Green and Green-Enabling Technologies

Read the summary below or download the entire Chapter Nine from the printed report.

Minnesota has firms that possess technological strengths in areas with broad potential applicability to green purposes, including:

• Biochemistry
  Biopolymers, plastics made of biomass, and green chemistry products including personal care and cleaning products.
• Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology
  Coatings, nano-materials for photovoltaic solar panels, thin films and adhesives for semiconductor applications.
• Renewable Energy 
  Wind, biodiesel, geothermal and solar. Combined with renewable sources, distributed generation (on-site, decentralized energy generation) has the potential to heavily supplement larger utility scale energy production in the future.
• Waste Treatment and Recovery
  Composting, fermentation, methane digestion, gasification, and pyrolysis of biomass as well as incineration. Outputs include electric and thermal energy, biofuels, and syngas. Significant new applications for waste recovery systems show potential for growth in Minnesota.
• Energy Generation, Storage, and Distribution
  Advanced batteries, energy conversion, power management, and data storage solutions. Work on the smart grid is also happening in Minnesota although implementation could be decades away.
• Wireless and Control Technologies
  Green-enabling technologies that are embedded in a wide variety of green products from control instruments for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions to smart meters that allow utilities and consumers to track energy consumption in real time and make more educated decisions about energy use.
• Transportation Technologies
  Manufacture of exhaust filters manufacturing, alternative fuel vehicles, and emissions-reduction engine technologies.

Occupations most likely to need an upgrade in skills and knowledge to keep up with evolving green and green-enabling technologies are scientists, engineers, maintenance and repair technicians, technical sales representatives, and business operations specialists. 

For example, a training development specialist might be responsible for training the sales force in the energy-efficiency technologies embedded in an HVAC system, while an engineer might evaluate the feasibility of new waste conversion technologies to help a local municipality prevent waste from going into landfills. On-the-job training in new technologies is the tool preferred by employers to train their workforce in the specific green component of the job.

Innovative green companies face the same set of hurdles that hold back any new technology.

• Capitalization is difficult especially for startups caught in the double crunch of financing a manufacturing facility and moving to large-scale commercialization.
• Investing in green product performance improvements can be risky and costly, especially when newer technologies do not yet have the consumer support that more conventional technologies have.
• Proving the effectiveness of green product features is difficult in the absence of broadly recognized, objective, and reliable metrics that customers can understand and use to compare products.

Throughout the 2009 recession and its aftermath, private sector firms reported green job openings in industries like scientific research and development and manufacturing, sectors that were particularly hard hit by the recession. This stands as remarkable evidence of the source of economic resilience and renewal green activities can represent for Minnesota.