Buck's is a quirky Silicon Valley watering hole that feeds pancakes to celebrities, VCs and regular folks. Greentech Media held its inaugural VC Breakfast at Buck's on Wednesday morning in an event destined to become a Silicon Valley institution -- like the Algonquin Roundtable with pancakes instead of martinis.

Breakfast was attended by investors from Mohr Davidow Ventures (Will Coleman), Alloy Ventures (Dan Rubin), Triple Point Capital (Mark Watt), Rockport Capital (Victor Westerlind), Nth Power (Rodrigo Prudencio), Greylock Partners (Isaac Fehrenbach) and Lightspeed Venture Partners (Peter Nieh).

These gentlemen have a long history in cleantech and our (off-the-record) discussion focused on the investment climate and the Obama administration's potential impact on renewable energy. By the way, none of the investors walked, rode their bikes or drove Priuses to the meeting.

We'll get back to breakfast in a second but first let's cover some of the president elect's plans regarding our energy situation.

According to published info from the Obama campaign:

• Global warming is real, is happening now, and it is the result of human activities. (Contrast this with the Bush or Palin conclusion that the earth might be warming but its causes are unknown.)

Anyway, the Obama energy platform has some ambitious plans to tackle our energy challenges including:

• A cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions (this is a 100 percent allowance auction where polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release rather than giving emission rights away for free to coal and oil companies).

• Investing in basic research -- doubling federal funding for clean energy projects.

• Developing the next generation of biofuels.

• Developing clean coal technology (well, cleaner at least).

• Developing "safe and secure" nuclear energy (if there is such a thing).

• Creating a "Clean Technologies Deployment Venture Capital Fund" to move technologies from the lab to deployment. (The documents cite In-Q-Tel as a model, which may or may not be a great example.)

• Extending the federal PTC for five years.

• Making the federal government the leader in energy efficiency.

Back to breakfast...

VC investors by nature need to be optimists, confident that capital and human resources deployed efficiently can conquer technological risk and displace incumbent technologies in fast growth markets or create new markets.

Today's group was no exception. Despite the economic turmoil, these investors, with varying degrees of caution, are all looking to continue funding firms across the cleantech space -- in solar, alternative fuels, energy storage, clean materials and more.

Cumulatively the group has invested billions of dollars in cleantech.

Here are some of their more prominent investments.

• Alloy Ventures -- Genomatica

• Greylock Ventures -- Sun Edison

• Lightspeed Venture Partners -- LS9, Mobius Power, Stion, Solazyme, et al.

• Mohr Davidow Ventures -- Nanosolar, Genomatica, Hycrete, ZeaChem, et al.

• Nth Power -- SmartSynch, Soliant, Lion Cells, Nanogram, Terrapass, et al.

• Rockport Capital -- Enphase, Solyndra, Soliant, Powerspan, Tioga Energy, Southwest Windpower, et al.

These savvy investors will continue to invest in cleantech in 2009.

VC Breakfast at Buck's is an ongoing invitation-only event and is a must-have ticket for Greentech VCs and entrepreneurs. Next breakfast meeting in early December.

What's the main problem with trying to exploit waste heat in factories to generate electricity? The high temperatures required, says Bill Olson, vice president of business development at ElectraTherm, which has released a low-temperature waste heat device called the Green Machine. ElectraTherm said it raised $2.6 million today. Low is a relative term. The system requires air that's heated to about 200 to 400 degrees, but that is less than half the temperature required by conventional systems. The Green Machine takes hot air and runs it through a heat exchanger. On the other side of the heat exchanger is a volatile refrigerant. The heat converts the refrigerant from a liquid to a solid -- that creates pressure inside the refrigerant tubes, which is then exploited to turn a turbine. In a sense, you have three technologies in one: waste heat capture, heat exchangers and pressure-driven turbines. ElectraTherm's standard Green Machine can provide 50 kilowatts of power and several can be strung together. Larger units are also available, but the company will not likely cross the 1 megawatt line. After that, other alternatives such as fuel cells begin to undercut its advantages. The Green Machine costs over $100,000 but payback can occur in the first few years.