In the long term, fixed currency rates were a recipe for trouble because when economic times changed currencies, conversion rates needed to change as well to keep the economy in equilibrium.
All of these cleantech companies are building not geographic monopolies for which few alternatives exist, but commodity conversion businesses, whose economic viability is exquisitely sensitive to shifts in both feedstock prices and energy alternatives across global markets.
This is not the first time that he has had a "conversion", and to me his conversion is no more "unprincipled" than the conversion of new Labour to core Thatcherite economic and trade union policies.