Venture visionary has deep roots in cleantech: Ira Ehrenpreis of Technology Partners will serve as keynote speaker at awards celebration.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: CLEANTECH

How fitting it is that the first Colorado Cleantech Awards Celebration should be addressed by the man at the summit of venture capital investment in the industry.

Ira Ehrenpreis, general partner with Palo Alto-based Technology Partners, transformed cleantech. He shattered the lens through which VC and later other investors saw the industry largely through his fund's investments in cleantech, when it was still called "alternative energy."

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Along the way Ehrenpreis' breakthroughs have been recognized fittingly by his service of seven consecutive years as chairman of the Clean-Tech Investor Summit.

Over on the VC side, he serves on the boards of both the National Venture Capital Association and the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, and as co-chairman of both the VCNetwork and the Young Venture Capital Association.

Those are all on Ehrenpreis' VC side. On the cleantech industry side, his fund's gleaming portfolio boasts investments in leading-edge companies long before they had appeared on other VC's desktop dashboards.

One prescient-seeming investment is Loveland-based Abound Solar, which was founded on ideas developed at Colorado State University. Just before this Independence Day, President Obama announced the federal stimulus program would afford Abound a $400 million loan guarantee to support its manufacturing expansion.

What's happening in the cleantech industry as we reach the end of 2010? Ehrenpreis' Oct. 19 keynote address at the Denver Marriott, "The State of the Cleantech Industry," promises to bring the global view down to Earth.

To put that another way, with no sweeping federal energy or climate policy or legal change on the horizon, and continuing tight financial markets, why bet on cleantech? And will it continue to be a good bet for Colorado?

His response: Forget the critics. Forget the naysayers. Cleantech is being driven by forces that never existed before, so forget the comparisons to other eras when the industry faltered.

"The question people always ask me to talk about is, how did this go from a relatively niche sector, a small sector that only captured a very small percentage of venture capital dollars, to becoming the fastest-growing area of the venture asset class?" Ehrenpreis says.

His argument in part is that the key drivers that have led to this transformation in the sector are the same ones that could power it through current obstacles.

Cleantech has moved from obscurity to the...