20 UK cleantech entrepreneurs are in San Francisco as part of Clean & Cool, a mission to generate new opportunities and new investment. Martin McAdam, chief executive of Aquamarine Power, is one of them

Many of the great travel writers say that the journey is as important as the destination. For air travellers I doubt this is the case anymore. At the airport, you are probed and detected. A free government massage might be attractive to some but I find it quite disturbing. And no, we don’t fly business class. Equity at this stage in a start-up has better uses. Even though it is already dark when we arrive, the city is spectacular. You see the Bay Bridge lit up and the downtown buildings just being American: tall and confident.

Clean & Cool seems to have grown out of the original UK Web Missions to California’s Silicon Valley. You can imagine that when a Web mission came to California everybody was into the latest digital communications. With Clean & Cool you have a bunch of engineers who care about bubble physics, building materials, diamond semiconductors, or in the case of my business, Aquamarine Power, wave energy.

The organisers of Clean & Cool want us all to blog and tweet about the experience. Does this make sense? Do people who put big iron in the sea need a digital presence in the same way as the latest twitbookspace.org gadget for use by mass millions? I am not convinced, but as always, I jump straight in. I now have a Twitter account for Aquamarine Power and learn quickly that all tweeting for the mission uses the hashtag #ccmission. Look me up there.

A quick shower and then off to meet with my fellow missionaries. There is an introduction to the companies and the press. Everyone is talking about blogging and tweeting. All companies are here because they have been selected. They talk about their products or what their products do. What I want to know is: why do I need that product, how does it change my world and why as a company are they here? I am not sure everyone on the mission has thought it through in the same way.

As a representative of Aquamarine Power, I have thought about this event long and hard over the past few weeks. We are in a capital-intensive business and any investor needs to look beyond the three-year time horizon to an exit in around five years. The venture capital market in the UK is still reeling from the credit crunch. Investors have moved up the food chain to revenue and close proximity to exit. The quantums of cash needed to create a new industry are bigger than they can handle.

If Aquamarine Power needs an additional £30m to take the business forward, a VC who can invest £5m over the life of an investment and expects 25 per cent of the business in the first round just can’t play.

We need smart investors. Those who can understand the market opportunity, the prize and the way a new industry can change the world. People who understand the physics of wave energy are also important. Many investors chose technologies in the early days of the industry because of the glamour associated with the technologies. Making a 5kW machine and creating an industry that will deploy thousands of MW in the ocean is hugely different. You need to think beyond the prototype. You need to think about how the technology is commercialized.

Our message to the US is that our technology works. Our challenge is to make it economically viable. That is all about delivering the lowest cost of power and competing on an equal basis with all other renewable power: wind, solar and biomass. Is Aquamarine ready for the challenge that Cool & Clean presents? I think so.

Clean & Cool aims to find new opportunities for UK cleantech firms, and is sponsored by the Technology Strategy Board, UK Trade and Investment, Polecat, Volans and Enterprise UK