This past Sunday, 60 Minutes, the magazine news show of CBS, ran a segment entitled, The Cleantech Crash. The segment left viewers with the message that US taxpayers have invested in a number of clean tech flops (including Solyndra), and that Chinese companies are scooping up the defunct US companies as vulture capitalists.

Case in point is this quote from the segment:

Pin Ni and his autoparts company Wanxiang have made six big investments in American Cleantech so far, including buying A123, another electric car battery startup that lost over 130 million tax dollars.

The segment was a mash-up of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, like Vinod Khosla, and the energy sector. While Vinod Khosla is one of the great investors and entrepreneurs of our time, the real success in energy is not coming from new inventions. That is worth repeating.  Real success in energy is not coming from new inventions.