First off, I'm very excited about a new conference Greentech Media and I are teaming up on. In Menlo Park in September, we're going to host a crowd of limited partners, family offices, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other industry participants for the first "NextWave Greentech Investing" event. It's an idea based upon this column I wrote a few months back, and cheers to my friends at GTM for following through on it. Already a bunch of LPs and family offices are registered to attend, which is great to see. Should be a fantastic day with a wide variety of interesting investment theses brought out into the open.

And yes, that means there will be some (constructive)...

Two years ago, I heard today, at the NVCA Annual Meeting the Cleantech session had 200 participants.

At today's, it had around 30.

And yet I walked away very encouraged. Why? Because in a room that probably had something like 200 or so collective years of cleantech venture experience, so many smart minds were focused on the basic question that we're wrestling with these days: "What will the next wave of cleantech venture capital look like?"

The panel session quickly turned into a full-room discussion on the subject, with lots of fodder for future columns (I'll get to them eventually, I promise). But perhaps the biggest takeaway for me from the conversation was Josh Green's...

Consolidation in an industry sector can be a good or a bad sign.

The waves of consolidation in the PV manufacturing sector for example, presaged (when it was vertical consolidation to lock up access to demand for panels) and then highlighted the overcapacity in that industry. Much of the ongoing consolidation upstream in the solar value chain at this point is opportunistic consolidation of IP on the cheap. Not exciting at all from an investor's perspective.

But the looming consolidation in the "intelligent energy" (ie: IT applications in energy efficiency) sector is, I believe, a very different story. One that is positioning the sector to start showing some really exciting...

As I sit here at the jam-packed BNEF Summit listening to Senator Murkowski express her frustration about unrealistic political rhetoric on energy, I'm reflecting upon all the recent discussion among clean energy advocates here in the U.S. about priorities.

There's a recognition that in this policy environment, at a federal level this sector won't be able to enjoy all the policy support it should. But upon recognizing this the three major camps of clean energy policy advocates immediately fall upon each other, arguing that their camp deserves the most attention and support.

Advocates of deployment argue for implementing today's energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies...

The traditional utility model is under threat. Industry leaders like Jim Rogers and David Crane are talking about this publicly. It's becoming harder and harder to make profits managing wires that distribute centrally sourced kilowatt-hours to end customers on demand. The aging T&D workforce, new potential significant loads like PHEVs, intermittent and distributed generation sources, an increasingly complex array of technologies on the demand side and on the grid for utilities to be on top of -- it's not surprising that utilities are finding it a daunting challenge to profitably manage their businesses with their existing wires-based revenue models.

But what I'm surprised about is...

It's been quite a while since we did a roundup of recent news items here on the Cleantech Investing blog, but a few smaller news items have caught my eye and are worth discussing.

First of all, some housekeeping issues -- at my firm, we have made the decision to change the name of our firm to address a surprising amount of confusion out there in the marketplace. After receiving numerous business plan submissions addressed to "Black Corral Capital," we've determined it makes sense to change the firm's name to match apparent expectations. Of course, by that logic we also could have renamed the firm "Blackstone" or "Black Rock," but those are already taken. As we believe strongly in...

We recently held a one-day retreat for all of our portfolio CEOs at Black Coral Capital, and it was a really energizing affair. Rather than a day of stale presentations, we created lots of opportunities for our CEOs to compare notes with and look for ways to work with each other, and it was just terrific to be a fly on the wall as all those smart entrepreneurs chatted / cajoled / brainstormed / opined. Just great fun to watch. It certainly helped that all of our companies are in a revenue-growth phase, so they had lots of common points of discussion. And of course, they all had one shared investment partner to complain about with each other...

But to kick off the day I gave a...