The Energy Revolution That Keeps Carbon on Top: Nathan Myhrvold

Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- A remarkable thing happened inSilicon Valley during the past decade. Venture capitalists andentrepreneurs set their sights on clean energy as the Next BigThing. They audaciously hoped to reinvent energy by harnessingthe incredible innovation that had transformed informationtechnology and biotechnology.

Some of the best venture capitalists in the business,including my friends Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla, detached fromtheir computing roots and focused on energy startups. The resultwas a staggering surge of capital into clean-energytechnologies. Worldwide, from 2006 to 2010, about $535 billionin venture capital, private equity and initial public offeringsas well as mergers and acquisitions flowed into 4,236 clean-techbusinesses, according to a recent analysis by GlobalData.