{"id":977,"date":"2009-03-09T05:26:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-09T05:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oilgae.com\/blog\/?p=977"},"modified":"2009-03-09T05:26:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-09T05:26:00","slug":"arent-vcs-putting-money-into-pond-scum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/arent-vcs-putting-money-into-pond-scum.html","title":{"rendered":"&quot;Why aren\u2019t VCs putting money into pond scum?&quot; Michael Weaver"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You are at: <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/\">Oilgae Blog<\/a><\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>For all the hype surrounding algae biofuel, the moneymen still aren\u2019t ready to invest. At a panel at the WSJ Eco:nomics conference, top venture capitalists John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, and Bryant Tong explained what they like (smart-grid technology) and what they don\u2019t (algae).<\/p>\n<p>The algae discussion was prompted by a question from Michael Weaver, whose company Bionovitas has made advances, he says, in bolstering the yield and cost-competitiveness of algae. Why, he asked, aren\u2019t the big VCs putting money into pond scum when every other clean tech seems fair game?<\/p>\n<p>All three said they\u2019ve looked at dozens of algae biofuels plans in recent years; Mr. Khosla says he\u2019s looked at more than 100. None have invested a dime so far.<\/p>\n<p>For Mr. Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield &amp; Byers, the problem is algae itself. To get better economics, you need to grow the stuff in cheap, open-air ponds, not in fancy bioreactors. But that is rough on algae and limits yields. Mr. Tong, of Nth power, says both the economics and the timeline of algae biofuels are still ugly at this point.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/environmentalcapital\/2009\/03\/06\/pond-scum-plenty-of-hype-for-algae-biofuel-but-no-money-yet\/\">See more<\/a><\/p>\n<p>By the way, have you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/feed\/rss.xml\">subscribed to the Oilgae Blog?<\/a>; How about <a href=\"http:\/\/oilgae.com\/mlist\/user\/subscribe.php\">joining the Oilgae mailing list?<\/a>; and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/forum\">our forum to discuss on with others<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You are at: Oilgae Blog. For all the hype surrounding algae biofuel, the moneymen still aren\u2019t ready to invest. At a panel at the WSJ Eco:nomics conference, top venture capitalists John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, and Bryant Tong explained what they like (smart-grid technology) and what they don\u2019t (algae). The algae discussion was prompted by a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-algae-energy-investments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oilgae.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}