Virginia

There are a lot of venues where clean economy players network and do business. Michael Liebreich’s excellent Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit and Pennwell’s Solar Power-Gen come immediately to mind. But there’s nothing for cleantech like the National Rifle Association (NRA) or NAACP conventions – a place where political candidates and office holders talk to us because it’s a must-attend event.

The fact is that the political aggression aimed at clean economy businesses demands that we grow our leadership options.

We piloted an effort to change that recently with a first-of-its-kind roundtable featuring one U.S. Senate candidate (former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine) and some of the sharpest clean economy minds in the mid-Atlantic region. I don’t know that I’m in the “sharpest clean economy minds” category, so it’s good that I got to play host. Still, something novel happened during this meeting: Leaders from seven clean economy sectors got together with a political candidate who actually wanted to hear from them!