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Solar energy conference planned

Pray for sunshine — the nation’s biggest solar energy conference is coming to town.

Plans for Solar 2009, the May 11-16 annual convention of the American Solar Energy Society, were announced Wednesday at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

“Why not solar in Buffalo? If it works here, it will work anywhere,” said Walter Simpson, co-chairman of the Western New York Sustainable Energy Association and member of the local organizing committee for the conference.

The event is expected to draw 1,500 delegates from around the nation and the world, and will end with a “public day” that is expected to attract thousands more people to solar-themed exhibits and projects in and around the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center.

Though the conference will mainly be a skull session for representatives from the industrial and academic fields involved in solar energy, they will explore other technologies and products that will be needed to achieve “a renewable-energy future,” said Dennis A. Andrejko, a University at Buffalo associate professor of architecture and member of the energy summit’s national organizing committee.

For its part, the host Buffalo Niagara region will attempt to show that it is leading the way to that future through the growth of energy-related companies, products and public programs.

It will be “a tremendous opportunity” for the region to shed its image as a backwater of the “Gloom Belt,” Andrejko said.

The event will move Buffalo from “geek to chic,” said Laurie Dann of the conference’s local organizing committee. “Really, green is chic,” she said.

“A new day is dawning for clean renewable energy production, and Buffalo Niagara is at the center just as we were at the turn of the last century,” when city streets were lit with electricity generated at Niagara Falls, said State Sen. Antoine M. Thompson, D-Buffalo, chairman of the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee.

Thompson plans to set the stage for the conference with a Green Business Expo May 9-16 in Main Place Mall near the convention center. More than 75 businesses will exhibit during the Green Week expo.

Buffalo’s reputation for cold and clouds actually worked to its advantage in persuading the 10,000-member society to come here, Simpson said, because that image helped make this seem like the ideal proving ground.

The organizing committee hardly mentioned that Buffalo weather is milder than the rest of the world thinks—averaging more sunlight than many Sun Belt cities, including Atlanta and Charlotte.

tbuckham@buffnews.com