Mississippi State University Sustainable Energy Research Center (SERC) and the Mississippi Biomass Renewable Energy Council (MBREC) are partnering this year for the inaugural Southeast Biofuels and Renewable Energy Conference, to be held August 8 – 9, 2012 at the Marriott Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. With over 15 years of combined conference experience for the two groups, this event promises to be an important occasion for the discussion and dissemination of information related to the areas of biofuels and renewable energy that will appeal to a wide audience.

Conference presentations will be organized into five separate focus areas, or clusters, where each cluster will include speakers from academia, industry, and government.  The emphasis for the clusters will be to highlight current technology, progress toward commercialization, and government policies and priorities for funding. The event provides an exceptional educational and networking opportunity for suppliers, producers, consumers, researchers, and students.  READ MORE

 

Pre-Conference Workshop (separate registration):

Renewable Energy Venture Development Academy

Course Presenter: Dr. Sumesh Arora
Strategic Biomass Solutions™ • Mississippi Technology Alliance
Course Description (overview, purpose and objectives)

This course will provide a comprehensive set of tools and methodologies to screen, develop, or coach innovation-based renewable energy ventures. The course walks the participants through an overview of the energy market drivers followed by the rigorous process of developing a technology based venture. The course is based around a set of tools called VentureCapitalTools® designed to assist entrepreneurs in understanding the requirements of an investor-ready deal. The tools include analysis of the technical, market, & financial validation of a deal from the pure idea stage to a mature venture.
The course allows an entrepreneur to assess their risk in five areas: execution, product, market, management and finance. Used with hundreds of entrepreneurial clients, the tools have proven to be able to simplify and prioritize the steps toward success for these ventures. The tools have also been used as an evaluation tool and due-diligence checklist for economic developers and investors who have sought this training to screen potentially viable projects or coach startup ventures in their respective geographical areas. While individual investors and economic developers find the format and criteria of these web-based tools useful as an effective due-diligence method, energy entrepreneurs and project developers using the tools can be assured of common language and expectations regarding valuation as well as technical and market validation. Additionally, the attendees are exposed to the Butterfly Model© of interorganizational collaboration which provides a multi-stakeholder framework to deploy successful renewable energy and emerging technology projects.

The participants will learn about the venture development process as you walk through the following phases of the venture/project development:
• Concept phase
• Development phase
• Commercialization phase

And learn to identify risk in five key areas of the venture development and challenges and opportunities as the relate to the renewable energy markets:
• Product/technical risk
• Market risk
• Finance risk
• Management risk
• Execution risk

A final learning objective is a discussion about the need for private-public collaboration and partnerships as you deploy the next generation of renewable energy technologies. This course is open to economic developers: local, regional and those representing utility companies who are working with renewable energy companies to deploy such projects as well as to all entrepreneurs and project developers who are trying to implement renewable energy projects or starting new ventures in the rapidly changing market segment. Economic developers will learn what to look for in good renewable energy projects and potential investors will also benefit from this information. All participants will receive comprehensive course materials as take-aways from the workshop and will have the ability to consult with the instructor at no-charge for a period of six months after successful completion of the course.  READ MORE