Last week, I attended the AlwaysOn “Going Green” event at Cavallo Point (the former Fort Baker, scenically situated just under the Golden Gate Bridge in the Marin headlands). Going Green is an up-and-coming event in the fall circuit – this is the third year it has been held (an East Coast version started last year) and the third time I have attended.

AlwaysOn, though probably not a household name yet (despite its desperate desire to become one), is the multi-headed social media monster created by Tony Perkins of Red Herring fame. The first Going Green two years ago pointed the full arsenal of late-90’s internet hype at the cleantech sector to occasionally laughable effect… flashing lights and NBA style pre-game intros for an 8 am waste water treatment panel, anyone? Fortunately, things have toned down a bit since then (although the real time, on-screen “blogger crawl” – random musings from the worldwide web video audience -- remains a personal pet peeve). Overall, the content of the event outweighs any remaining weaknesses of the format.

So what is the state of cleantech?

The mood among the entrepreneurs in evidence seemed cautiously upbeat – not the unrestrained boosterism of a couple years ago, but a visitor from outside Silicon Valley might find the sector to be in relative good health, at least as compared to the rest of the economy.

Panels this year featured the usual who’s who of cleantech VCs and CEOs. This year’s keynotes showed an increasing interest in infrastructure -- senior execs from CH2M Hill, Bechtel, and the Honorable Chuck Reed, Mayor of San Jose (straying a bit far North to make his economic development pitch to attract cleantech businesses; presumably he made the hour-plus drive in one of his City’s many plug-in Prii). I won’t attempt to provide a blow by blow rehash, but for anyone interested in the content, http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/33469" TARGET="_blank">full web video archive is available.

While there was lots of high flying future think, particularly on the materials science and biotech sessions, for my money, the best gauge of current market sentiment came from the more down-to-earth CEOs in smart grid and solar. The mood on the solar panel, in particular (including CEOs of Ausra, Cool Earth, Solexant, and the CTO of Sun Edison) was decidedly downbeat – lack of project finance, the crash in silicon prices, and the difficulty of permitting utility scale facilities all came up as significant speed bumps to the solar industry’s ambitious growth agenda.

On the smart… excuse me “omniscient” grid panel (a little Internet hype seeps through even in the panel titles), the CEOs of Tendril, eMeter, ICE Energy, and On-Ramp Wireless reported a different bottleneck. Despite the windfall of the stimulus bringing new interest and customers to the sector, the CEOs reported that so far they have seen almost a reverse of the intended effect -- the utilities are all paralyzed, waiting for the DOE to announce the awards for the $4.5 Billion of stimulus money for smart grid deployments. As one CEO put it frankly, no utility executive wants to have his feet held to the fire by a regulator for funding a major project now, on the ratepayer dime, rather than waiting a few more months to see if the feds will pick up part of the tab.

From the entrepreneur fast pitch sessions (run in parallel to the main panel show in a separate smaller room), a couple of observations stick out. First of all, whatever the outward appearances, Going Green has never been a “deal flow” driven show where VCs sniff out new investment opportunities – in point of fact, VCs were little in evidence anywhere outside of those featured on a couple of panels. The quality of companies on display was fairly weak, which is probably a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy – in my experience, the best companies and CEOs have no trouble getting a direct audience with top tier VC firms, leaving only the weaker/earlier stage/less experienced to do conference presentations in the vain hope of catching a future funder’s eye. Among the slim pickings, I was intrigued by a couple of the European entries this year – Novacem (a new concrete replacement play) and Yoga IB (an Estonian building automation company).

Upcoming events on the cleantech calendar

Next week, I’ll be attending West Coast Green at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center – http://www.westcoastgreen.com/ -- a six track conference that’s heavy on green building and includes a large trade show floor. Then it’s off to Anaheim for Solar Power International at the end of October -- the big daddy of solar events. Rumor has it Sharp has rented out Disneyland for an evening party… can a solar/LED electric light parade be far behind?

Matt Lecar is a veteran energy industry expert with 18 years in utilities, international business development, cleantech venture capital, and consulting. Most recently, he served as Fund Manager for the CalCEF Angel Fund, a first-in-kind seed stage fund focused exclusively on clean energy markets. This article is part of a series called “View from the Poletop” – broad perspectives on the current state of markets in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and smart grid markets.