Cleanweb

= "We're engaging and inspiring entrepreneurs to make our cities more livable and sustainable #cleanweb",

URL = http://cleanweb.co/

Clean tech entrepreneurial movement cited by Jeremy Rifkin is his book on the zero marginal cost economy.

Contextual Citation

"Infrastructure gains have gotten the environmental industry pretty far, Paul said, “but the CleanWeb is the ability to distribute software and services on top of that infrastructure that makes it more efficient, and that is the next big evolution in clean-tech.”

- Sunil Paul [1]

Description

Katherine Tweed:

"“It's time to blow up these outdated markets,” Rob Day, a partner with Black Coral Capital, wrote after attending his first Cleanweb Hackathon. “And no one is better positioned to do so than good, solid web and IT entrepreneurs.”

Cleanweb could do just that. “Cleanweb is a grassroots movement committed to solving the world’s most profound issues related to resource constraints through the application of information technology,” according to The Cleanweb Initiative.

It’s not just a bunch of developers in a renovated warehouse (although there’s some of that too). Government agencies, utilities and large energy companies are all leveraging open data, social media and mobile communications to transform how they do business and drive down energy use.

One of the most obvious applications is energy efficiency. Home energy management firm Opower is partnered with Facebook, while commercial energy management firm Lucid works with Honest Buildings to bring energy to its platform. Software startups like FirstFuel and Retroficiency are trying to change the way large buildings assess energy use and potential retrofits.

The cleanweb movement goes far beyond just conserving electricity. Firms that offer car sharing services, such as Zipcar or RelayRides (which recently acquired Wheelz), are part of the trend to leverage IT to do more with fewer resources. InnoCentive, a marketplace for open innovation, helps private companies or government entities solve internal challenges by creating prize competitions for its members. Recyclebank allows people to earn points and hold school competitions for recycling.

The Bay Area also doesn’t have a monopoly on cleanweb, either. The Cleanweb Initiative has communities across the U.S. and in Europe with regular events to come up with solutions for problems both local and global." (http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/cleanweb-is-it-the-secret-to-a-new-energy-future)

Discussion

By Sunil Paul and Nick Allen:

"The price of a rooftop solar installation has dropped by half in the last few years, but the reductions in panel prices can’t continue. Now more than half the price of a home solar array is made up of soft costs like site evaluation, customer acquisition, and financing. On average, solar companies spend $2,500 to acquire each new customer. Imagine the frustration when after sending a truck out to a home, an installer discovers that a tree shading the roof makes the project uneconomical or that the customer doesn’t qualify for financing. That’s a significant waste of time and money.

Better information can reduce these inefficiencies. OneRoof Energy, for example, a solar company we’ve invested in, uses satellite imagery to remotely work up a customer’s project, determining its cost and viability long before a truck ever rolls out to the house. Another company we’re backing, Solar Mosaic, is raising money for solar installations via online crowdsourced loans. We estimate that IT-driven solutions alone can reduce solar costs by another 75 percent; if so, solar could become decisively cheaper than electricity from coal. Eventually it could account for 15 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs." (http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427382/inventing-the-cleanweb/)