An earlier post from the MIT Energy Conference completely ignored Sven Thesen of Better Place, who sat on the Global Transportation panel with John Casesa and John Viera.

I've already pimped several times for Building Energy '09, but I want to mention the public forum that is table-setter for it.

I just love shows like the just-completed MIT Energy Conference, for all the opportunities to learn in such a short space, and often directly from people actively studying in the field. Another such opportunity arises this week at NESEA's Building Energy '09.

Here's some orts left over from my walk through the poster session Friday night and the four-plus hours I was able to spend on Saturday...

* d-lite.org is a new website, still being populated but open for visiting, whose purpose is ...

In the previous post, I alluded to US Rep. Jay Inslee, the Washington State Democrat with a very clear focus on energy issues. He said a bunch, both in his luncheon speech and in a generous discussion with journalists afterward. Some highlights:

Cap-and-trade legislation will pass this year. "I can't conceive of sending President Obama to Copenhagen empty-handed." "Coperhagen," of course, refers to the multilateral climate change conference scheduled for Dec. 7-18 in Denmark.

For many, the question isn't "will cars be powered differently in 40 years?" but whichnfuel will dominate — electricity (plug-in, or batteries or both?), biofuels (food-based ethanol, or something more advanced?), or hydrogen? (Really?)

But in a session at the MIT Energy Conference Saturday afternoon, analyst John Casesa, a one-time GM employee who spent 17 years on Wall Street before opening his own consultancy, says he doesn't envision much change:

In general and as one might expect, discussions at the MIT Energy Conference this weekend were energetic and forward-thinking, which made a comment by Bernard Neenan of the Electric Power Research Institute (none of their links were working yesterday) stand out:

This is no doubt a post about a word guy lashing out, unfairly even, at a bunch of very educated scientists, some of whom grew up speaking a language other than English, but hey, I'm as human (read: shallow) as the next guy, so why not....

Building Energy '09 is next week, but online registration ends tomorrow. The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, which runs the show, is offering an enrollment deal: With six, you get discount. If you shared the savings, it would amount to 18 percent off for each of you, which is decent.

No, the subject isn't cold drinks made with evaporated cane juice, organic yogurt, and shavings of ice from distilled water. EcoShakes are an artificial shingle made from wood chips and recycled PVC piping that were shown at GreenBuild.

I thought they looked awful.

Granted, I was seeing them at fairly close range under artificial light, and they might look a lot better espied from street level on a typical day in the suburbs. But in those conditions, they looked as fake as fake could be.

An interesting product I came across at GreenBuild was the home-control system being offered by Verve Livings Systems. The tech-candy for me is their wall switches, which convert the energy you use to flip the switch into a pulse that sends the instruction to a a central controller, dousing or dimming the light in question, or performing more complicated routines if programmed that way.