CNBC Business | Green  Heroes  2009

Green  Heroes  2009

No more business as usual.  These 30 entrepreneurs are already building the low-carbon post-recession economy

Hylton Murray-Philipson

The former banker using the markets to help safeguard the rainforests

Deforestation is responsible for 20% of the world’s carbon emissions, roughly the same amount as the United States or China, the world’s largest polluters. Yet all three sources – approximately two-thirds of global emissions – are missed by the current Kyoto Protocol. For every hectare of forest burned, 400 tonnes of CO2 is released into the atmosphere – and sometimes up to ten times more due to the exposure of underground peat reserves.  

This situation forced Philipson to completely rethink his career and act. An ex-investment banker, he realised that the financial pressures on the emerging markets where most rainforests are situated are such that it is usually more profitable to cut them down than leave them standing. Unless this changes, deforestation will continue unchecked. 

Philipson’s goal is to counter the pressures of globalisation that are driving deforestation by developing a new capital market to value standing forests. Specifically, this will include the launch of an Ecosystem Service Certificate attached to an €80m, 10-year tradable bond, the interest from which will pay for the protection and maintenance of 350,000 hectares of the Guyana rainforest. The deal will be launched this year and is being conducted through a partnership with the Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation & Development in Guyana.  

But Philipson is not stopping with Guyana. He wants to design a comprehensive, global trading model for rainforest protection. Ultimately, he wants to create a Forest Index so that investors can treat forest as a legitimate asset class alongside other renewables such as wind, biomass and solar. “Fundamentally, this is about the global management of global carbon stocks, part of which must preserve biodiversity levels, indigenous cultures, and the monitoring and governance of the rainforest.” 

Philipson established for-profit company Canopy Capital in December 2007. The Global Canopy Programme, a UK charity dedicated to the research and preservation of the tropical rainforest, holds a 20% stake in the company, with the remaining 80% owned by a dozen investors.  

Philipson also heads up Wingate Ventures, which he established in 1990 to provide corporate finance to businesses making a positive contribution to the environment. As special advisor to The Prince’s Rainforest Project (set up by the UK’s Prince of Wales), Philipson also works with governments, businesses and NGOs to seek solutions to the destruction of tropical  forests around the world.  

In Philipson’s view, forests are an investment hedge against government failure to deliver emissions reduction targets by reducing society’s dependence on fossil fuels and encouraging renewables.  

“The rules of the game we inherited from our forefathers are no longer fit for purpose. With global population going from  1.5 billion in 1900 to 6.7 billion today, the relationship between man and the planet is reaching crisis point. Sustainability needs to be at the heart of everything we do.”

André Heinz

The scion of the baked bean dynasty is bringing clean-tech investment to Scandinavia

California has long been a crucible where green-tech meets venture capital, but American environmentalist André Heinz has his sights on another emerging green corridor: Scandinavia and the northern fringes of Europe. 

“There are spectacular opportunities here: quality companies but not much venture capital dedicated to the region,” Heinz says by telephone from Pittsburgh, home of Heinz Endowments. He shuttles between the American industrial heartland city, and Stockholm, seat of his newly-formed VC outfit, Sustainable Technologies Fund, the first Nordic clean-tech fund, and Paris, his European home base.  

The Heinz name may be better known outside green circles in Europe – he is the son of Teresa Heinz, from the famous ketchup clan, who is the wife of US senator John Kerry, a presidential hopeful in the last election. 

Heinz wants to grow his Nordic-focused fund to take in the Baltic states and, later on, Germany. For him, philanthropy and venture capital are not contradictory: “Lessons learned from environmental grant-making apply to venture capital and vice versa. But the private sector is better suited to the task than philanthropy.” 

In its two years so far, Sustainable Technologies Fund has invested in Suncore AB, makers of a polymer solar-thermal collector; and Swebo, which makes boiler systems that use non-refined fuels like wood chips. Heinz also practices what he preaches. His Paris pied a terre in the exclusive Place des Vosges is outfitted with the world’s most energy-efficient Alpen windows and harvests the sunlight as it travels along the roof during the day.

Peter Fraenkel

The technical whizz who is harnessing the power of the ocean tides to provide a practical, commercial energy supply

Biofuels were hot in the middle of the decade. Before that the future was the hydrogen fuel-cell car. Nuclear has been lambasted and coal is the environmentalist’s worst nightmare. Europe’s graceful wind turbines have been criticised for being unreliable. 

So the first rotations of new underwater tidal stream turbines in spring 2008 in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, were a brave new venture in a sector afflicted by one false dawn after another. Created by renewable energy company Marine Current Turbines, the blades of the device, known as SeaGen, rotate at about the speed of a revolving door. They create enough energy from tidal currents to make 1.2MW of electricity, or power about 1,000 homes.  

Masterminded by CEO Martin Wright and employing technical wizard Peter Fraenkel, MCT claims to be the world’s first tidal energy company to connect power to the grid as part of a commercial project. Irish utility ESB will buy power for the first time in early 2009.  

SeaGen has since become a star with a huge following in the British Isles. This promising new form of power generation has escaped political taunts, since all oceans are governed by the regular ebb and flow of the tides, giving it enormous potential as a predictable form of energy, unlike its predecessors, wind and wave. It means bankers like it, too, because they can forecast cash flow more easily. This reliability outweighs one of the device‘s only drawbacks: that it can only operate between 18-20 hours a day because of slack tides during the different phases of the two-week tidal cycle. But as Peter Fraenkel explains: “If you deploy a device that operates intermittently but in a random way you get a pattern with a probability you can work with. The probability of not getting any energy is low. With tidal stream energy, the gaps are predictable.”  

Like many other tidal stream devices, SeaGen needs strong currents. The Irish Sea surges into a narrow, deep stretch of water at Strangford Lough, creating turbulence that pushes the blades around quickly enough. To really pack a punch, SeaGen needs to be used near populated areas so that the energy it produces is constantly captured and used. Even though only a handful of locations along the shorelines of Portugal, Norway, France and Canada meet this requirement, the pioneering status of MCT’s  simple invention suggests it has already earned its place in the history books.

Kevin Surace

His building supplies company has come up with a way of removing gypsum  from plasterboard, saving lots of energy

Never mind greenhouse gas targets for 2050, one company has shown it can make things happen now. When the chief executive of Serious Materials, a US building supplies company based in Sunnyvale, California, set out to solve some of the huge carbon emissions problems in the building industry, he found one solution in just two years. If gypsum, a mineral quarried for construction use, could be cut out of drywall, reasoned Kevin Surace, the lengthy cooking processes needed to make it would be avoided. Drywall, also known as plasterboard and sold in vast quantities all over Europe, is a finger-thick building component that fits between brick walls and the paint or wallpaper. 

Surace and his team came up with a gypsum-free recyclable insulating alternative, known as EcoRock, due to hit builders’ yards for the first time this year. EcoRock, they say, eliminates 80% of the energy needed in the process, dominated by the monolithic gypsum products factories that make drywall. Hardly a topic for dinner parties, perhaps. But in a sector crying out for innovation after decades of stone walling, Serious Materials is a breath of fresh air; its products will dodge many of the environmental controls that have now cornered the industry. If so, this unglamorous alternative, alongside a new range of energy saving windows, could become standard.

Jean-Francois  & Jean-Charles Decaux

The billboard brothers who funded and built Paris’s wildly successful bike hire scheme, and are getting ready to take it global

Although community bicycle schemes are hardly new – for years Paris boasted Roue Libre, co-ordinated with RATP, the company which runs buses and the Metro – it’s the entrepreneurial Velib scheme that’s really captured public imagination.  

The scheme – named after the words for bike and liberty –was first launched in July 2007 with 10,000 bicycles and 750 automated rental stands each with 15 or so bikes. Subscriptions start at €1 a day or €29 for an entire year, plus a hourly charge starting at €1 for an hour. There are now 20,000 bicycles and 1,450 stations – about one every 300m throughout the city centre – making Velib the largest system of its kind in the world. Encouraged by just one major transport strike, there have been more than 30 million rentals since the launch.  

The scheme is meant to encourage riders to use the bikes as they would a car or public transport, to reduce traffic and pollution in the city – and indeed car traffic is down 5% 12 months after the launch. But Velib was conceived as a commercial venture as much as an environmentally friendly one. The entire system is financed by  JCDecaux, the world’s second-largest outdoor advertising firm, in return for Paris signing over the income from a substantial portion of billboard ads. 

The family firm paid start-up costs of about €90m and employs around 285 people to operate the system and repair the bikes. The city receives all revenue from the scheme plus a fee of around €3.5m a year. In return, JCDecaux has exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards; the city receives about half of that billboard space at no charge for public-interest advertising. JCDecaux also takes 12% of all annual Velib subscriptions. More than 200,000 people have taken out one-year subscriptions, yielding almost €6m. 

Co-chief executives and brothers Jean-Charles (49) and Jean-François (39) Decaux developed software that uses credit-card information and tracks where each bike was rented and returned, how long it was used, and by whom.  

Because of the way Velib is structured, it’s impossible to tell if it’s profitable as a stand alone business. But the Decaux brothers say they are now building their proprietary payment and tracking software into a significant product to be sold to other city authorities, just as global advertising revenues are expected to plunge. A recent article in French newspaper Le Figaro claimed that JC Decaux was losing €3m a year on the Velib scheme operating in Lyon. However, having inspired numerous other city authorities the Decaux brothers may yet be on to a winner.

Juliet Davenport

The energy expert who founded the  only utility company in the UK that  sells fully renewable electricity –  winning over 20,000 customers

It was while studying atmospheric physics at Oxford University that Juliet Davenport, CEO of Good Energy, first became interested in climate change. “This was my turning point,” she recalls. “I sat there thinking what can I do about it?” Quite a shift from her childhood, which was spent watching racing cars with her rally journalist father.  

After she left university, she worked for the European Commission on energy policy but soon worked out that the renewable sector was going nowhere. “It wasn’t connecting to consumers, to people or to financiers,” she says. “It was stuck in a slightly academic, government space, more concerned with report writing than actually doing anything.”  

After a chance meeting with a German venture capital firm she launched Good Energy with its backing, eventually buying it out. Then and now it’s the only UK electricity company supplying 100% renewable energy to its customers, sourcing it from more than 450 independent renewable electricity generators. It all goes into the generalised national grid of course, but the more customers that buy renewable energy, the more Good Energy feeds into the grid and the less fossil fuel generation is required.  

To date, it has more than 25,000 homes and businesses on its books, attracted by its unique selling point: other companies’ green tariffs only source a small proportion of energy from renewables, the rest is made up of non-renewable fuels bought from coal or gas-fired power stations. It’s a tough market but that doesn’t bother Davenport who thrives on the challenge.  “I am quite competitive, which helps,” she says. “I never want to give up or give way. If someone tells you can’t do it, you have to find a way to do it.” 

Though she makes light of the fact that she’s a female CEO in what is still a male-dominated world, she is a trailblazer, not only by making renewable energy more consumer-friendly but by paving the way for a new generation of female entrepreneurs, much like Anita Roddick, founder of the Bodyshop, did before her. “Women are more likely to take risks when they believe in something, rather than just chasing the money,” she says.

Tom Blades

Releasing the energy locked inside wood waste could mean the end for petrol and biocrops, hopes the head of German-based energy company Choren

Road transport could be revolutionised by a heady brew bubbling away in the heart of the vast Saxon forest. Freiberg-based energy company Choren, backed by oil and car industry shareholders Shell, Daimler and Volkswagen, has seen the end of cheap petrol.  

It visualises the genesis of a road fuel extracted from wasted branches, pine needles, bark and other woody products cast off by the paper and timber industries. Wood cellulose is a polysaccharide, or complex carbohydrate, containing large stores of energy. But the structure of plant cell walls and the presence of a natural polymer called lignin restricts the release of sugar and creation of the wood-based ethanol. Applying a chemical process known as Fischer-Tropsch to break down the cellulose, Choren has managed to solve this conundrum but not, so far, on a large scale.  

Rival groups working at the problem in Scandinavia are racing to get there first. But Choren, steered by chief executive Tom Blades, is marginally ahead. He built an 18m-litre pilot plant (enough to fuel 15,000 cars annually) in 2008 and is revving up to become the first to start-up production in 2009 for fuel purely from wood products. If Blades succeeds, biofuels from edible crops may well turn out to be a blind alley, while he’ll no doubt make his green fortune.

Eddie O’Connor

With the zeal of the convert, this Irish businessman has already built and sold one wind energy company. Now he is bidding to create a Europe-wide wind-power grid 

Dr Eddie O’Connor once wasn’t interested in the environment. Bord na Móna, the biomass company he ran for nine years, burnt enough peat to supply 12% of Ireland’s energy but was the biggest polluter in the country at the time.  

“In 1989, I started reading about global warming and realised that there was a major-league issue here,” he explains. “I became convinced that CO2 was something that had to be dealt with.” In order ‘to balance the ticket’, Bord na Móna built Ireland’s first windfarm in Bellacorick in 1992, still operating today. By 1996, O’Connor had left and a year later had set up the company that was to become wind energy company Airtricity Holdings. The business proved to be a success and was sold for £1.8bn (€2.1bn) earlier this year, netting O’Connor an estimated €50m.  

That could have been where O’Connor’s story ended, reclining on a yacht somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean. But like all keen entrepreneurs, he immediately started looking around for the next opportunity. In February 2008, using some of his share of the sale of Airtricity as seed capital he set up Mainstream Renewable Power to build and operate wind energy, solar thermal and ocean current plants throughout the world.  

At the same time he started to focus on his grand masterplan: the European Supergrid. This bold scheme will connect offshore windfarms to each other and nations’ energy grids, allowing countries to trade their energy multilaterally and creating a huge reliable renewable energy resource for Europe in the process.  

It means that when, for instance, the wind dies off the coast of the UK, wind energy can be bought from the Norwegian grid to compensate, because all the grids are connected. Currently less than 10% of Europe’s energy is traded across borders. Supergrid would create a competitive single internal trading market for all sources of electricity, getting rid of the protectionism that exists today and meaning Europe could negotiate to purchase energy as a single entity.  

There’s much that needs to be done to make Supergrid a reality: developers need to be offered incentives to build a DC grid in the North Sea, an organisation must be set up to manage the construction and run the offshore transmission system and there needs to be the drive and funding — it will cost billions of euros — from the EU to do it. Despite these potential barriers, the European Commission has recently drawn up a blueprint, setting out how it might work. In O’Connor’s opinion, there is no alternative.

Sebastian Waldburg  & Eusebio Guell 

The Barcelona-based venture capitalists who left their jobs to help stop climate change – with profitable results

Venture capitalists do not know whether to laugh or cry as the global economic system comes crashing down around them. On the one hand their business model has been seriously damaged. Debt is expensive, so borrowing heavily on the hope of future returns looks foolhardy at best. On the other hand, companies that would have gone public six months ago are now frantically seeking private investors, and offering much more favourable terms than they would have. 

The pair behind Barcelona-based SI Capital are cautiously optimistic. They have raised €10m from family, financial institutions, and foundations, among others, and are seeking another €70m to reach their target size by July 2009.  

Fundraising will not be easy in this climate, admits Sebastian Waldburg, co-founder and co-CEO with partner Eusebio Güell: “At the same time as being concerned about financing, we have never had as much high quality deal flow as we do now. Many companies that have invested heavily in renewable energy projects over the past few years are having to sell off those assets at much lower values.” 

Driven by a desire to profit from the massive environmental growth story, save the planet, and run their own business, Waldburg and Güell quit a Spanish investment banking boutique to set up SI Capital in 2004, launching the fund two years later.  

Waldburg characterises SI as sitting halfway between an infrastructure and venture capital fund. It invests in renewable energy assets rather than risky, unproven technology. But it boosts returns by investing throughout the development process, from companies still at the drawing board through to others already pumping electricity into the grid. As such, SI is providing much needed capital to the burgeoning renewables industry, just as the banks are shutting up shop.  

The aim is to make 14% returns for investors after fees. Waldburg is confident that the fund is on track to achieve that, although it has not yet exited any of its five investments. He says the value of the portfolio has increased despite the current climate, after two institutional investors recently bought into one of their companies at a significantly higher value than SI’s original investment.  

Rolf Disch

This German architect has been preaching green design since the early 1970s. Now people are listening and he is building homes that create their own power

For true pioneers in the environmental field, it must be hard to avoid the temptation to say: “I told you so.”  

Take Rolf Disch, the architectural guru who has single-handedly changed attitudes to the concept of ecological building in his native Germany. After training originally as a bricklayer and joiner, he went on to study structural engineering before setting up his architect’s office in 1969. Three years later he helped defeat plans to build a nuclear power plant close to Freiburg and, keen to show there were alternatives, he developed his concept of ‘green architecture’, buildings constructed using local, environmentally friendly materials and resources and powered by renewable energy.  

Faced with a hostile local administration and banks reluctant to lend on what they regarded as a risky project, he raised the money himself from investors and built the Heliotrop — a cylindrical house that completely rotates to follow the course of the sun. From this, he developed his concept further and built the Solar Housing Estate (Solarsiedlung) which includes 50 ‘plus-energy’ houses, which generate more power than they use. There is also a six-storey commercial building, and an ecological senior citizens’ home. 

This project proved to be a breakthrough: the units sold out quickly, demonstrating that there was a market for environmentally friendly developments. By this time Disch had become something of a guru on green architecture: people were coming from all over Germany to find out how the Solarsiedlung had been built.  

Suddenly Disch, after years of ploughing a lonely furrow, found that official attitudes towards green architecture were beginning to chime with his own. Disch’s firm has designed and sold 64 plus-energy houses in Germany, enough to earn him a decent living, and interest is starting to pick up from abroad.  

“For many years, we’ve been capable of constructing plus-energy houses but through a combination of financial and planning barriers, they haven’t been built,” says Disch. “As energy prices rise, things will change very quickly. The plus-energy house concept will become a normal standard for the future. I’m sure about that.”

Tom Pakenham

A young entrepreneur who has started  the world’s first sustainable taxi firm

Not many entrepreneurs will admit it was their mum that came up with their killer business idea. But Tom Pakenham and Jonny Goldstone are happy to credit Tom’s mother with the idea of a green taxi service as she was travelling to Heathrow airport. Both young men had trained as corporate lawyers, during which time they became friends, but knew deep down it wasn’t what they wanted to do: not long after mum’s eureka moment, they set up Green Tomato Cars in London, a taxi service that uses a fleet of Toyota Prius cars. 

Why the Prius? They claim it produces less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of a conventional vehicle or taxi through a combination of its hybrid-electric drive train, stop-start technology, and lightweight design.  As the Green Tomato name suggests, the pair were keen to change the perception of green businesses: that they were worthy, expensive and not taken seriously. Through a mix of clever branding, competitive pricing and focusing on customer service, the business has taken off since it launched in  March 2006.  

Privately funded – Tom sold his flat and they found a private investor – the company started with four cars and now has 100. Turnover has increased from £650,000 (€750,000) to £3.5 million (annualised). This year it launched its first franchise in Sydney where there are 20 cars on the road, and the pair are looking at other cities to expand into. To make sure that it’s being as green as it can, the company offsets its emissions, uses driver telemetrics to improve driver fuel efficiency and has bought what they claim is the world’s only plug-in hybrid taxi.

The company ethos is different from your average cab company too – it runs a performance-driven profit share scheme for drivers and staff, and drivers are not charged rent for the vehicles, instead they split revenues 50-50. The idea is to build a strong team mentality and loyalty, recently acknowledged by the UK’s Department for Transport, which awarded Green Tomato an award for industry leadership.  

And they don’t want to stop there. “We have a much bigger aim under the Green Tomato umbrella,” says Goldstone. “We want to be the mainstream green brand for products and services including micro-generation and third-generation biofuels.” The old adage ‘Mother knows best’ might have some truth in it after all.  

Richard  C Kelly

Smart power grids, such as those constructed by US firm Xcel Energy,  will help enable microgeneration

It’s interactive. Companies talk to each other instantaneously. Customer problems are flagged up and fixed quickly via remote communications. Sound like the internet? Wrong. Welcome to the world of smart grids. This year will see the first of these go live in Boulder, Colorado, a college city at the foot of the US’s Rocky Mountains.  

If the internet successfully challenged state broadcasters, so smart grids – which rely on electronic and broadband communications – could bring down the most conservative energy utilities. The future will see a tide of microgeneration by householders. When they generate more energy than they consume, it’ll feed back into the grid and they’ll get paid. Buyer and supplier roles will seamlessly switch as the utility purchases surplus electricity from the customer’s solar photovoltaic roof or other renewable energy appliance. 

Data is interchanged via sensors fitted at numerous points on the grid – pylons, substations and other equipment. Consumers acquire a smart meter that the utility can read at regular short intervals. By contrast, a utility at present only receives aggregate data from its customer base.  

Xcel Energy, the company leading Boulder’s five-armed SmartGridCity consortium, hopes to connect 95% of the town by the end of 2009 while assessing how to cut present operational costs from $2,000 to $500 for each of the 45,000 premises involved. 

The improved information will help the company meet a quickly-growing demand for supply. “It’s a question of better distributing the load rather than building new stuff,” says Mike Carlson, spokesman at Xcel Energy. Some of the company’s investment in reserve capacity could be avoided if instead of using historical information it were able to assess its customers’ needs on a real-time basis. Like the internet, the smart grid – as yet only a dream in Europe – allows energy companies to adjust to customers, pulling them out of their 19th-century mindset.

Marc Stuart  & Pedro  Moura Costa

With ten years of experience, Ecosecurities is one of the most admired carbon reduction and trading companies – and is set  to profit from Obama’s election

The price of a tonne of carbon fell by close to 50% in the second half of this year, which made Ecosecurities’ use of long-term Emission Reduction Purchase Agreements at fixed prices look pretty neat. One of the most admired companies in the carbon reduction and trading sector, the company founded by US citizen Marc Stuart and Brazilian Pedro Moura Costa back in 1997 has more experience than virtually any other similar company, and a glittering array of carbon reduction projects all over the globe, from pulp and paper biomass in Brazil to a wind farm in Turkey. Other projects include a methane capture project and N2O abatement in China.  

Floating in 2005 on London’s Alternative Investment Market raised €80m and rewarded the founders, but by the end of 2008 the share price was a tenth of its peak, partly because the company is classified under ‘general financials’ and suffered the same credit crunch as everyone else. Other bad news last year included reports of a massively overburdened and inefficient UN Clean Development Mechanism executive board resulting in a backlog of projects waiting to be registered and certified, slowing down Ecosecurities’ ambitious growth plans.  

The future fortune of the company rests on converting certified  carbon credits into cash as they mature and are sold, a big theme for 2009. It also rests on the future of the EU emissions trading scheme, which will be very healthy if the EU Commission can achieve its unofficial €40 per tonne carbon price target in the third, 2013-20 phase of the system.  

The carbon reduction sector’s fortunes have also soared with the US presidential election. Although it remains undecided, indications are that Barack Obama may adopt elements of the UN Clean Development Mechanism by which much of Ecosecurities’ inventory has been built up. If it does, they may be transformed from medium-size company to a globally dominant carbonreduction corporation.

Ian Simm

The founder of London- listed Impax, whose pure-play enviromental investment  fund has barely lost ground  in the current turmoil

Cambridge and Harvard-educated physicist Ian Simm saw much earlier than most fund managers that the great investment themes of the 21st century would span broadly environmental categories, from alternative energy to water, not forgetting waste management, clean-tech and all the fiddly sub-sectors such as pollution control and resource management.  

Long before Kyoto he also had an eye on climate change as the issue that would drive the rest, founding Impax Asset Management, the trading entity of Impax Group plc, in 1998 as what he describes as “a specialist finance house focusing on the markets for cleaner or more efficient delivery of basic services of energy, water and waste.” 

Today there are few boutique investment houses that can claim as much experience as Impax, and none that field such a comprehensive range of funds for both retail and institutional investors.  

Better, Simm has avoided greenwashing the subject or confusing the moral with the financial by fielding so-called green funds that are basically loaded-utility plays minus Big Oil. Impax manages the only ‘pure play’ environmental investment trust in the FTSE All Share Index – Impax Environmental Markets. The group defines ‘pure play’ as companies with more than 50% of sales and invested capital in the environmental sector, a much higher ratio than most green funds. Closed-ended and trading as a regular share, the trust has outperformed the MSCI World index by a factor of approximately 60% in the past year, barely losing ground as the rest of the market crashed in September and October.  

BNP Paribas bought 28.3% of Impax Group late in 2007, confirming Impax’s attractiveness as a long term strategic play, although that did not prevent the group share price from tumbling alongside most of the rest of the companies listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market.

Stephen Wrage

He dreamt up the idea of  powering ships with massive  kites at the age of 15. Now it’s a reality, and could save millions  of tonnes of carbon every year

It’s the ultimate example of blue-sky thinking: attach a giant kite to the mast of a cargo ship to try to save fuel costs.  

Earlier this year, a 133-metre cargo vessel belonging to the Bremen-based Beluga Group completed a voyage from Germany to Venezuela flying a 160m2 kite from its deck. Taking advantage of the more consistent high winds that occur at 100-300m, the kite, winched in and out from the deck, can pull the vessel through the water with the equivalent of 6,800 horsepower —  dramatically cutting fuel bills and reducing emissions. 

So who is the brain behind this invention? Enter Stephen Wrage, chairman of SkySails, the company that is developing the technology. “I came up with the idea of propelling ships with a towing kite at the age of 15,” he says. “I am a passionate sailor and kite flyer, and while being dragged along the beach one day, I started thinking about alternative ways of using the immense power of the kite.” He describes the moment he saw the first SkySails kite flying above a ship as “a dream come true” but admits that now the hard work starts to develop the product from the pilot stage to commercially viable product.  

The implications of this invention are massive. Maritime CO2 emissions are predicted to rise by 30% by 2020; data from SkySails various pilot voyages shows that kites could reduce fuel costs and emissions by more than 146 million tonnes of CO2 a year, an amount equivalent to about 15% of Germany’s CO2 emissions, and reduce annual fuel costs by 10-35%.  

It’s not just tankers that could benefit. Fish trawlers and super yachts can also be retro- or outfitted. To protect against competition, the company has patented its system, but at the moment there are no serious rivals out there. Though the pilot phase still has six months to run, SkySails has already sold six systems, which will be fitted this year and next. “SkySails’ objective is to show how working with nature rather than against it makes business success possible – both for its customers and itself,” says Wrage.

Tanzi Besant

The engineer and CEO who is working to make electricity generation more efficient

Professing no particular eco-agenda, Hiflux chief executive Tanzi Besant insists she is a fervent believer above all in efficiency, both economic and in the engineering sense of avoiding wasted energy. That’s exactly what Hiflux’s core product, a heat exchanger, does. When electricity is generated, heat is a by-product. When it is lost a major inefficiency occurs, which is why centralised power generation – that means large power stations supplying a national grid – is barely 50% efficient, losing energy at source and via long distance transmission to customers. A heat exchanger captures that heat and makes it usable. 

Possessing a mechanical engineering degree and an industrial track record in aerospace structures, Besant formed Hiflux in 2001 with John Coplin, currently chairman of the company. Several fundraisings and EU grants have brought the company to the point where it has a proven prototype heat exchanger that trounces the opposition by being lightweight, low cost and scalable. 

Besant admits that it’s a bit techie to explain. But the end application has enormous commercial potential because it will play an integral role in the anticipated transition from centralised to decentralised power distribution that will occur in coming years. The key to this is the growth of micogeneration within the home with Combined Heat and Power (CHP) technology – basically hot water boilers that use spare heat to generate electricity. The Hiflux heat exchanger operates at higher temperatures than existing technology, allowing more heat to be reused in the electrical generation process rather than just to provide heating – which is important since the economic value of the electricity generated is higher than that of the heat. 

One of the big stories of 2009 will be the product launch of Swedish company Compower’s 5KW microCHP unit, utilising Hiflux technology. Besant notes that the European market for microCHP is predicted to be 120,000 units by 2011, but this doesn’t include substantial anticipated growth beyond Europe. 

Alongside her engineering role, Besant’s other objective this year is to raise additional funding so as to fund the Big Push – getting heat exchangers out into the market place, scaling up the manufacturing side and paying for marketing and sales. Since a stock market listing is nigh on impossible in the current climate, she is looking instead for angels and venture capital.

Bill Riddle

With ever-more punitive  taxes on landfill, the founder of composting specialists New Earth Solutions sees a positive future

By most people’s reckoning waste management isn’t the most exciting part of the environmental market. But try telling that to Bill Riddle, founder and CEO of New Earth Solutions (UK), which specialises in the composting of biodegradable municipal waste. Ever since he took over his grandfather’s sand quarry when he was 17 and built it up from a business employing four people to one employing 400, he’s seen the commercial and environmental value in managing waste streams.  

Since 1996, when a landfill tax was introduced, that value has steadily risen. The 2008 UK budget raised the tax to £32/tonne (€40) the largest leap since its introduction, and the indications are that it will continue to rise by £8/tonne a year. The UK currently puts more rubbish into landfill than any other country in the EU, and councils could face up to €3.5bn of European fines if recycling rates aren’t improved. 

Riddle’s latest venture, New Earth Solutions, is well placed to help. NES operates a 50,000 tonnes per annum capacity waste facility in Canford, Dorset and one in Kent, which compost food and mixed biodegradable household waste for use in land restoration or on farmland. It also separates other waste items such as such as plastics, glass, and ferrous and non-ferrous metals, helping councils meet statutory recycling targets and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.  

At the heart of the plant is new technology — the Advanced Bio Stabilisation System — a high temperature composting process combined with air handling equipment that prevents the odour and emissions normally associated with traditional biological waste treatment processes.  

But why is it better than other disposal methods such as incineration? An New Earth Solutions composting plant costs about €12m to build, takes about six to nine months to get planning and doesn’t require continual feedstock to keep operating; an incinerator can cost about 10 times that.  

“Composting seemed like a good way of turning a waste item into a valuable product,” says Riddle. “I guess I have always had a certain entrepreneurial spirit — we are in business to make money and provide opportunities for others, and the growth prospects for the environmental sector are spectacular. I also have an ever-growing band of grandchildren and want to leave an improved legacy for them.”

Nigel Meir

This former doctor and diplomat is the co-founder of one of the biggest and most influential environmental investment funds

From becoming a medical doctor, working in the Israeli army, becoming an Israeli diplomat, to ending up as co-founder of a major green investment fund, the Ludgate Environmental Fund, you could say that Nigel Meir has had an unusual career. After returning to the UK in 1993 he got a series of jobs in the financial sector, until one day he started talking to people from investment firm Ludgate about why they were investing in clean-tech and environmental companies, at the time an exotic, barely known sector.  

“They had worked out that these were strong investment themes and, intrigued, I started investing in a small way in some of the companies they were investing in,” says Meir. “I became quite convinced that this was a big up-and-coming area. Why? Because I made some money from those investments and because I realized that this was something that would not just be dictated by making money but driven by society’s attitudes.”  

The fund’s biggest success was fuel cell group Ceres Power, which they invested in during 2001, helped bring to market in 2004 and which has seen its share price rise tenfold. This track record allowed Ludgate to raise another €20m last November, in the teeth of the banking crisis. By then, it was also the sole specialist green fund in the UK whose share price was still in the black compared to a year earlier. Investors love a winner.  

But can finance really play a part in combating climate change? Surely it’s profit that’s king? “If you look through our portfolio, there are companies that can help save energy, provide renewable energy, reduce packaging, lower emissions etc,” Meir says. “There’s no company that we’ve invested in that I can’t make a clear case for a positive environmental impact.”

Richard Yemm

The Scottish inventor and entrepreneur whose mechanical sea serpents are making the  vast untapped potential of wave  power practical to harvest

When you consider that there is enough wave power breaking on UK shores to supply the country’s energy needs three times over, it’s a wonder that more money hasn’t been invested in harnessing the power of the oceans. Attitudes to the technology are slowly changing though, down in no small part to the work of one man: Richard Yemm, founder and chief technical officer of Pelamis Wave Power. 

Though he has dabbled in wind power ever since his Edinburgh university days, he was fascinated by the potential of the seas. So when the Scottish government announced there was funding available for pre-commercial technology development, he set up the company, and developed the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter. 

It looks like a giant red serpent (it’s named after a surface-swimming sea snake) and is composed of a series of cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. The wave-induced motion of these joints pumps high-pressure fluid through hydraulic motors, which drive electrical generators to produce electricity.  

The pilot, tested off Orkney, was the first time a wave energy converter had ever supplied energy into a national grid; now the company has a commercial project running off the coast of Portugal. The three Pelamis wave-energy converters near Aguçadoura, the first multi-machine wave farm in the world, will generate enough electricity for about 1,500 family homes, and the plan is to add a further 25 Pelamis machines, saving about 60,000 tonnes of CO2 per year compared to a fossil-fuel power station.  

“It’s a very exciting time,” Yemm says. “We are emerging from the development phase into the commercial scale phase. By 2011/12, we want to scale up to utility scale much like the way that wind has done.” He sees wave power as a much better long-term bet than wind power – it’s more predictable and out of sight, offshore – and there’s a buzz around the sector now. “Anyone who is a scientist and engineer recognises that we haven’t done a very good job over the past 100 years,” he says. “Now we are starting the second industrial revolution and it’s exciting. It’s not some regrettable course of action we have to take – it’s an opportunity.”

Jurgen Habichler

The head of the Frankfurt-listed Cleantech Invest has a big pot of cash to play with. With plenty of good ideas finding it hard to get investment, he is ready to clean up

Cash is king in an economic downturn and new green venture capital fund Cleantech Invest has buckets of the stuff. Managing director Jurgen Habichler is one of the very few business people who seem to relish the current economic doom and gloom. “We have been very conservative in terms of putting too much money to work,” he trills. “We still have a lot of cash available, which we are very excited about because we think 2009 is going to be an excellent vintage year for green investments.” 

Listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in December 2007, here is a fund ready and waiting to mop up the deals that have failed to raise money on the public markets, and position itself as a major financial player in the new green economy. 

It will, of course, be harder to exit investments. One of the fund’s portfolio companies, Sinsol, a German-Chinese solar venture, was forced to postpone an IPO earlier this year and Habichler believes the market will be closed for at least 12 months.  

In the meantime, he has 10 million Swiss francs (€6.5m) to play with on behalf of a collection of family offices, rich individuals, and a few institutional investors, including US-based Stamford Asset Management. The fund is targeting annual returns of around 20% over a five-year period. It will invest in companies that are already turning over at least €5m, working in solar, wind, biomass, energy efficiency, carbon trading, water and recycling. The value of the portfolio has increased since its launch in April 2007, says Habichler, although he remains coy about specifics.  

The 37-year-old set up an environmental division as part of his former job at venture capital group Atlas Ventures, but investments got lumped in with other tech stocks and there was no dedicated clean-tech fund. “I had discussions with people who invested in internet start-ups; it was hard to convince people. There’s a very different investing cycle for clean-tech. So I decided it was best to get out there and set up my own fund.”

Shai Agassi

The entrepreneur who has signed up four countries, a major carmaker and €160m  for his visionary electric-car network

Shai Agassi believes that carmakers should give their vehicles away free, claiming that they are in the business of selling razors when they should be selling the blades. “Put it this way,” he told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last November, “If you are driving around and gasoline costs an arm and a leg, doesn’t it seem fair that somebody should give the car away for free?” 

The 40-year-old Israeli serial entrepreneur – who quit his position as head of product and technology at German software giant SAP in 2007 to pursue interests in alternative energy and climate change – is agitating for this model to be adopted in his brave new world. His California-headquartered company, Better Place, is developing electric car recharging stations that he claims will help wean the entire world of its dependency on fossil fuel. A big ask? Well, by early last summer, Agassi had two countries signed up, a major automaker producing the cars, and $200m (€160m) in committed capital. According to some estimates he had launched the fifth-largest start-up of all time in under a year. 

At the beginning of 2008, buoyed by huge tax incentives for drivers from the Israeli government and investors including petrochemical conglomerate Israel Corp, Agassi unveiled a joint venture with Renault-Nissan. The carmaker is supplying the electric vehicles while Better Place will provide lithium-ion batteries and build the necessary infrastructure, which will include 500,000 parking-meter-like charging points on streets and service stations where spent batteries will be replaced with freshly charged packs within minutes. 

Israel, in many ways, is the perfect choice: apart from the abundance of solar power and big solar player Solel, it is impossible to drive an electric car for more than 150 miles – the maximum distance possible between recharges – without plunging into the Mediterranean or bumping into hostile neighbours. Renault-Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn said mass production of electric cars will begin in 2011, and to begin with he expects to place 10,000 to 20,000 cars a year in the Israeli market.  

The second scheme is being trialled in small and green Denmark in partnership with the Danish Oil and Natural Gas company. Like Israel, the Danish government will be offering tax breaks on the vehicles. According to Agassi, the average price of a car in Denmark is €38,000 while the tax break could price an electric car as low as €20,000. 

Far more ambitiously, in October Better Place announced it was partnering with Macquarie Capital Group to bring its concept to Australia, the world’s sixth largest country and seventh largest ‘car nation’. Macquarie aims to raise $1bn (€800m) in funding. The venture is to demonstrate, Agassi says, that “you can actually take sustainable transportation to any size”. 

At the launch, Agassi said the project would establish Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne as network hubs and link them with electric highways. Likening the east coast of Australia to the west coast of the US, Agassi said, “If it can be done between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, you can see the same thing happening between LA, the San Francisco Bay area, all the way up to the Seattle region.”  

Roberto  Deambrogio

Geothermal power is far from new. Italian energy giant Enel, whose renewables development division is headed by Deambrogio, has been using it for almost a century and plan to expand capacity around the world

The world’s first geothermal steam power plant went online in 1913 in the small Italian city of Larderello, proving the theory that electricity generation was possible by harnessing the heat from beneath the earth’s surface. Today the plant is operated by Enel, the world’s fourth largest producer of geothermal energy, and generates 5m MWh of electricity a year, meeting 25% of Tuscany’s power needs. 

If successfully developed and exploited, geothermal energy could be the key to stopping global warming in its tracks. Enel renewables development boss Roberto Deambrogio points out that the heat contained in the first 5km of the Earth’s surface is equivalent to about 500,000 times current world energy demand. Enel has earmarked €620m for further geothermal development in Italy and €360 in Latin America through 2012.  

There are a number of factors that make geothermal energy superior to other renewable sources. Firstly, some sources of geothermal energy are competitively priced against fossil fuels, averaging 5 to 8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Secondly, on a lifecycle basis, emissions from geothermal are lower than for solar panels and only marginally higher than other renewable forms.  

Geothermal energy is more reliable than other renewable sources because the heat within the earth’s surface is constant. Geothermal provides a constant capacity, averaging 90%, versus 25% for offshore wind and solar, whose power generation is dictated by changing weather patterns. Geothermal is also the only renewable energy source that can be used for electricity, heating and cooling. This is particularly important when considering the growing energy demands of developing economies, as well as the IT sector, which today accounts for 2% of global emissions. 

Enel's international renewables division, under Deambrogio’s leadership, is now developing technology to overcome present-day geological barriers that prevent geothermal energy from being converted into electricity at lower temperatures. If successful, every nation in the world could in theory rely on geothermal energy as its primary power source.

Avi Brenmiller

The chief executive of the Israeli company that leads the world in concentrated solar energy – and has done for almost 20 years

Shimmering in the heat of California’s Mojave Desert is a sight worthy of the most fantastical science fiction novel. Rows and rows of mirrored troughs cover some 3,000 acres of this vast expanse of arid land, tracking the movement of the sun’s punishing rays. 

Together these plants, run by Israeli company Solel, are generating 350MW of electricity for 500,000 consumers, eliminating the need for two million barrels of oil each year. Using parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun’s light, they heat fluid that turns to steam, to spin turbines that make electricity. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the fact that these fields have been operating successfully for nearly 20 years.  

Debate will always rage over the relative merits of renewable sources. For its part, solar thermal’s unique selling point is its ability to answer peak demand for electricity, as the sun shines during the day when we use most energy. Supporters like to cite the fact that a solar thermal power plant built on about 1% of the surface of the Sahara desert would be sufficient to satisfy the entire world’s electricity demand. 

Avi Brenmiller, Solel’s chief executive, says he realised solar was the future some 20 years ago. “This is a renewable resource. It is shining every morning. It is heating the Earth so we need electricity for air conditioning. This should be the source of the solution, because it creates the demand.” An idealistic mechanical engineer, he joined Solel after it bought up the assets of his bankrupt former employer Luz Industries Israel, which pioneered the solar thermal technology. 

As a private company Solel does not disclose its finances, but Brenmiller says it made more than $10m (€7.75m) of profits in 2007, and the firm is doubling capacity every year. Solel is now developing an even larger plant for the heart of the Mojave Desert, almost double in size. The new Mojave Solar Plant will have 1.2 million mirrors and  317 miles of vacuum tubing, generating 554MW of electricity by 2011. Another plant in Andalucia, Spain, is expected to come on line by the first quarter of 2010.

Mark Shorrock

He gave up a career as a film producer to do a job where he could make a difference. He is now in charge of the first UK-listed capital fund dedicated to eco-companies

Before Mark Shorrock became the founder and CEO of Low Carbon Accelerator, a venture capital fund for green start-ups, he was a film producer.  

“I was sitting on Stac Polly [a mountain in Scotland], surrounded by the immensity of that magic land,” he recalls. “I could see the rest of my life in the film industry mapped out in front of me. I suddenly realised that there was no challenge there. No way of making a difference about the topics that interested me.”  

It was a moment that changed his life. He left the film industry soon afterwards and went on to set up Wind Energy, which became the largest independent wind energy firm in Scotland. After a couple of years he decided to broaden his horizons, stepped down from Wind Energy and launched Low Carbon Accelerator, the first UK-listed venture capital fund dedicated to environmental companies. The fund went public in October 2006, which raised £44.5m (€50m).  

“I could see a multitude of early stage businesses that collectively offered a solution to climate change but needed courageous funding,” he says. “There was no one place to come to and seek investment though, so I thought I would start a fund and put a team together who could make such investments.” The fund focuses on four sectors: clean energy, energy efficiency, green buildings and cleaner transport. “We are the rocket fuel to get a company where their product speaks for itself and can be rapidly and widely adopted.”  

Rocket fuel it might be but in the latter half of last year [2008] the share price fell 85%. “It was mainly the result of redemptions from institutions investing money on behalf of clients who wanted their money back,” explains Shorrock. In his view, LCA’s share price fall is a temporary blip, and though it means it can’t raise extra funds at the moment, it has enough money from the public float to keep investing in its companies for the next two years.  

Shorrock is confident that both the sector and LCA will ride out the downturn though he predicts that there is hard work ahead. “Two years ago I did some pioneering and went out to educate the City about what climate change was and why it makes sense to invest in low-carbon companies,” he says. “Part of the reason for having a public fund was to be able to educate shareholders that a low-carbon economy was a sensible place to be. Now I probably need to go out and tell another group the same thing.”

Leo Johnson

Brother of the eco-sceptic mayor of London, he has persuaded banks to stop lending to projects with harmful social and enviromental track records

Since 2004, the organisation co-founded by Leo Johnson, Sustainable Finance, has advised more than 50 international financial institutions about the risks and opportunities of sustainability. Johnson is also a co-founder of the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards, an industry award now receiving some 180 entries from banks, asset managers and private equity groups. 

Sustainable Finance’s motto is to ‘make sense of sustainability’, pinpointing the mega-trends that will impact business performance – from climate change to price shocks in water, oil and food and shifts in consumer preferences – then laying out the risks and opportunities for the financial sector and its core clients.  

Johnson has worked since 2003 on the rollout of the Equator Principles, an industry standard for environmental and social due diligence, that has grown from an initial four to 60 banks, representing 85% of cross-border sustainable project finance. The Equator Principles have become the standard for assessing and managing environmental and social risk in financing projects of €80m or more, and across all industry sectors. Under the agreement, signatories restrict lending to borrowers who cannot prove their projects will not have harmful social and environmental consequences. 

Later this year, Sustainable Finance will launch Financing for the Future, an educational forum developed in conjunction with the University of Cambridge, to highlight the commercial benefits of investing in green technologies and alternative energy sources. Among other topics, the forum will cover the short and long-term risks for financial institution product lines, from private equity investments to consumer financing, and how emerging consumer preferences and regulatory frameworks shape these; strategies for eliminating carbon emissions from the world economy through financing of new green technologies; and how the market can reward sustainability. 

“Given the recent market turmoil, banks are not lending and there is a huge level of risk adversity, but we need to propel high growth sectors such as energy efficiency, moving subsidies and investment from fossil fuels to low carbon sources,” says Johnson. 

To stave off dangerous temperature rises, the world must remove 16 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. To remove just one billion tonnes of CO2 will require 700 times more solar installation, 25 times more wind projects and 250 times more use of biofuels.  

All of this costs money, which Johnson says is not being made  available. “Right now, in the face of the credit crunch, the capital needed to combat climate change is just not flowing because banks are not lending.” 

That’s where Sustainable Finance and the Financing for the Future forum come in. The global economic system now stands confronted by two crises of historic proportions: the economic crash and climate change. Johnson says this is a critical point for the financial sector. 

“We need to rewire the [banking] system, which is currently flawed because it ignores the risks and opportunities linked to climate change.” In the same way that irresponsible financial practices led  to the sub-prime mortgage debacle that collapsed the global economy, so too will ignoring climate change have significant capital  repercussions on a scale that could dwarf the losses brought on by the credit crunch.  

“If there is one lesson to be learned from the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the ripple effect it had across the global markets, it is that these risks do come back to bite you.”

Dr Gordon Oswald

The spinning blades of wind turbines cause havoc to aircraft radar. This British inventor has solved the problem, opening up many new sites to wind farms

Gordon Oswald might be the catalyst for a great expansion of windfarms, until now held up by worries about aviation safety. A big problem not widely understood, the whirling blades on a large wind turbine create the same Doppler effect as an aircraft, confusing the radar used by air traffic control. The mass of blades return noisy signals to the radar, filling the screen with blobs and making it hard to distinguish aircraft. The problem has put approximately 40 windfarms on hold in the UK, which due to its small landmass and high-density air traffic is on the frontline of a global problem.  

Oswald, technology director at UK-based Cambridge Consultants, has developed an application called Holographic-Infill radar. By soaking a windfarm in a continuous stream of radar pulses at short range, he can create a ‘patch’ that blocks out the wind farm as far as air traffic radar is concerned, thereby permitting normal clarity in picking out aircraft. The pulses are projected out from a flat-panel device, several of them working together to ‘soak’ a large, commercial windfarm.  

Although still at the experimental stage, the potential sales  for the technology are global, according to Craig Webster, responsible  for commercialising clean-tech solutions at Cambridge, although he  is conservative about numbers and doesn’t see a product for sale before 2011. 

Other solutions to noisy radar are so-called ‘stealth turbines’ and placing additional air traffic radars in carefully sited locations. Oswald claims that his solution is much, much more cost effective and has the simplicity of being scalable and modular. If one day every windfarm in the world is required to come equipped with the technology, which is already patented, it will delight Cambridge Consultant’s French parents Altran, the listed technology giant headquartered in Paris’s Levallois-Perret commune.

Frank Asbeck

The controversial solar power magnate has offered to employ all Germany’s nuclear technicians and to turn floundering Opel into a solar-powered car firm

Frank Asbeck, chairman and chief executive of German solar powerhouse SolarWorld, is not a man to shy away from publicity. At the tail end of 2008 when General Motors was struggling to stay afloat, Asbeck offered to buy the carmaker’s German arm, Opel, for a cool €1bn. The announcement caused shockwaves through the industry.  

Germany’s self-styled ‘Sun King’ said his aim was to transform Opel from a traditional carmaker into a manufacturer of energy-efficient vehicles, including solar-powered cars. “The challenges of climate protection and of the market require a transition from automotive to sunmotive concepts,” he said at the time. 

Some dismissed the story as a PR stunt. After all, this was the man who once offered all the country’s atomic engineers a job in his solar-technology company if Germany turned its back on nuclear fuel. At the time of going to press, GM was adamant that Opel was not for sale.  

But Asbeck’s supporters say he should not be underestimated. In less than 10 years, he has grown SolarWorld from nothing into a multi-million-euro company and one of the leading solar groups in the world.  

SolarWorld has blossomed both organically and through acquisition. Asbeck famously bought chemical company Bayer’s solar division with the proceeds of its flotation in 1999, and more recently the solar energy section of oil giant Shell. 

The shares rose to almost four times their listing price in 2007 when they reached a peak of €48. Hit in part by shareholders concerns about Asbeck’s wild ideas, they recently dropped back to just over €12. But shareholders should have little to complain about. By the third quarter of 2008, earnings were growing by around 50%.  

This maverick businessman’s green credentials are only slightly marred by the fact he drives a gas-guzzling Maserati.  

Dr Alan Hearn

His RPS Group helps companies – from airports to oil – limit their environmental impact in order to comply with government rules

When faced with an issue as big and complex as climate change there will always be a debate over whether to fight the system that caused it, or work within the system to resolve it. At one end you have the kind of protestors that hijack coal trains, at the other you have Alan Hearne and RPS Group. 

Hearne believes that it is for governments to lay out a framework of things that are environmentally acceptable. RPS Group then helps companies and organisations limit their environmental impact to comply with government restrictions. 

“We are not an organisation that says we want to stop development,” he says. “We want to help achieve sustainable development. Working out what sustainable development comprises is a huge intellectual challenge for society, and we are at forefront of finding out some of the answers for that.” 

Hearne agrees that green issues were “a bit fringe” when he started up, but the company stuck to it with considerable financial success. When RPS listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1987 it had £1m (€1.2m) of revenue; this year it is targeting £57m of profits. 

But investors have punished RPS on fears that deals will dry up as the global economy cools, and the shares have bombed by 70% over the past six months. Hearne remains remarkably upbeat in the face of this collapse. “We’re nowhere near the end of this story. We will be five times as big in 10 years,” he says, with typical aplomb.

Charlie O’Malley

Fifties-style home marketing – with 1,500 sales representatives – is helping  this serial entrepreneur spread the sustainability message and make millions

Tupperware parties have been around since the 1950s. But, argues Charlie O’Malley, the idea is actually very modern with its viral system of marketing. He intends to use the home party model to spread the word about environmental issues. The idea is to sell cookware and natural food products, while educating participants about sustainability.  

This is just one of a myriad of companies O’Malley is developing through incubator fund Enso Ventures, which he set up with partner Paul Hannam early last year. Other ideas include a venture to sell green products through estate agents. Enso is in talks with a large real estate company in the US about a possible strategic partnership.  

O’Malley launched the fund partly as a reaction to frustrations with his previous venture, environmental consultancy P3 Capital. “What we found with P3 was that entrepreneurs were too much outside of your control,” he says. “Deals fell through because of management falling out, or other things going on in their businesses that had nothing to do with us.” 

With Enso, he acts as the principal rather than intermediary. The aim is to take an initial idea right through to its realisation as a company, developing the strategy, recruiting management, and introducing investment.  

It is still very early days to determine any kind of parameters for success, but O’Malley hopes to have realised some value from his ideas within two to three years. Most of the projects are still in the planning phase. The home party company is further along because Enso was looking to start up a business in the sector but instead found one seeking business acceleration. As such, the company already has turnover of $5m (€3.9m) and 1,500 sales representatives across the US.  

O’Malley himself has a solid track record. With between 20 and 30  clients over a three year period, P3 Capital raised several million pounds  for early stage ventures, including the iconic Quietrevolution vertical access wind turbine.  

A serial networker, he has run a number of groups bringing like-minded people together, including the UK branch of the high-profile Social Venture Network.

Jonathan Adnams

The boss of the eponymous British real ale brewery is shaking off the industry’s conservative image and greening his whole operation

Brewing is such a traditional industry that you might wonder how it could become any greener, given all the virtues of harvesting local hops, securing clean water sources and presenting beer and ale in eternally re-cycled casks and glass bottles. Jonathan Adnams begs to differ and has blazed a path to cost-cutting sustainability that other brewers would do well to emulate.  

Recounting how his great-grandfather founded the business in 1872, and how even today most of the shares are closely held by six local families in the east English town of Southwold, Adnams notes nonetheless that brewing is an energy intensive business, from the brewing to the distribution and transport of the beer. 

The first major opportunity to green the business came when Adnams’s brewery required complete rebuilding. Instead of commissioning more of the same, Adnams toured Europe and came home with a German-built Huppman heat condenser. It stores the steam heat required for brewing, slashing Adnams’s gas bill by almost a third. The second major innovation came three years ago when the company opened a revolutionary new distribution centre. Using locally sourced hemp and lime in the walls, a giant turf roof, solar panels for 80% of the hot water, and rainwater recovery for vehicle washing and toilet flushing, the centre (pictured left) strikes a significant blow for sustainable beer. 

To top it, following a request from ever-greener UK supermarket giant Tesco, Adnams launched  a carbon neutral beer called East Green last year. It  utilises a glass bottle 34% lighter than usual and is made from locally grown hops to cut air miles in the supply chain, and because of the efficiency of the rest of the operation only requires a tiny offset to be fully carbon neutral.