Clean-energy investments are hot despite lack of policy direction

Smart money is flowing to lower carbon energy, even as the Obama administration’s efforts to cap carbon emissions appear to be on the rocks.

Hopes for a U.S. climate-change bill that would somehow cap greenhouse-gas emissions this year have all but melted in the heated atmosphere of a divided Washington in an election year.

But plenty of smart money is heading toward lower-carbon energy — whether in wind and solar energy, batteries, technology that promotes conservation of electricity, or burning coal in a cleaner way.

Does that mean we’re headed toward the solar-and-wind-only energy economy that ecological utopians imagine? Hardly. The U.S. still gets some 60 percent of its electric power by burning coal. And President Obama, who has advocated carbon caps, also this week opened huge swaths off the East Coast to offshore oil exploration and drilling. Paradoxically, part of the reason for that move is to win political support for comprehensive energy legislation that would include moves toward capping carbon emissions.

So we’re not going "no carbon," by any stretch. But low carbon? There are plenty of signs that we’re heading in that direction.

Nissan announced Tuesday that it was pricing its all-electric Leaf directly for the mass market. The Leaf will cost about $25,000, once a tax credit is included. The automaker says it already has some 85,000 customers who have at least expressed interest in the car, one of the first of the electric vehicles by a major automaker.

“Clean tech touches every major industry,” said Ira Ehrenpreis, general partner at Technology Partners Inc. and the chairman of the annual Clean-Tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California. “Clean tech embodies a body of opportunities. The subsectors of the subsectors could be multibillion-dollar opportunities.”

Read the full story in Portfolio.com.