Yesterday I hopped down to LA for the first day of WINDPOWER 2007, the wind energy industry’s annual conference and trade show. It’s not an event that will make a lot of waves in the media (despite high-profile speakers), but I wanted to provide GO readers with an inside look at how the wind industry sees itself and what that means for the rest of us. However, it’s such a huge event that even one day’s coverage demands multiple posts. I apologize for not getting part one up earlier, but here it is.

EcoGeek’s Ransom Riggs sat next to me at the morning press briefing featuring Sen. Tom Daschle, head of conference sponsor AWEA, Randall Swisher, and other energy big-wigs. Ransom's writeup provides a good overview of conclusions coming out of the briefing and the message of the conference in general, so we asked the EcoGeek if we could feature Ransom’s overview in addition to my thoughts and analysis.

Looking down on the showroom from the press room, the wind industry's largest gathering was a sight to behold. Whereas Greenfest Chicago called the ‘green’ world together to speak to tens of thousands of consumers, WINDPOWER 2007 has brought 7,000 wind energy professionals to a showroom about the same size, with the extra space filled by glitzy, expensive (and effective) marketing displays.

Similarly, WINDPOWER replaces Greenfest’s impassioned speeches with multiple themed tracks of seminars and panels for the various types of stakeholders at the event. I hopped around to as many sessions as I could, and every speaker I heard had a particular expert perspective on wind power's potential to help mitigate and solve many of the problems facing our present and future. I'll save the real analytical meat for part 2 of my coverage, but for now, some highlights:

• acclaimed scientists picked apart myths and bogeymen about using and expanding wind energy;
• engineers beamed at new technologies that are ready to make a huge difference in energy production given continued investment growth and economies of scale;
• regulators warned that transmission capacity is emerging as a bottleneck for harnessing the best and most plentiful wind resources, although there remains lots of wind that can be exploited with today’s transmission infrastructure;
• every question about how best to bring wind power to scale (AWEA would like to see 300GW of capacity installed by 2020) had a single answer: stable, supportive long-term government policies that will signal investors that the opportunity profit from wind energy is here to stay.

Until I have time to tackle each of these points and others in greater depth over the next few days, GO and EcoGeek aren’t the only online media outlets providing coverage of the happenings at WINDPOWER 2007. Renewable Energy Access definitely wins the award for most frequent updates from the conference. In keeping with REA’s industry professional focus, most of their updates look like press releases from one of the 400+ exhibitors, but there’s some good, meaty info in their coverage nonetheless. Also, my buddy Summer Bowen of BTC Elements (who kindly chauffered me around at the last event I attended in LA, Phoenix Motorcar’s SUT launch) covered the event for Treehugger (link to come). Lastly, I can’t forget NewEnergyNews. If I’m forgetting any bloggers who are providing their take on the action, or if any of you at home have feelings about wind power or policy you’d like to share, leave a comment below.

If you have been following politics on TV since last November, there’s a good chance you’ve watched Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) using an imaginary middle-class family as a rhetorical device to unify the Democratic message around this crucial target market. (note: if you object to comparing politics to marketing, keep in mind that Republicans have been using micro-niche issue targeting and other staple techniques from the marketing world for years, with great success)

At Green Options, when we build services and features, we hold ourselves to a similar standard: can my mother use this? Of course, I don’t expect my mom to get linked to our site through Digg and then add our RSS feed to her news aggregator (indeed, she’s never heard of Netvibes), but we try to make sure that all of the information we provide is accessible to not only the less green-savvy, but the less tech-savvy as well. At the same time, we do our best to make sure those users have the tools to understand terms like RSS and Web 2.0.

In the end, we know that all of the resources we provide won’t be right for all users, but we are confident that there is something useful or interesting for practically everyone, and we trust our users to decide for themselves what features and information they find useful.

Contrast our market-making philosophy with the multi-level marketing (MLM) approach taken by Citizenrē. Instead of giving users the resources to make their own energy and lifestyle choices through open information, independent ‘Ecopreneurs’ claim to provide a one size fits all solution: wait on buying solar panels today to get on a waitlist for renting them a few years down the road.

For those of us trying to build green markets now (especially solar energy), this pitch immediately raises two major concerns: lost consumer confidence in the solar industry if promises go undelivered, and the pre-empting of legitimate projects for solar installers by overzealous Citizenrē reps.

Over-hyped grand visions of a sudden MLM-based energy revolution are harmful at worst and apparently infeasible at best. The vast majority of ‘green collar’ professionals who spend their time in the details of building their industries understand that transforming our energy economy is (and will continue to be) a painstaking process.

I’m sorry to say that multi-level marketing will not be the hero of this story, at least not without having proven deliverables in place before initiating such a campaign. I may come to eat my words: it is possible that Citizenrē is just using MLM to prove consumer demand, and the word is out that the company will announce its investors and factory location a mere two weeks from now. But if I do, I’ll eat them happily, because it will mean that at least someone got through to the world.

While the rest of the solar industry obviously shares in the hope that (for example) solar energy’s market share will reach 25% by 2025, unsupported promises and unbridled enthusiasm are obviously not enough to get us there. Development is more likely to be accelerated by unexpected climactic, economic, or political events than by down-line residual sales commissions. Indeed, in their ebullience, Citizenrē executives appear not to take into account the complexities of implementing such a huge, vertically-integrated business plan—but at least they have a vision.

I was taught that a company’s vision statement should be defined by an ultimate, unachievable goal. Given the company’s robust projections and …interesting (for lack of a more judgmental word) ‘pyramarkting’ choices, Citizenrē’s goals certainly appear to be just that: unachievable.

But that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. One secretive company might not be able to do it, but a sea change in public perceptions certainly could. Grand visions of transformative change can and will spur innovative solutions, but only if we can help green markets grow in honest and transparent ways, and keep intact the trust of a cautious public.