Not to rain on your parade (pun intended) but I want to challenge you a bit on calling water the next hot idea.

As you know, I work with Deloitte and helped out on their Green15 initiative in Canada…plus I have a column on Green investing for CBC radio.

I 100% agree that VCs are chasing Clean Tech — and that water investing will (in various forms) be a big part of their strategy. As will emission and carbon-reducing investments, as will cleaning up soil and so forth. All of those markets are important and will attract significant dollars/euros.

But (and I’m not saying this is a good thing) Western society does put a lot of ECONOMIC value in front of clean water, clean air, clean soil. Think about some common cliches: “free as the air”, “spend like water” and “cheap as dirt.”

On the other hand, ENERGY is a huge market - making it, storing it, transporting it, using it, conserving it. The global energy economy is measured in the tens of trillions of dollars per year, and solutions that address that market are much more attractive to VCs than the intriguing but smaller air/earth/water markets.

Early VC data supports that idea — last quarter global investing in cleantech was about $1.7 billion, of which 70% went to energy. That pattern isn’t likely to change soon.

Water will matter — global warming and melting glaciers say so. It needs investment and it will receive it…and Canada (home of former water purification star companies like Trojan and Zenon) is likely to be a global leader in innovation as well as a global leader in fresh water supplies.

But it looks unlikely to be the biggest clean tech niche.