The death of "cleantech"? Or the perversions of "free" money?

TechCrunch notes that "old" cleantech was overhyped and is now nearly unfundable but there's an emergence of more sustainable and profitable tech: "They’re looking to be downstream, close to those juicy, fast-growth markets, with new channels and new marketplaces. Even in hardware, they’ve moved to distributed, smaller, modular, automated and intelligent hardware."

Doesn't this just highlight problems with governments trying to choose winners - when it comes to either technologies to pursue or even more insidiously, companies that try to develop those technologies? Could these companies like Nest have gotten there faster if it weren't for all the carrots being dangled to pursue those "overhyped" technologies? And was losing all this money and time really such a "noble way to lose money?"