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The Greenbuild celebration at Phoenix’s Chase Field last night was the best conference presentation I’ve seen, bar none—this from someone who’s been attending about 15 tech industry conferences a year for the past 20 years.

Why? Yes, there was the star power of Al Gore, looking trim and fit and delivering his usual inspiring talk (“We must make it easier for our elected officials to do the right thing and harder for them to do wrong.”). The concert by Sheryl Crow concluded the evening on a great note. The huge projection of the speakers was attractively winged by a split screen image of video footage of nature at work, exceptional green building projects, and people in communities. All good stuff, but what really impressed me was the presentation by the organizers—the last thing you’d usually expect to be exciting.

Rick Fedrizzi, president and CEO of the US Green Building Council declared, “We need not only change we can believe in but change we can build on. We need not only a tipping point but a leverage point.” The audience agreed: It’s time for a green building revolution. “It’s time to move from aspirational green building to informational green building.”

The zero-carbon buildings movement could solve the energy, economic and quality-of-life challenges for the world. If anything can. The 27,000 attendees, including the friendly, funny and hospitable CB Ellis brokers who shared their table and great view with me, all seemed to agree.

Still, what impressed me was the superbly coordinated presentation, first by Fedrizzi, then interweaving many more Green Building Council leaders from around the world: Australia, UK, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, Brazil and Italy. Each presenter was perfectly on message and smoothly handed off to the next, like the old friends and long-time collaborators they actually are.

At the heart of most conferences lies someone trying to make money. At the heart of Greenbuild is a huge and growing global network of designers, builders, policy-makers and humanists trying to make a better world. I loved every minute of it.

As part of the 2nd Annual InterSolar conference held this week in San Francisco, Antenna Group worked with the Solar Gigawatts team to organize a panel of experts to discuss leveraging your brand in the US solar market.

The panel included PR, marketing and branding experts:

• *Caroline Venza, Vice President, Antenna Group
• *Dr. Isabelle Christensen, Senior Director Marketing & Public Relations, REC Solar
• *Angeline Johnson, Manager, Climate Change and Sustainability Services and Advisory, Ernst and Young
• *Jocelyn King, Director of Worldwide Marketing Operations, National Semiconductor

A full copy of their presentations will be available online after July 21st at: http://solar-gigawatts.com/

This week Think Equity LLC and Antenna Group welcomed cleantech industry investors, executives and policymakers to the Think Green Clean Technology and Alternative Energy Forum, in San Francisco. Attendees spanned every sector of the industry from wind and solar, to biofuels and batteries. At the cocktail reception, as in the sessions, people gathered to exchange the biggest breakthroughs of 2008 and get the scoop on what lies ahead for in 2009.

AMI, AMR, demand-response, MDM, HAN, interoperability, scalability…if one left DistribuTECH 2009 in San Diego with anything, it was a better understanding and appreciation of  just how complex and intricate smart grid solutions can be—especially in today’s early stages.

A perfect illustration of this was the breakfast keynote, “The Smart Grid From A to Z: The Nation’s First Smart Grid City.” The brave moderator Teresa Hansen (Editor in Chief of Utility/ T&D Automation Engineering) handled no less than eight panelists with the skill of a rancher herding cattle. Companies like Xcel Energy, SmartSynch, and Gridpoint shared their work plugging in Boulder, Colorado with an AMI or advanced metering infrastructure. Of Boulder’s homes, 50 percent are now wirelessly equipped with automated meter reading (AMR).

Deals, deals, deals!

Perhaps because of the recent economic slowdown (and many canceled flights due to snow storms and ice) it seemed there were fewer people than normal at the event, but that only served to concentrate the quality of the crowd. The $4.5 billion for smart grid technology in the Federal Stimulus package had utility companies swarming the exhibit hall searching for how they would spend their 50 percent matching grants.  Traditionally, utility companies are slow adopters of new technology, preferring to take a wait and see attitude. Spending on average has been approximately $1 billion on smart grid technology annually, but since the stimulus money must be spent before 2010, there was definitely an step-up in pace and a keen sense of “getting deals done” in the air.

Removed from the flurry of exhibitors, chatter in the conference halls focused more on the actual language of stimulus package. As of this writing, it denotes the $4.5 billion to be used only for technology that is based on IP languages and open networks. Silver Spring Networks (of which Al Gore is a board member) has been lobbying aggressively in congress for the adoption of this language.

But others in the industry such as Landis+Gyr and Elster, as well as a third of the utilities, say today’s vendors use technology with proprietary networks and such language could preclude a large number of promising companies from benefiting from the stimulus bill. The technology thus far has been based on proprietary networks, so change will come hard. However, a vote on the bill isn’t expected for a few more weeks, so experts say there’s still time to iron out this delicate phrasing.

It seems clear that smart grid technology has a strong future. Demand for electricity is only expected to rise and if we can bring some sensibility to just how we use electrical power, perhaps the better off we and the planet will be.