Below are excerpts from an interesting article at AOL Energy, providing yet more evidence – on top of stories like this one about record investment in renewable power – that cleantech is increasingly where it’s at from a hard-nosed business and investment perspective.

Large corporations are steadily replacing governments and banks in financing renewable energy transport fuels and technologies, helping a popular sector for venture capital and private equity early stage funding cross the infamous development “valley of death” in search of scale.

The renewable energy transportation sector has reached a pivot point in which the needs and criteria of investors is changing ahead of a new race to scale up transformational technologies…

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Large corporations, meanwhile, are sitting on trillions of dollars in hoarded cash and seeking investments in cleantech areas that complement their core businesses; a departure from the first decade of renewable energy and cleantech investing that focused on disruptive technologies remote from core functions and “green” investing for public relations and carbon reduction target reasons.

So, the bottom line is that serious corporate players are moving into the clean energy space, despite the yammering of some politicians and pundits who think they understand investment opportunities. In the real world, serious business people are seeing a serious business opportunity and acting on it.