Vinod Khosla: What's next for clean tech?

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Speaker: How do you look at the next five to ten years, I mean for green entrepreneurship. Are you bullish?

Speaker: I'm very bullish about reinventing technologies that green inaudible the infrastructure of society. Ten, fifteen from now, there's an overwhelming probability that most of today's conventional wisdom will be dead, that we need oil sands or we need deep offshore drilling. I can't imagine those things will compete with better biofuels, or that we have get to electric cars because biofuels maybe, with the highly efficient engines, a lot cleaner on carbon emissions than electric cars. Electric cars are fundamentally coal-powered cars. But I'm also bullish, probably not your standard A123 lithium ion battery, I suspect nobody will be talking about those kind of batteries five years from now or ten years or no, but a 10X reduction in price-performance of lithium ion batteries into some other kind of batteries, whether it's compressed air for storage or quantum scape batteries that don't use any lithium ion electrolytes and crap like that. Those kind of reinventions will happen, and we will stop -- and then, like, suddenly, electric cars with economic sense. So my drive is to only invest in battery companies that might make economic sense. And we have five battery investments, so I'm not negative on the electric cars at all. That kind of reinvention will happen in lighting, in air conditioning, in how we build buildings. We're redoing glass. We're doing cement. I mean, just -- we're doing sugar production, replace high-fructose corn syrup. We're doing steel. We're doing fertilizer. Just about everything you can imagine, we're taking a shot at. Most of the time, we may fail, but that doesn't matter. When we succeed, it makes up for all the failures.

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