I think the first thing I look for is the idea coupled with the people. Quite often there will be a brilliant idea but you know the people behind it aren’t going to make it. My rule is always out of 10, allocate 1.4 points for the plan or idea and nine points for the execution.

Is it a great idea? Are these the right people to take it through, and if not, is there a way you can buy the idea and put the right people in place or use these fabulous people to do something else?

And clearly there has to be a market and you have to be able to make money. I get hugely excited by a company like Lanzatech. It looks like it will globally make a significant difference because you can take all these nasties, carbon monoxide going into the air in pollutants, and turn them into a fuel. That sort of thing really makes me excited.

How much influence do you think you will have?

I do think it is an iterative process. We’ve got the New Zealand Council for Sustainable Business Development and the NZ Institute which are two organisations I’ve had a lot to do with starting up, monitoring all sorts of environmental and economic indicators. I think it is a whole bunch of people working together not any one organisation can make it work on its own.

I hope we can play a part but one of the good things is we are all quite well connected with other things going on and we can use our connections to get all sorts of people involved.

I am really encouraged now that people like Todd Energy have invested in this tidal energy consortium in the Kaipara and we’ve seen massive amounts of wind energy developed by public and private interests.

Mighty River Power is getting really stuck into the geothermal power sector. If we can build a whole industry as our engineers did in the 1950s and 1960s with consulting on more geothermal power in other parts of the world, we can build a whole cleantech industry just on that.

Then you have the whole backup of the stainless steel industry that comes out of dairying that can help Lanzatech in China, and can probably help with geothermal.

It is there, it’s just waiting to be unlocked.

I did invest in one overseas solar plant because I was interested in keeping a close eye on it. Now the Chinese are going to put together a solar farm that will be a hundred times bigger than any other in the world and I don’t think there is any doubt that they are going to start off by producing the largest number of electric vehicles in the world by far.

We have invested in two battery plays now. You might not say those are cleantech but I believe they are.
I think cleantech in its broadest sense is about replacing industries that either spew huge amounts of CO2 or they remediate in terms of the environment or they save energy. We’ve been an investor for many years in Wellington Drive which is now selling over a million small motors a year that go into the refrigeration industry around the world.

In some ways you could almost say an outfit like Fisher and Paykel Healthcare is cleantech because it is solving a problem with something that doesn’t do any damage and it’s using clean energy. Rakon is probably another one. It is making the world a better place by creating crystals which go into GPS. While technically you couldn’t say that is absolutely cleantech, it is a technology that does no damage so maybe that is the definition, investing in things that do no damage to the environment. I think this weightless export thing will be a great benefit to New Zealand and the proposed Pacific Fibre cable will mean New Zealand can do so much from a weightless economy point of view.

What drives you?

There is a little bit of fear. We’ve got two and a half grandkids now and I was in Nelson a couple of weeks ago when we took some Google Earth data and worked out what would happen to Nelson if you raised the water level by 1.5m. It wipes out a huge part of the town. That could happen with our own home. So there is bit of fear.

What has driven me for many years is the pride in New Zealand and the fact that we should be able to stand on our own two feet. We’ve got the brain power, we can invent things that make us cashflow positive but we continue to fail to do so. It’s the same old one point for the idea, nine points for the execution.

I think a lot has to do with the fact that we don’t have a huge lot of natural resources ourselves so we are behind the eight ball and constantly comparing ourselves with Australia.

But in terms of these types of things we do quite well in comparison with vast parts of the world. We are reasonably smart about the way we do things. We have proof that we can turn all this stuff into economic benefit and of course the other part of my life is to do with the Tindall Foundation which deals with people at the very bottom. In New Zealand I look at a lot of the things that are the result of poverty and I don’t think there is any doubt that if you have more money to play with, you can beat a lot of poverty so a lot of things we doing in the Foundation is all about jobs. Taking kids out of schools and creating an education pipeline to a guaranteed job. It is a different way of thinking but if you have the money, anything is possible.

So there is some fear, the challenge, and the opportunity of putting ourselves on the world stage. There are two or three things we are investing in that some day people might say ‘that is the Nokia of New Zealand’ and it has come out of little old New Zealand and made the world a better place.

Your name

Listed as anonymous if blank

Subject *

Comment *

Comment composition options »

Allowable HTML: <!--break--> <a> <em> <i> <b> <strong> <pre> <u> <strike> <sub> <p> <table> <tr> <td> <thead> <tbody> <sup> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <br> <hr>
Line and paragraph breaks are recognised automatically.

Captcha *

This is a test to prevent automated spam submission. To receive a new challenge click below or click to receive audio challenge.