On February 19 – 20, hundreds of people came together in Chapel Hill to talk about clean tech at the aptly named NC Clean Tech Summit. In its second year, the Summit seeks to bring together “professionals in business, policy and academia from across the state for two days of problem-solving and planning to foster leadership and growth in North Carolina’s Clean Tech industry.”
That sounds pretty great, right? Wait, you might be asking yourself, what exactly is clean tech? That’s a great question.
Last year, Steve Wall, a Policy Research Associate with the UNC Institute for the Environment, wrote about the first Clean Tech Summit and provided this excellent definition of clean tech:
“Clean tech” is a term that encompasses a wide range of industries from clean energy to water efficiency to waste reduction. Clean tech broadly refers to the more efficient use of natural resources in products, services, and processes. These industries share a business approach of a competitive return on investment and the offering of services or products that address energy and environmental challenges.
Renewable energy. Energy efficiency. Water management. Integrating technologies to use our energy sources in smarter ways. These are just some of the topics that were touched on last month at The Friday Center. You can see all the topics and speakers from the Summit here.
Besides lining up some of the most cutting edge presenters and freshest topics in clean tech, the NC Clean Tech Summit organizers also do a fantastic job in bringing the conference online, particularly through Twitter. Since we couldn’t be there in person this year, we followed along using the #NCCTS15 hashtag.
So, we wanted to share with you some of the highlights from this year’s Clean Tech Summit from the very people who were there, tweeting away. If you went, let us know! We would love to hear more about how you plan on incorporating the knowledge you took away into your work to continue to push North Carolina on the national stage as a leader of clean energy.
Enjoy the Storify below – a visual collection of tweets, photos, and highlights from the 2015 NC Clean Tech Conference! Mark your calendars now for iteration number three coming in February 2016.
