Gary Kremen is the Chairman and founder of Clean Power Finance (CPF), an interesting solar company. CPF provides a standardized software-as-service (SaaS) tool that lets solar panel installers vastly speed up the sales proposal, rebate processing, system design and lead generation.

Based in occasionally sunny San Francisco, the company aims to enable mass-market adoption of solar with an end-to-end solution that integrates software and financing into the sales process. 

Solar installers work with trucks, ladders, tool belts and roofs. "They hate paperwork," according to Kremen.  So, CPF runs that part of the business for the installer. "We help the installer close the customer,"...

Camille Ricketts of Venture Beat moderated a panel on VC investment in smart grid at the Greenbeat event this morning.

Here are a few notable observations and quotes from the investors on the panel.

Peter Wagner of Accel Partners:

• He's very interested in the issues in the charging and control of EVs.
• He encourages entrepreneurs to find customers who are not the utility – go direct to a consumer.
• Wagner is looking for the company that looks like Opower meets Playfish – bringing social networking plus energy monitoring direct to the consumer
• "Wouldn't be surprised to see Cisco acquire Silver Spring Networks – although Cisco is probably tired of being extorted in the M&A market." (See...

Introduced by Venture Beat's Matt Marshall as "The best known investor in Web 1.0, involved in the founding of Amazon, Netscape, and Google," John Doerr and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, have raised a billion dollars to be channeled into greentech. 

"Greentech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," said Doerr.

Speaking at Venture Beat's inaugural Smart Grid event in San Mateo Calif., he offered his usual thoughts on greentech governent spending, the daughter Mary story ("Your generation created this problem you better fix it.") but he did add some interesting quotes:

• "The internet is a $1 trillion economy. Compare that with the energy business, a $6 trillion...

Always On previewed its December Venture Summit with a breakfast at the offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) this morning where it examined trends in finance and the VC outlook for 2010.

Tony Perkins runs Always On, christened Silicon Valley the "Athens of the Information Age." He asked the panel "if the economic recovery is real?"

Doug Merritt of SAP is in charge of sales to SAP's largest clients  (SAP will have revenues of $14 billion this year) and gave a 30,000-foot view.  "People were so panicked at the end of 2008, they didn't even know how to act," he said. But now "the largest organizations I deal with are actively investing." On the Greentech front, he detailed...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Smart Grid is the energy theme of the moment – hundreds of millions of government funding, billion dollar smart meter deployments, and hundreds of millions in venture capital have drawn the attention of entrepreneurs, utilities, and corporate behemoths like Cisco, Intel, Oracle, ABB and Silver Spring.

And almost 500 of these smart grid cognoscenti converged at the PG&E Auditorium in San Francisco to assess the state of this nascent many-faceted industry at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid event.

Rick Thompson, GTM's fearless smart grid leader, kicked off the event with a review of some recent industry polling. Here a few tidbits:

• Utilities view the benefits...