07:22 Wednesday 7th January 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire
DOTTY MCLEOD: We’ve all heard of Silicon Fen of course, part of Cambridgeshire, brought us major international development right here in our county. It’s been through various sectors over the years. In the ’60s and ’70s IT and telecommunications, ’80s and ’90s it was life sciences. Well now we’re hearing that the third wave has arrived, and it is cleantech. For the past three years the industry has grown rapidly, and now Cambridge is seen as the go-to place for green energy development. Martin Garrett is the CEO of Cambridge Cleantech. Martin, you’re going to have to explain first of all what comes under this bracket of cleantech.
MARTIN GARRETT: Yes, good morning Dotty and happy new year to you. I’m quite happy to do that. Our definition for cleantech covers three categories. First of all, renewable energy, so that’s new forms of energy using no or low-carbon. So that would be wind, wave, solar, tidal and so on. Then we also have a low-carbon category. Think of that as using less energy. So that could be smart building materials and metering, so that people use less energy in a building. And electric vehicles would come into that category as well. Then we also have the third category, which is environmental, and that would include recycling and water treatment.
DOTTY MCLEOD: I can appreciate that this is probably quite a hard thing to quantify, but do we have an idea of how many people are employed in this kind of sector in Cambridgeshire now?
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