants to the conference at the Four Seasons Hotel Boston by the time it ends tomorrow.

Hemant Taneja, a managing director at the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners, will sit on the panel discussing how to make sure emerging clean technologies are successful.

He said companies must have patience to create new technologies that may take years to bear fruit, but that will ultimately appeal more to eco-conscious consumers.

“We have to shoot for really, really disruptive things and we have to have the patience to wait for them to happen,’’ Taneja said. “Squeezing costs out of the existing solutions is not going to be competitive.’’

Read the full article at The Boston Globe.