Call for Energy Technology Makers and Thinkers
We've just launched the call for participation for the Energy Innovation Conference. It's a new conference we're putting on this year in the clean tech/alternative energy space. I'll be co-chairing the conference together with Alec Proudfoot from Google.
This all started a couple years ago in a conversation Tim O'Reilly had with Larry Page and Sergey Brin about the power demands of Google's massive data centers. Energy costs are simply staggering: the cost of powering a server for a year is a greater factor in budget planning than the cost of purchasing the server. The need for efficient production and use of energy is not only relevant to current concerns about oil depletion, pollution, and global warming, but also one of the biggest factors in the shape of future computer technology.
It'll be an interesting conference—a cross section of makers, inventors, VCs, university researchers, car manufacturers, petroleum companies, power distribution companies, government departments, and others, all exploring practical solutions to our energy problems.
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I am quite excited to see you doing this. For a few years now, I have been thinking about how to bridge my experience in software entrepreneurship, especially opensource-style collaborative development, with the wide-open energy innovation fields such as biodiesel and solar.
Those worlds are having such a magnetic pull on me that for my next "thing," I've been torn between starting a collaborative software dev company or a venture to accelerate and capitalize on the enormous growth coming in these latent energy fields.
Clearly a needed element in the ecosystem is a conference from a group like O'Reilly to provoke the big-energy status quo and coalesce the smaller innovators lurking around the edges.
Kudos for going this far outside the software and Internet box.
In case you haven't seen it, a recent Charlie Rose on alternative energy hits on the basics and the topics of data centers comes up a few times, with Scott McNeally (SUN), John Doerr (Klieiner, Perkins) & K.R. Sridhar (Bloom Energy).
I wonder if anyone in the alternative energy world would be at all interested in radically energy-efficient transportation technologies. Such as trains, or for that matter streetcars and trolleybuses.
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Lori Sinsley [01.18.07 10:58 AM]
It would be valuable to have speakers of this conference address how they are supporting the energy bill being voted on today by the House that would channel additional dollars to renewable energy projects--and get their take on Congress's pledge to introduce an energy independence bill no later than July Fourth.