Pangaea Blog

The average cost of a 30 second ad during last week’s Superbowl was about $4 million. So when a power outage delays the game for 34 minutes, it’s kind of a big deal. It looks bad for the Superdome, the local utility company (Entergy), the perhaps-not-yet-fully recovered city of New Orleans, the NFL, and for the US at large. CBS was caught off guard and some awkward pauses and transitions accompanied the bizarre turn of events. We can’t keep the lights on at an event averaging over 100 million viewers?

LED lighting has the potential to be one of the true blockbuster clean tech markets. A 2011 report by McKinsey & Company forecasts the global lighting market to reach €108BB($140BB) by 2020 with LEDs taking €64BB($83BB) of that share. This is a 10X increase from the LED lighting market size today. Technology is advancing as well; with Cree producing a record 254 lumen-per-watt device in 2012 - almost a 3X increase over the last decade. Exciting stuff for VCs indeed!!! At Pangaea Ventures we share in the excitement but worry that current thinking just won’t take us far enough.

Organic electronics, from OLED displays and lighting to third generation photovoltaic modules, is an enabling technology platform promising lighter, cheaper, and more flexible devices for a wide variety of industries and applications. The recent proliferation of organic-empowered devices like Samsung’s AMOLED displays in their Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets shows just how far we’ve come over the last few years. However, we still have yet to see the truly transformational devices on a large-scale inconceivable with their non-organic analogs (e.g. fully printed, flexible HDTVs).

Last week, my partner Andrew posted a blog about the LED market and discussed some emerging technologies that will revolutionize the lighting market. I want to expand on that topic and provide some insight into energy efficient green buildings.

Buildings are huge consumers of energy. The US Department of Energy estimates that, in the US alone, buildings use nearly 40 quadrillion Btu of energy for space heating and cooling, lighting and appliances. This represents approximately 39% of the total energy consumed in the US and 38% of a building’s energy is consumed for heating and cooling. The Building Technology & Urban Systems Department at Berkeley Labs states that buildings consume 71% of US electricity, 53% of US natural gas and emit 40% of US greenhouse gases. There is clearly room for improvement.