World on cusp of clean tech revolution: Merrill Lynch

Clean technology will rival the Industrial Revolution and every major technological development since then to become the “Sixth Revolution,” as the world grapples with the threats of peak oil, global warming and the need for energy security, says financial analysis firm Merrill Lynch.

While such revolutions occur only about every 50 years, and can deliver “a golden age” based on the new technology’s transformative possibilities, we are now on the cusp of the next great change, says Merrill Lynch clean-tech strategist Steven Milunovich.


“History shows that technology revolutions occur about every 50 years. We believe clean tech is at the beginning of a high-growth period, much like computing was in the early 1970s,” says Milunovich.

The end result will be significant long-term investment opportunities likely heralded by a phase beginning as early as 2010-2011, when the potential impact of these changes bursts fully onto markets and the current financial crisis has eased, the report said.

It also foresees: A world in which energy is not to be conserved but, paradoxically, so abundant as to be wasted, and one in which power generation is no longer the integrated monolith it is now, but one that is decentralized among users. A world in which electric automobiles navigate our roadways, solar panels heat our homes, and where hotels and large buildings use “utilities in a box” that offer electricity, heat, hot water and cooling on site by recapturing waste heat. And with transmission costs and new power plants adding dramatically to power costs, it will be a world in which “microgrids,” or clusters of small on-site generators, serve office buildings, industrial parks and homes without overburdening aging transmission lines.

Canwest News Service