A second Industrial Revolution, that is. I hear that often at renewable energy conferences, and this week is no different. I’m at the two-day Advanced Energy New York 2009 conference on Long Island, N.Y. And there’s quite a crowd here to man the barricades.

 

David Brancaccio, senior editor for NOW on PBS set the stage in the opening session when he discussed shows on the energy landscapes in Denmark and the Maldives. In Denmark, “At the level of the mundane and at the level of the exotic are doing some really interesting things,” he said. Everything from putting meters at eye level to monitor energy use easily, to planning for a conversion within two years to an electric fleet of cars powered by battery-stored, wind-generated electricity. On the other hand, the Maldives is a “front-line state” at climate risk due to rising sea levels, at the same elevation as Manhattan. He quoted its president as say, “We need to talk about climate change in terms of interesting, innovative things we can proactively do, not in terms of terrifying prohibition lists of things we can no longer do.”

 

In that regard, Nay Htun, a Stony Brook University professor and 25-year veteran of the United Nations where one of his titles was undersecretary of the environment program, pointed out that more wind power was installed in the past two years than in the previous 20. And policies that promote that means green jobs would proliferate.

 

New York policy mirrors that. As the New York State energy commissioner in the early 1990s, Frank Murray remembers overseeing its research arm with its $35 million budget. In his second tenure with the state, now as the president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the budget of $600 million just shows the changing energy landscape here, even nationally and worldwide.

 

The same could be said, in an accelerated time frame, about the conference. Founded a couple years ago at the nearby Stony Brook University campus, the conference now drew an overflow crowd of about 1,000 with 192 speakers to discuss renewable energy, smart grid and energy efficiency. I’ll spend the next couple days blogging about the event and there will doubtless be dozens of articles about the companies, people and technologies seen here that are doing exciting things that are reshaping the energy landscape nationally.