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Nothing like presenting a green technologies conference with a renewable energy focus on a day when oil prices skyrocket to new highs, the Dow Jones stock average takes a nearly 400-point hit, and the US Senate shoots down the Climate Security Act. As the news cycle would have it, the timing of the GreenTech 2008 event held last Friday (June 6) in Pasadena, CA, could not have been much more compelling.

Cohosted by local nonprofit entrepreneur empowerers Entretech and ecofriendly catalytic chemical company Materia, the daylong symposium featured speakers from the cleantech wing of the venture capital community, utility companies, and a wide-ranging (though not all-inclusive) selection of solar PV, water purification, nuclear, wind, biofuel, and green design representatives.

Some might quibble with the lineup, in terms of what kind of companies were or were not included. The presence of two presenters from what Materia's Mike Giardello euphemistically called the "energy from fission" area might have rankled certain greener-than-thou types who seek to keep the nuke option out of the renewable discussion.

But I found the presentations by Phillip Finck of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) and Idaho National Lab and especially that of Joe Reyes, CTO of NuScale Power (developer of small-scale "modular nuclear power generation technology"), to be quite interesting and informative. Although waste disposal remains a sensitive topic, the two true believers made a strong case that new and next-gen nuke plants (such as thorium-based reactors) will play an important role in the planetary move away from carbon-based energy dependency. Just ask the French, who rely on nuclear for some 80% of their power-grid needs and have made big strides in improving the technologies.

For an event with the subtheme of "Rethinking energy," I was struck by the absence of any speaker from the emergent thin-film/new-tech battery or energy scavenging/harvesting sectors (although I did chat with attendee Rachid Yazami, who's starting up a new, Southern California-based lithium-ion energy-storage player, CFX Battery). A talk from a tide- and wavepower energy startup would have also been welcome, especially given the relative proximity of the conference to the planet's largest source of that renewable--the Pacific Ocean.

Many of the companies and presenters had either direct or indirect ties to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and especially the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Lab (Caltech/JPL). Fred Farina of Caltech's tech transfer office said 80 companies have spun out of the institute, at an average of eight per year. Of those that have emerged from the institute so far, 75% are either ongoing startup concerns or have successfully gone public or been acquired by a larger company--a pretty impressive success rate.

Solarmer Energy's plastic PV cell technology has UCLA beginnings, while much of the technical team helping Soliant Energy develop and productize its concentrating PV modules came from JPL. Caltech research on branched nanopolymers, and nano- and microparticles with tunable capture sites led to AquaNano Technologies' new water-purification membrane approach, while the three cofounders of Gevo brought their biofuels breakthroughs (can you say, butanol?) with them from the brainy Pasadena campus as well.

One recurring theme that cut across several of the presentations is that new green techs must be scalable and take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place. Gevo's Pat Gruber spoke of the importance of "designing technologies to fit into the capital base of existing facilities," citing gas pipelines and beer plants as examples where biofuels could also flow or be produced. Elevance Renewable Sciences' Mel Luetkens talked about the concept of "retrofittable assets," where you don't start "from scratch" and utilize "existing assets" for products such as his company's metathesis-enabled renewable biochem feedstocks.

Jeff Green of Nano H20 explained that his UCLA-rooted startup's reverse-osmosis nanocomposite membranes will be able to use, with minor tweaking, the same manufacturing process as more traditional membranes do and "can retrofit into existing desalination plants when ready." AquaNano's membrane can also be "easily integrated into existing water treatment systems," according to the company's Mamadou Diallo.

Soliant's Art Buckland noted the risk-minimizing importance of "using established solar channels, field-proven materials, components, and subsystems," and established "contract manufacturing" in the company's efforts to bring its easy-to-install, very-high-efficiency CPV modules to the commercial rooftop market. Paul Glenney of AeroVironment's Clean Energy Tech Center said that the company's "small wind turbines for the built environment" had to be "modular, scalable, and quick to install," and were "complimentary to PV" and could be "utility-grid connected."

Glenney's notion of different renewables being "complimentary" touches on another core green-and-clean truth: no single solution will provide a silver bullet for the globe's growing energy crisis and carbon-fed eco-mess. Using a combination of green-energy sources to power a biofuel plant, instead of relying entirely on electricity from a coal-powered grid, or deploying a PV fab's own panels along with a few wind turbines to help keep the lights on and tools running on the factory floor represent the kind of models that industrial mavens need to embrace in the new economy. Information-sharing forums like the GreenTech conference play a key role in shaping the discussion moving forward.