After decades of instability and uncertainty, the United States suddenly finds itself in a peculiar position: In the driver’s seat as a net-supplier of energy, potentially the world’s largest.

Driven entirely by the rapid progress of advanced energy technologies, oil and gas extraction is increasing; wind, solar and geothermal energy sources are booming; and energy efficiency is allowing us to do more and more with less energy.

For some, this is validation that the “old way” – oil and gas – are making a comeback; for others it’s about “clean” sources of energy reshaping our economy and protecting our environment.

The truth is that it’s not a zero sum game. Advancements in technology in all types of energy are leading to cleaner solutions, making the “clean vs. dirty” energy debate irrelevant to the opportunity that lies ahead. This technical synergy across the various energy markets is also leading to an accelerated transformation of the overall sector to advanced energy, which was a $1.1 trillion global market in 2011, making it larger than pharmaceutical manufacturing worldwide.

By focusing on making all forms of energy affordable, secure and clean, this technological revolution is succeeding because it provides an economic imperative that “clean” alone could never accomplish. Clean lacked the power of the invisible hand to align the incentives of the individual energy consumer with that of society’s energy needs. Advanced energy is different because it couples two important things: the ability to prosper and increase economic competitiveness while simultaneously improving the health and wellness of the United States.

Corporations embrace diverse energy sources

The retailer Kohl’s, the nation’s largest corporate solar panel owner, offers a good example of a large company that’s embraced advanced energy technologies for economic reasons. Kohl’s has made an effort to strategically diversify their energy mix, installing solar where there are strong renewable energy incentives on the books. Kohl’s has also implemented a range of energy efficiency programs, such as sophisticated lighting and energy management technologies, that deliver significant cost savings and emission reductions.

Intel and Google also actively deploy advanced energy technologies, including innovative energy-saving data center designs and an energy mix that features “traditional” energy sources, renewables and fuel cells.

General Electric, a long time supplier to the oil and gas industry, has similarly embraced an “all of the above” strategy in its product portfolio. In addition to its traditional offerings, GE now supplies a whole range of advanced energy products and services, including wind turbines, smart grid solutions, reciprocating engines that run on biogas, and some of the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbines, not to mention Energy Star appliances and LED light bulbs.

Advanced energy is a growth industry

It’s unlikely these successful companies would have embraced advanced energy so wholeheartedly if it offered no economic benefits.  Indeed, research indicates the United States as a whole is following suit:

• The U.S. advanced energy market reached $132 billion in 2011, representing nearly 12 percent of the global market. This market is expected to grow to an estimated $157 billion in 2012, with the U.S. share of the global market expected to rise to 15 percent.
• Patents for advanced energy related technologies granted to U.S entities in 2011 exceeded the 1,000 mark for the first time.
• Wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and hydropower projects accounted for 46.2 percent of new electrical generating capacity for the first ten months of 2012, a 47.7 percent increase over the level recorded for the same period in 2011.
• All this is occurring while oil and natural gas suppliers enjoy robust, and in some cases, record profits.

From a macroeconomic perspective, with global energy demand expected to grow 40 percent over the next few decades, the economic opportunity is so vast that the growth in new energy markets like solar, wind and geothermal doesn’t interfere with the ability of traditional oil and gas businesses to grow their markets. That is why you now see unlikely combinations – small, innovative start-ups working hand-in-hand with traditional legacy companies – because it ties together scale with science to create economic opportunity in all markets.

That’s also why you see industry leaders like Arno Harris, CEO of solar PV developer Recurrent Energy, arguing that “stability can be found in a portfolio of both renewables and gas [that offers] more predictable prices and greater energy security.”

Energy is not a zero-sum game anymore. So let’s end the polarizing focus on “clean vs. dirty” energy and focus on migrating to an advanced energy future. Let’s ensure that we continue to invest in technology to drive down the costs of using all of our domestic sources of energy and make them healthier for consumption.

With an advanced energy mindset, the United States can be both prosperous and healthy as a nation.

Hemant Taneja is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm focusing on early stage and growth equity investments. In addition, Taneja co-founded Advanced Energy Economy, a business organization focused on catalyzing regional energy innovation clusters across America. The creation of AEE is modeled after the work he did in founding the New England Clean Energy Council, which received an award from the Department of Energy. He is also an entrepreneur in his own right; before joining General Catalyst in 2002, Taneja was founder and CEO of a mobile software company that was acquired. He is a graduate of MIT.

Rooftop solar panel photo: Shutterstock

That’s the line coming from Scott Stanford, the co-head Internet banker of Goldman Sachs, in three videos that apparently have just been posted today. The videos express the bank’s positioning on innovation and where investors should put their money.

Goldman Sachs is one of two or three big investment banks vying for thought-leadership in the technology industry; indeed it’s in cut-throat competition with Morgan Stanley. While Goldman has led deals such as the Yahoo-Alibaba sell-down, the Zillow follow-on, and the Yelp IPO, and was in on the big Facebook IPO, Morgan Stanley scooped Goldman to be lead bank on Facebook’s IPO and has scored other big IPOs, such as LinkedIn.

So it’s always interesting to take note of Goldman’s public stances on the industry, because it has no doubt spent considerable time thinking about it. Stanford, for one, has networked hard in Silicon Valley; I invited him to speak at DEMO two years ago. He’s  also been very active managing the firm’s investments in Facebook, Uber, and Linkedin.

Here are the cliff notes on Stanford’s position:

First, and foremost, it’s about Data.

• The scale of data created daily is multiples the size of the Library of Congress and it’s very difficult for companies to harness this opportunity. This will create stark bifurcation between the haves and have nots.
• In order for a company to harness the data, they need three things: (1) access to proprietary data, (2) wherewithal/knowledge of what to do with it/how to process it, and (3) the right relationship with the consumer in order to apply the data. Some companies have some of these. Few have all.
• (Stanford doesn’t mention the Apple maps disaster, but the company’s fumble is a good example. The problem stems from a major disadvantage on the data side, where Google is winning.)

Second, it’s about efficiences or capacity utilization.

• Efficiencies/utilization is being applied universally to lots of sectors — not just transportation but education, labor, retail, etc. The Internet is disruptive because it’s wringing out huge amounts of inefficiency in each of these areas. (Stanford doesn’t mention the company here, but Uber is one of his investments; that company is helping create efficiencies in transportation.)

Third, the rate of innovation is unprecedented.

• The well-known websites today took ~80 months to reach 15-20mm users. The latest batch of startups took 10 months to reach same scale.
• New platforms that didn’t exist a few years ago gives entrepreneurs access to consumers, data, capital, global markets previously unheard of/inaccessible.

Here are Stanford’s views on what investors are looking  for:

• First, size of “total addressable market.”
• Path to profitability. Not necessary to have profits today. It’s often better to invest in top-line growth with confidence in durable margins than eek out marginal profit today.  Must be able to defend margin potential at the unit economic level. It’s ok to pro forma for future realistic assumptions.
• Scalability – ideally through network effects.
• Defensibility – not so much about barriers to entry any longer. Now the barriers are to scale and ability to develop moats as model/business matures.
• Data – per above, critical component of any company, large and small. Do you pass the three tests?
• Team – passion and ability to pivot as change will happen.

Stanford also summarizes entrepreneurship and the funding landscape.

We’ll update on whether these thoughts get translated by Goldman into new deals over the next year.

But the way the companies are run, and how efficiently they generate money, couldn’t be any more different.

Compared to Groupon, which has enormous administrative costs and is hemorrhaging a lot of money, Zynga is a ruthlessly-run, well-oiled machine. The social gaming company has kept its administrative costs to a minimum and, while it hasn’t kept up with Groupon in terms of revenue, has been the most profitable company to file for an initial public offering this year.

Zynga has since become a Facebook distribution powerhouse like no other game company. That makes it a lot easier for Zynga to generate revenue, since a percentage of users usually pays for items in otherwise free games.

The company has delivered hit after hit to Facebook. Zynga’s latest social game, Empires & Allies, is another hit for the company. It attracted more players than FarmVille, its first breakout hit, in just 25 days. Empires & Allies is gaining new users at a rate of a million a day and 8 million a week now, according to AppData.

Here are a few significant differences between two of the most hotly anticipated IPOs this year:

Revenue: Groupon brings in much more revenue than Zynga. The group-buying site brought in $713.4 million in 2010. The company brought in $644.7 million in the first quarter this year, up from $44.2 million in the first quarter last year. By comparison, Zynga brought in $598 million in revenue last year and $235 million in revenue in the first quarter this year, up from $101 million in revenue in the same quarter a year earlier.

Profit: The biggest difference between the two companies is that Zynga is profitable, while Groupon has lost a lot of money. Zynga made a $90 million profit in 2010. It made a profit of $11.8 million in the first quarter this year, up from $6.4 million in the first quarter of 2010. Groupon has consistently lost money each quarter except for one — the first quarter of 2010, when it brought in an $8 million profit. Groupon lost $456.3 million in 2010 and $6.9 million in 2009. The company lost $146.5 million in the first quarter this year.

Marketing Costs: Compared to Groupon, Zynga spends very little on marketing. Groupon spent $263.2 million on marketing in 2010 and $208.2 million in the first quarter this year. Zynga spent $40.2 million on marketing in the first quarter this year and $114 million in 2010.

Selling, General and Administrative Costs: Groupon has enormous administrative costs that make up roughly a third of its operating expenses. Groupon spent $233.9 million on administrative costs in 2010. The company has spent $178.9 million on administrative costs in the first quarter this year, compared to $4 million in the first quarter last year.

By comparison, Zynga’s administrative costs only make up a fraction of the company’s total costs. The company spent $32.3 million on administrative costs in 2010, or 7 percent of its total costs. Zynga spent $27.1 million on administrative costs in the first quarter this year, or 13 percent of its total costs that quarter, compared to $16.5 million in the first quarter last year.

Groupon currently has 661 employees in North America and 2,895 international employees. As of the end of May, Zynga had 2,268 employees.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. Our sponsors include Qualcomm, Flurry, Greystripe, Nexage, Tapjoy, Fun Mobility, TriNet, Zong, Spil Games and WildTangent.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Alta Devices said it was able to produce Gallium Arsenide solar panels that capture 28.2 percent of the light shining on the panel and convert it to electricity, up from a previous efficiency rating of 27.6 percent that the company produced last year. The last record for solar panel efficiency rating was 26.4 percent, according to results verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Wafer-style solar panels have a theoretical efficiency rating of 33.5 percent, according to the company. Alta Devices appears to be developing solar panels that will eventually reach that efficiency rating. The company is one of several solar panel manufacturers that focus on wafer-style solar panels that operate best in clear days when the sun is shining directly on the panel.

Thin-film solar panels like those that First Solar manufacture do not have efficiency ratings as high as those types of solar panels. But they are able to perform better in diffuse light situations and in high-temperature environments, said First Solar’s Pam Hegarty. Those panels take up more space than crystalline solar panels and cost more to install, but can generate more electricity in non-optimal environments, she said.

“All things being equal, those systems have a higher conversion efficiency,” she said. “But when the sun is not at a 90 degree angle, thin-film solar cells absorb more of that light and has a broader energy curve than crystalline silicon panels.”

Alta Devices recently raised $72 million in its most recent round of funding despite still being in stealth mode. A job posting at the time indicated the company wanted to develop photovoltaic cells that are around 30 percent efficient and can generate 1 watt of electricity at a cost of 50 cents.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to move a few minutes north to Sunnyvale, Calif., according to Green Tech Media. It has 55 employees and has filed for 35 patents, according to the job posting. The company also received a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy to develop low-cost and highly efficient photovoltaic cells.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile web browsing can be slow and frustrating to users. It seems like there’s nothing that can be done about it, given the overburdened mobile networks of carriers that are facing increasing data usage.

But Sayeed Choudhury, director of product management and web technologies at Qualcomm, says it’s possible to optimize web browsers to take advantage of hardware such as Qualcomm’s mobile Snapdragon processors to deliver a better web experience. We spoke with him at VentureBeat’s recent Mobile Summit event in Sausalito, where he was a speaker.

By optimizing the software and hardware together, Choudhury says that it’s possible to make a page load faster and make it more navigable once it has loaded. Getting mobile video to play right is also important, while not consuming all of a smartphone’s battery power. That means Qualcomm works on making everything more efficient, from Javascript to rendering. This work has been happening for a couple of years, and now Javascript can run five times faster than it once did on Google’s platforms such as the Android mobile operating system and the Chrome web browser. The result is “snappier and glassy smooth” web browsing.

Check out Choudhury’s perspective on what can be done to speed up the mobile internet in the video below.

First Solar now stands alone as the last major independent manufacturer of solar panels in the United States. Solar panel manufacturers have faced stiff competition from Chinese companies that are able to compete with much lower costs, forcing U.S. companies to either seek large amounts of financing — typically in the form of huge guaranteed loans from the Department of Energy — or sell off to larger energy companies.

SunPower specialized in photovoltaic panels that were highly efficient, but a little more expensive than other solar panel manufacturers. Solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity, but usually capture only small amounts of the sunlight that hits the panel. SunPower’s cells can capture around 24 percent of the light hitting the panel and convert it to electricity — compared to FirstSolar’s 11 percent efficiency ratings. SunPower specializes in wafer-style solar panels, while FirstSolar and other major competitors produce thin-film solar panels that can be placed on any surface and have lower manufacturing costs.

That’s because most new solar power projects carry tremendous capital costs and take some time before they recoup their costs. SunPower also played that game — the company purchased European photovoltaic plant company SunRay for $277 million in February last year. SunPower supplied 80,000 panels for SunRay installations in Europe and Israel covering 13,000 homes before it decided to purchase SunRay.

Total will buy 60 percent of SunPower for around $1.4 billion, valuing the company as being worth around $2.3 billion. SunPower currently has a market cap of around $1.45 billion — so the deal represents a 58 percent premium over its current market price. Shares of SunPower were up around 40 percent to $22.15 in extended trading after the deal was announced.

[Photo: pgegreenenergy]

Rackspace is one of several companies that run public cloud servers. That means application developers and companies can offload programs that require a lot of heavy-duty computing firepower onto remote servers like the ones Rackspace provides. It’s an increasingly popular trend as it lets smaller businesses and developers have access to some pretty powerful hardware without having to buy servers and databases and set them up.

Cloudkick basically gives developers and companies using applications on cloud computing servers a dashboard that shows how they are performing. The core product is free, but Cloudkick recently started charging for premium tools. The idea is to help manage cloud computing applications and squeeze out a little more efficiency in order to cut down cost. It’s important because a lot of public cloud providers charge per gigabyte of storage or for a certain amount of time spent using the servers — so, literally, every second counts.

If the success of services like Rackspace and Amazon’s EC2 weren’t enough to show how popular cloud computing has become, how about this: Cloudkick is only two years old. The company was originally incubated in Y Combinator and pretty quickly raised about $3 million in venture capital funding. It has a number of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list as its clients.

Cloud computing might not be the sexiest field in the world, but it does something a lot of technology fails to do — it just works. It works well enough that Rackspace is willing to take a chance on a company that’s just two years old, and it works well enough that a company like Salesforce will pick up a three-year-old company that will help cloud computing development for more than $200 million.

Only time will tell whether Marc Andreessen’s vision of everything but love notes existing in the cloud will ever come to fruition. But, for the time being, the cloud is proving to be pretty powerful.

The company offers a way to make and act on expense reports by importing expenses and receipts from credit cards and mobile phones, submitting reports through email, and reimbursing online using QuickBooks and direct deposit.

Expensify had earlier raised $1 million in its first seed round in May 2009, which was led by Hillsven Capital, Baseline Capital, and Travis Kalanick. Redpoint Ventures founding partner Tim Haley will join Expensify’s board of directors as part of the deal.

Expensify launched at TechCrunch50 and took home the “DemoPit 2nd Place” prize. It has since grown to offer its apps on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm WebOS and Android platforms.

[Photo: Brett L]