But the venture world has learned some hard lessons on the difficulty of building energy businesses: they face science risk, often take a longtime to scale and can be capital intensive.
The auto industry has been working on so-called V2V technology for a longtime but this is the first large-scale test to see how well it works in the real world.
The inherent uncertainty in investing in novel technologies, coupled with the high capital costs and longtime horizons, prohibits most venture capital funds from investing in large-scale clean energy projects.
But now medical device makers are introducing an array of new, minimally invasive procedures to provide long-term pain relief without all the costs, risks, complications and recovery time of full-scale surgery.