The Vancouver Energy Roundtable was held June 15^th.  The conference “Clean Technology as an Engine of Economic Growth” pulled a great selection of speakers and panelists and a strong crowd of cleantech executives from Vancouver.

The general message conveyed was that Vancouver is establishing itself as a globally recognized cleantech centre.  A number of positive factors where mentioned such as strong academic and research centres, a provincial and municipal willingness to be a leader in clean solutions and a strong entrepreneurial mind set.

Examples to support this, is North America’s first Carbon tax, stringent green building codes and the living lab concept at UBC. However there is still more that can be done.

How to leverage BC geographic and social proximity to Asia and China was mentioned as one area of improvement. Another was, how to grow big, globally successful companies.

The governments unwillingness to “pick winners” was debated in one panel and reference was made to China were a sector is picked and 2-3 companies are supported that will grow large.  To contrast that, BC supports every start-up with limited funding, resulting in many small companies that do not succeed on the word stage.

Stephan Dolezalek of VantagePoint Capital suggested that “BC should grow trees not weeds” and Cullen Jennings from Cisco, encouraged start-ups to think bigger “instead of planning for a 2% market share companies should plan for 20%”.

As capital is in different places, India, China, Brazil to mention a few, the VC’s need to attract capital from around the world and find reasons to invest them in BC.  Vancouver and BC are competing on a global stage now and it is important that BC companies provide sufficient returns to the investors to keep them coming back. A suggestion from one panel was to market BC as a Gateway to North America, taking advantage of BC’s positive reputation in China and leveraging that to also open up the market in US.

Michael Littlewood from IBM – said a perfect storm is happening in cities.  The cost to provide service is growing, revenue is under pressure and compliance demands are increasing.  Cleantech and conservation is a lever that could bring this back in balance. The Mayor’s panel continued with Surrey, Prince George and Vancouver presenting what they are doing in terms of green developments. The Mayors requested a provincial vision for cleantech, which is lacking today. A common goal providing certainty to companies, investors and municipalities would strengthen the Province as a whole and make BC more competitive on a world scene.

As the target is to create 50,000 green jobs in greater Vancouver by 2020, up from the current 8000 green jobs, as presented in the KPMG report, a lot more tree-size companies will need to be grown over the next 9 years. If the municipalities and academic institutions can provide the living labs and be the early stage customers, and global capital will support the growth, greater Vancouver can maintain and grow its presence on the global scene as a provider of clean technology solutions.