Alternative energy and clean technology companies are attracting investor capital in record amounts this year, setting up what one solar photovoltaic (PV) industry observer sees as a positive feedback cycle whereby technological improvements and government incentives attract investment and lead to lower production and consumer costs, which attracts more investment, which leads to further gains in quality and efficiency. And the growth trend looks set to continue, according to recently released research reports. If anything, existing production capacity and nascent distribution networks, along with short supplies of key, high-quality components and associated raw materials - copper, steel and silicon among them - are constraining production of everything from biofuels, domestic solar panels and wind turbines to their industrial-scale counterparts. “There has been a flood of new money coming into the clean energy sector,” Michael Liebreich, CEO and founder of London-based New Energy Finance, the lead analysts of a recent survey of investment in the European alternative energy market, told RI. “The risk is that these new investors don’t understand that the energy industry is about heavy engineering and commodities as well as about technology. Fortunes will be made in the coming years, but fortunes will also be lost,” he said. Thanks: ResourceInvestor.com