An overflow crowd of more than 400 packed the Alternative Energy Summit Friday at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn.

The event drew together students, government officials, entrepreneurs, utility executives, auto executives and activists for keynotes and breakout panels on everything from more efficient appliances to powering the future with novel technologies.

HFCC president Gail Mee kicked off the event by pointing to HFCC's wind, solar and hybrid programs -- and joking that her hybrid "gives me a great place to park."

Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly said that while his city is strugging with budget realities, it's also moving toward greater environmental awareness and energy efficiency.

Among the city's energy projects now are proposals for wind turbines along the Rouge River, an installation of LED street lights now under way, and exploration of turning sewage into power.

Longtime environmental activist Peter Sinclair presented the first keynote, showing pictures and graphs of the Earth's dramatically shrinking polar ice cap and dramatically rising temperatures of late, compared to the baseline since scientists began taking careful readings in the 1880s.

Sinclair praised President Barack Obama's choice of Nobel prize winning scientist Steven Chu as energy secretary, calling him "an actual scientist, far from the typical political appointee." He played video of Chu saying scientists now fear that rising global temperatures will melt the world's permafrost region, releasing massive quantities of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and creating a "runaway effect" of "completely out of control" global warming.

"We cannot go there," Chu said.

Sinclair said Scientific American magazine pronounced in September that "the debate on global warming is over," but noted that "of course that is not true." He told attendees to check out his "Climate Denial Crock of the Week" feature on YouTube.

The latest, said Sinclair: "Of course when you go outside you will find we are in the middle of a winter, and a pretty hard one, so every year when it gets cold we get a bunch of people saying, 'I went outside and it was cold, therefore there is no climate change.'"

He showed a Weather Channel map of the recent cold snap, noting that while temperatures were 20 degrees below normal in the eastern United States, they were 20 degrees above normal in the West.

"What does this slice of conflicting information over 1.6 percent of global surface area tell us about climate? The answer is nothing. This is not climate, this is weather," Sinclair said.

Sinclair showed several maps that "real climatologists" use, finding that global surface temperatures in most recent years are well above the mean of base periods, and are in a steady upward climb.

The next keynoter, Monica Patel of the Ann Arbor Econlogy Center, spoke of the proposed New Energy Future plan, a goal of 25 percent renewable energy by 2025, and energy efficiency efforts to stabilize demand. Like speakers that followed, she said Michigan has huge potential for wind, solar and biomass power generation and that Michigan currently spends $20 billion a year (or $1,700 per capita or 5 percent of state GDP -- to import energy.

"We can increase wages and jobs and keep dollars local with renewables," she said.

The big crowd then jammed into two breakout periods of four sessions each, and enjoyed a renewable energy exhibit fair.

One breakout, featuring Al Fields of DTE Energy, covered the state's potential in renewable energy and how DTE will meet the new state mandate to get 10 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2015. He said President Obama's recovery plan includes billions in reneable energy incentives and research funding. He also noted that renewable energy dominated Gov. Jennifer Granholm's State of the State message, "and this is a good thing -- it's going to push everyone, it's going to push every entrepreneur."

Fields said comprehensive green economic development will include greener, more efficient buildings, a modern and optimized power grid, funding for renewable power and public transportation.

Finally, fields pointed out that a recent University of California study showed that $1 million invested in energy efficiency creates 21.5 jobs, vs. 11 jobs for the same $1 million invested in a conventional power plant.

In another breakout, Mark Cryderman of The Green Panel provided a whirlwind tour of every conceivable renewable energy technology in just 40 minutes.

Cryderman said an aggressive deployment of renewables could employ 40 million Americans by 2030. By then, he said, "all of us are going to go to a community based energy development strategy, and all of us are going ot become energy producers not consumers."

He said fossil fuel prices are steadily increasing, while renewable costs are falling. And, he said, today's environmentalists aren't aging hippies or woolly-headed tree-huggers -- they're CEOs and money managers, because there are potentially big bucks in renewables.

Cryderman predicted the U.S. would soon have either a carbon tax or a carbon trading system, allowing somebody who can't afford to clean up their emissions to buy carbon credits from someone who can. Another critical factor to the industry's future, he said, is a feed-in tariff -- the price a utility has to pay for renewable electricity from private generators.

Cryderman then covered the wind industry -- pointing that the U.S. is way behind at 0.7 percent of power from wind vs. 20 percent for some European countries. Wind turbines are also getting bigger because the wind blows harder at higher altitudes -- and now come in a wild variety of designs, including vertical and horizontal axes. There are also increasingly more designs for small wind for individual homes, including Michigan-made products from Windspire and Swift.

Cryderman then touted his company, Green Panel of Brighton, an installer of solar systems for commercial, industrial and institutioinal buildings (installed cost, around $10 a watt).

Said Cryderman: "You always hear Michigan isn't a good state for solar. Baloney! ... Don't ever let somebody tell you that Michigan is a bad place for solar." He pointed to a 10-megawatt installation in Bavaria, which gets only 70 percent of the sunlight the United States does. And he said solar panels actually work more efficiently where it's cold -- and they love days when it's sunny with a lot of snow on the ground, because a lot of light bounces off the snow."

Cryderman also covered solar concentrator technology, which doesn't require solar panels.

Cryderman said the global solar panel industry is sold out worldwide for more than two years, and said local players Uni-Solar in Auburn Hills and Hemlock Semiconductor in Hemlock are enjoying the benefits. He also mentioned Troy's Octillion Corp., working on turning windows into photovoltaic panels.

Cryderman also covered the biomass industry, where waste from large animal farms is turned into methane with microbes, with the sterilized remaining solids reused as bedding material, and the remaining liquid reused as fertilizer. Companies in Michigan are also working on plasma processes to turn garbage into power.

Cryderman also pointed out the 100,000 megawatts of unused hydroelectric capacity in the U.S., including 300 megawatts in Michigan, and new generation possibilities for moving water in rivers and tidal areas.

He said he was optimistic about the future of the industry because "until recently we didn't have a national energy policy promoting any of this. There wasn't much incentive."

Cryderman also covered petroleum replacements. He included ethanol, and dismissed the notion that producing ethanol takes away food.

"They use feed corn for ethanol, not the corn we eat, and making ethanol just takes the starch out of it which isn't good for the cattle anyway," he said. "What you are left with is distiller's grain, which is a high quality animal feed."

Cryderman said both cellulosic ethanol and butanol could also be gasoline replacements, but both are still too expensive. A lot of scientists, he said, are looking for a 'diva bug' that will, in essence, eat the feedstock and poop the fuel in a single step.

Cryderman said biodiesel could be the real answer for transportation -- especially if produced by algae. He said algae farms could supply enough biodiesel to supply all of America's transportation needs using only 0.2 percent of the country's surface area.

Finally, Cryderman wrapped up his amazingly comprehensive presentation with mentions of the need for a smarter electric grid that allows many small generators to contribute to it, and new battery and capacitor technologies that may finally usher in the era of the electric car.

Other panels covered the need for new products that use less power, behavior change among Americans that use far more power than people in other developed countries, the huge potential in more efficient heating and cooling equipment, wind and solar power installations being conducted by the city of Wyandotte, and the notion of peak oil, that oil supplies will soon begin to decline. (The bottom line: we're not running out of oil, we're just running out of cheap oil."

General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. also showed off various hybrid electric vehicle technologies, and in the day's most "science class" presentation, Michael LoPresto of the HFCC faculty presented "The Greenhouse Effect On Three Planets." In essence, greenhouse gases make it possible for us to have an atmosphere, so you want some. But too many and you get broiling, 900-degree Venus. Too little and you get the near-vacuum and 120-below temperatures of Mars.

The day wrapped up with a government panel, all professing support for clean energy technologies and praising their job creation potential.

However, Dearborn's Mayor O'Reilly noted that many of today's renewable energy ideas have been around since the original oil crisis of 1973. Why haven't they gone into wider use? "Because powerful forces are lined up against them," he said. And they still are.