Giving Compass' Take:

• Daniel Weiss co-founded the Angeleno Group to fund green energy companies. He's increasingly optimistic about the future of clean energy and the role he and other investors can play in creating environmental change. 

• Technology has played a key role in clean energy initiatives. Should donors focus their attention on the latest developments or stick with tried-and-true methods?

• Learn about grassroots clean energy efforts in Germany. 

When Daniel Weiss cofounded Angeleno Group in 2001 to fund green energy companies, few would have regarded him as a master of timing.“To launch an investment firm and raise capital to invest in this space . . . maybe we ought to have had our heads examined, ” Weiss, one of Angeleno Group’s two managing partners, told me on the latest episode of my podcast, The Bottom Line.

Along the way, they’ve kept their eyes on four fundamental drivers: an urgent need to replace an aging and inadequate power infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere; the steadily increasing demand for fuel and electricity as ever more of the world’s population enters the middle class and becomes urbanized; a push by different nations to secure their own energy independence; and the rise of global warming and other environmental issues as a major social concern.

“Not a lot of folks were focused on the next generation of energy,” he says. Not any longer, however. “We really are shifting,” Weiss says, “from a world in which adoption of some of these technologies is driven by politics and policy to a world . . . being driven by markets and economics.”

Read more about green energy optimism by Rick Wartzman at Fast Company.