Competition heated up to attract investors wanting to fund clean energy ideas at a three-day conference that kicked off in Austin Monday.

Twenty companies pitched their ideas at the Clean Energy Venture Summit to venture capital firms, and experts compared notes.

The idea was to kick-start good ideas, so they could gain a foothold in the marketplace.

At mid-afternoon, a big bus pulled up outside City Hall.

On board were people with big pocketbooks and others with big ideas.

As the visitors crossed the City Hall quadrangle, they passed beneath an energy source that is getting more affordable all the time.

“Even here in Austin we have a company called, Heliovolt, which is part of the next generation of solar, which is a thin film technology, which will bring down the cost of solar significantly,” said Clean Energy Venture Summit organizer Joel Serface.

If you listen carefully to that kind of talk, it’s full of future-tense verbs: will be, going to be, that kind of thing.

When will things such as electric cars become everyday occurrences, here and now?

“When some of them get funded and whenever they get, you know, more economies of scale to be able to allow everybody to have them there in their back pocket,” Serface said.

In other words, tomorrow will get here when it gets here.

In the meantime, for those who are betting their futures and fortunes on all this, it’s important to keep talking about it, and when tomorrow finally does arrive, we’ll be ready.

“So that when they do come on the shelf and there are those choices, that people can make those choices that are going to be better for their pocketbook,” Serface said. “They’re going to be better for the environment and can help keep us from having to go build, you know, coal-fired power plants and things of that nature.”

The Clean Energy Venture Summit will run through Wednesday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Barton Springs Drive.

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