The Complete Guide to Making Environmentally Friendly Investment Decisions: How to Make a Lot of Green Money While Saving the Planet by Alan Northcott

Author:Alan Northcott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: environment, green, investment, portfolio, financial, carbon neutral
Publisher: Atlantic Publishing
Published: 2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Investing in Water

Investing in water can include small state-of-the-art companies developing stand-alone equipment for Third World areas, as well as major manufacturers such as General Electric and 3M who cater to the utility scale projects. Outside investment in water projects and technology is slow, and the industry is crying out for more venture capital. It seems that there was a rush to invest in renewable energy when green investing became popular, but with many startups becoming overvalued, cleantech, whether water or energy-related, became an investment that is heavily researched but not so readily supported.

Another reason funds have been limited in the water-investing field is that there are many different answers but no clear solutions, and many of the technologies do not appear to have the potential for high profits. For instance, even with the advanced technology of reverse osmosis, the market for RO membranes, the heart of the functionality, does not even amount to $1 billion each year. Thus, clean water is a much poorer prospect than renewable energy.

A further problem with water investment is that it takes a long time to go from a viable model to commercial application. Public water utilities have to be convinced before adopting new technology, and there is little reward for them to take risks and be at the leading edge. There is seldom any competition, as water utilities tend to have a monopoly in any particular area, and they adopt the attitude of “if it is not broken, it does not need fixing.” This is coupled with the fact that many public water utilities have a fixed budget and are not keen to spend outside of their routine costs, and introducing clean water breakthroughs to the industry is a difficult task, which makes any returns for investors susceptible to delays and hard to come by. The truth is that water is a $500 billion industry that trails only electricity and oil in market size, but venture capital is limited to about $120 million per year.

With those provisos about the speed of adoption of any technology by industry, there is no doubt that water will become increasingly important, even though it may take a few crises before there is general acceptance of this. One thing is certain: the need for water can only increase, and it is not a discretionary purchase. Elster Solutions ( www.elstersolutions.com ), an English company, is a leading supplier of electronic water meters to the Gulf region and has recently released a smart water meter that has no moving parts, which means the meters are not susceptible to blockage. The company has supplied water meters to the area for the last 50 years and is proud that the meters are designed for harsh and hot operating conditions. Elster also produces gas and electricity meters.

One company that is hoping for the industry to concentrate on smaller, decentralized units, particularly in developing countries where infrastructure would be capital intensive and prohibitive, is Spectra Watermakers ( www.spectrawatermakers.com ) from California. The company was

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