Jenya Khvatsky’s start-up company CleanTek Market has been founded to create a global online platform to connect clean technology projects, technologies and organisations with investors, end users and intermediaries. Here’s how he reads the imperatives for such a service.
We are in the midst of a clean technology revolution. There is now widespread acceptance that the global economy is transitioning away from a traditional fossil-based model to one based on sustainable use of resources and energy.
To achieve an orderly transition, the scale of financing required can be counted in the trillions – not billions – of dollars. A widely quoted report by the International Energy Agency estimated that US$1 trillion a year to 2050 is required to finance this transition (IEA, 2015). Yet the cleantech market has averaged US$360 billion a year over the first half of this decade, peaking at US$391 billion in 2014, to be valued at US$5.5 trillion (CPI, 2015). The current scale of the market is impressive – and yet it is some 60 per cent below what is required. A clear market failure.