Word comes today that Nobel Prize recipient and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore is joining a Silicon Valley venture capital firm known best for their investments in Web 2.0. Sounds like their future may be a bit different though. Evidently Kleiner Perkins has over twenty clean energy related startups in their portfolio.

According to the story in Fortune magazine, “…by 2009 more than a third of Kleiner’s latest fund, which was raised in 2006 and totals $600 million, will be invested in technologies that aim to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Already Kleiner has invested more than $270 million from various funds in 26 companies that make everything from microbes that scrub old oil wells to electric cars to noncorn ethanol.”

There’s no doubt that we will continue to see the investment money moving to Energy 2.0. It’s heartening to find concrete evidence that market forces are in play at a time when the U.S. hasn’t come close to the peak of incentives that we should be providing these types of companies.

Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins to save the planet – Nov. 12, 2007