Mar 22

Written by: Russ Henke
3/22/2007 3:26 AM 

On the heels of my March 9, 2007 blog entry, lamenting the passing of two pioneers in MCAD/CAE and EDA, respectively, comes the news of the passing of John Backus at age 82, the creator of FORTRAN. As the early engineers and programmers of my generation recall, FORTRAN was among the first "high level computer programming languages" that allowed us to avoid machine coding. Many’s the late night of university thesis research and related software development, when we gave thanks to Mr. Backus of IBM.

But today I want to depart from MCAD and EDA briefly, to comment on the advent of Spring, the rising awareness of climate change, and finally doing something about it!

For example, while Applied Materials here in Silicon Valley sports over a thousand seats of commercial MCAD/CAE software, employing “virtual prototyping” to help design semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the company made other news on March 17, 2007, by announcing at its annual shareholders meeting that it would begin setting up “the largest solar power installation on an existing corporate facility in the United States” at its Sunnyvale research campus (i.e. more megawatt generation capacity than Google’s solar array). Applied will also expand its marketing of equipment for making solar cells.

At long last, it’s delightful to observe the partial awakening of corporate America to the dangers (and opportunities) of global warming, despite the dogged 6-year efforts of the Bush administration to deny its existence. Only this week, at a congressional hearing chaired by Henry Waxman of CA, the former White House
Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney was forced to confess that he skewed and edited government reports for years to inject uncertainty into the climate change debate. An oil lobbyist prior to his White House post, Cooney left the government in 2005 to work at … Exxon Mobil.

No doubt that an important part of the climate change “awakening” is down to Al Gore. It was gratifying to note that Mr. Gore won an Academy Award on Oscar Night in LA February 25, 2007, for the best documentary film of the year, “An
Inconvenient Truth”. Gore’s film encourages everyone around the world to help solve the problems of global warming and climate change. Gore of course is remembered as having won the popular ballot for president of the United States in November 2000 by more than 500,000 votes, only to have the US Supreme Court install George W. Bush instead.

As recent as March 21, 2007, former vice president Gore appeared at a joint session on Capitol Hill to insist that global warming constitutes a “planetary emergency” requiring an aggressive US federal response.

The venture capitalists of Silicon Valley and elsewhere are also awake to the opportunity. As the New York Times reported on March 17, 2007, “Many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars. For many in Silicon Valley, high tech has given way to “clean tech,” the shorthand term for innovations that are energy-efficient and environmentally friendly.”

As evidence of venture capital interest, through the first three quarters of 2006, VC’s put $474 million into a broad range of Silicon Valley start-ups in energy storage, generation and efficiency, according to Cleantech Venture Network, an industry trade group. Energy was by far the fastest-growing area of interest.

Another sure sign, is that the UC Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum is devoting one of its valued monthly meetings on March 22, 2007 to "CleanTech: The New Entrepreneurial Frontier", asserting that Clean Tech received over $2 billion in overall VC investment during the entire year of 2006. The March 22 forum is
hosting two of the best known energy entrepreneurs in Northern California today: JB Straubel, CTO, Tesla Motors; and John Woolard, CEO, BrightSource Energy.