Green gift: Energy upstarts chase stimulus cash

With help from Washington, a new crop of entrepreneurs are building pragmatic, planet-friendly enterprises.

(Fortune Small Business) — There were no champagne corks popping at Horizon Wind on the February morning when President Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Instead, 30 employees swilled coffee as they got down to work in the Houston energy startup’s conference room. The emergency meeting reviewed the company’s pipeline and decided to move a number of projects from Tier 2 (promising but on the back burner) to Tier 1 (funding), thanks to the stimulus plan’s $50 billion in clean energy provisions.

“This is a big opportunity,” says COO Gabriel Alonso. “We’re all very excited.”


Half a continent away, another clean energy executive was already reaching for the phone. Chris King, chief strategy officer of eMeter, a San Mateo, Calif. company that makes software for the electric grid, was delighted by the bill’s $11 billion allocation for businesses like his.

“We started calling our investors and prospective clients again,” says King. “The funds will accelerate some projects and make the business case compelling in others, doubling our U.S. business this year.”

The fragile renewable energy economy is dominated by small firms, and for some of them the stimulus arrived in the nick of time. Last October’s credit market crisis was an especially rude shock for a sector that had grown fat on six straight years of record investment growth. Even now, few in the industry doubt that a great green shakeout is under way.

“Everyone is in survival mode,” says Brian Fan, senior research director at the Cleantech Group, a trade organization in San Francisco.

Fortune