But the automobile industry isn’t the only one that’s going to experience huge disruption in the next decades, as Erik Straser, partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures says.

You’re also talking about electricity, water services, supply chains, manufacturing plants, concrete, and other building materials.

“And so if you were to boil that out, if you were to go to the Dow Jones components, you’re looking at roughly 30 to 40 percent of an industrialized country’s GDP,” he says. “So when you’re dealing with 30 to 40 percent of GDP, your market sizes all start with 100 billion or one trillion, right?”

What that means is that companies that solve the problem of, for instance, providing enough lithium or a lithium substitute for batteries to run electric cars could become huge firms without having to dominate a market.

“Single-digit success of market share will translate to huge companies,” Straser says. They don’t even have to be the primary developer of, say, a new kind of car. His firm, for instance, is betting on a company that can find new sources of lithium, the key ingredient in batteries for electric cars.

Virtually every computer-chip maker is getting into the solar-panel business in some form or fashion, says Straser, since solar panels and computer chips are made of the same substance—silicon.

Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics, which is developing biofuels from algae, has attracted up to $600 million in investment from Exxon Mobil, a bet that even if transportation doesn’t go electric, cars and trucks are liable to run on something other than petroleum products in the future.

In March, Silicon Valley startup Calera attracted a $15 million investment from Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer. Calera has a technology it says can use carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels like coal and oil and natural gas, to make building materials.

Peabody isn’t the only investor who sees huge promise in such an idea. Legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures has bet $50 million on the company.

“With this technology, coal can be cleaner than solar and wind, because they can only be carbon-neutral,” Khosla told the New York Times. Calera’s process, if it works, could actually remove carbon from the air. Such a process could make it a huge company in a world where China is bringing on dozens of coal-fired plants to provide growing demand for electricity and the U.S. gets about 60 percent of its electricity from coal.

And the potential for innovation doesn’t stop there. Think of the possibilities inherent in creating technologies for bringing clean water to the billion-plus people on the planet who don’t have access to such a necessity. Or imagine if you were the company that invented superefficient lighting for industrial or home use, or ways to store or recycle nuclear waste safely; or electric grids so smart they could regulate electricity for millions who don’t have it; or ways to add efficiency to the systems that millions have.

Any of the companies that can solve one of those problems could become multibillion-dollar players with global footprints in very short order.

While eye-popping numbers have attracted capital to the cleantech space, there’s still plenty of innovation to come, and money to be made, in other businesses. And, like cleantech, those businesses will play in an increasingly globalized world.