On a recent trip down to Silicon Valley from San Francisco, I got a chance to sit down for an extended discussion with Brian Hinman. He is one of a growing number of A-list venture capitalists who have jumped the fence from IT into alternative energy and greentech ventures. Oak Investment Partners is one of the most venerable venture capital firms in the country, and Hinman is the firm's point man on greentech. He's the kind of guy that you have to listen to based on his track record -- co-founder of a two successful companies and a former CEO of a third. Hinman founded Picturetel, which was later acquired by telecom equipment company PolyCom (PLCM). Hinman then founded 2Wire, another telecom equipment company that ended up with revenues greater than $300 million.

So this is a guy with no Internet fluff in his pillow. Hinman is a hard-core engineer with 12 patents to his name. Hinman also loves to talk ideas about greentech innovations and sits on the boards of seven different Oak greentech portfolio companies. He has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the industry. Our talk ranged widely, so I've edited heavily. Here are some brief excerpts from our conversation:

As the federal government hands out billions of dollars to subsidize, push, prod and canoodle companies into jump-starting a green revolution in the U.S., one segment of the economy has been more or less left out. That would be farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has gotten only a few tens of millions of dollars to underwrite grants and programs to promote rural alternative energy projects.

Still, acccording to the AP, the ranks of farmers who are producing their own power is increasing. But what's even more striking is how few now do so, considering the nature of their business and their access to precious energy commodities such as large acreage needed for solar panels and steady winds needed for wind-power generation. According to U.S. government figures collected in 2007, just over 1 percent of the 2 million U.S. farms are producing their own electricity, reported Cleantech.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will focus Tuesday on green projects and the new jobs they will create as they visit a new solar energy center and a former GM plant that will be retooled to produce electric vehicles. They will also announce $3.4 billion in government grants to improve the efficiency of the nation's electrical transmission network. All three projects are examples of how the administration plans to create or save tens of thousands of jobs using money from the stimulus package.

Obama starts his day at Florida Power and Light's Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Fla., one of three solar projects under way in Florida that will create 5,000 jobs. Obama pledged $467 million from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to expand and accelerate the development and use of solar energy. The Next Generation Solar Energy Center will generate enough power for 3,000 homes when completed. Obama will also highlight new technologies that will allow this solar energy to be transmitted to locations with higher demand.

Rooftop solar power is the next item on the menu for Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG).

The popular burrito chain announced today it had plans to install solar panels atop 75 restaurants during the next 12 months. Collectively, the panels will produce 500 kilowatt hours of electricity. That will make Denver-based Chipotle the largest direct producer of solar power in the restaurant business, according to the company's press release and an article in Environmental Leader.

Steve Jurvetson is the youthful partner at famed venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He is among the most respected VCs in Silicon Valley, with a string of successful investments under his belt, including Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft, MSFT) and Interwoven (IPO, then acquired by Autonomy), among others. He has made billions of dollars for investors and is reputed to be among the smartest VCs in the world. He got his electrical engineering degree from Stanford in a mere 2.5 years, graduating No. 1 in his class.

He designed communications chips for HP, worked in marketing for Apple (AAPL) and NeXT, and served at the elite consulting group Bain & Company. Like many VC peers, he jumped from IT into greentech. Jurvetson currently sits on the boards of several hot cleantech startups, including Tesla Motors and Synthetic Genomics, which is why I recently buttonholed him at a conference for a Q&A. Jurvetson suggested I join him for lunch. I didn't realize lunch meant sitting in on an impromptu pitch session from a fledgling company, providing a fascinating, first-hand view of how the mind of one of the world's greatest VCs works in real time.

Vinod Khosla is considered the leading cleantech investor in the world today but many of his peers still wish he would shut up. A founder of computer company Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and former general partner at venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vinod Khosla piled into the green investment space more than five years ago and was an early believer.

He has since become a vocal cheerleader for the sector. On September 1, he announced that he had raised a whopping $1 billion for investments in a new venture capital fund, Khosla Ventures, to be focused on green technologies. Prominent backers including CalPers, the powerful and enormous public workers pension fund for California. But along the way Khosla has quietly alienated many in the venture capital green investment community with his brash public statements at big conferences. "What is he bashing this week?" quipped one green technology consultant when Khosla's name came up in conversation at the recently concluded AlwaysOn Going Green Conference in Sausalito, California.

The biofuels market is in a funk. Corn-based ethanol has become an environmental pariah to activists and an economic lodestone to people in favor of energy independence. Plant-based biofuel companies seeking to harvest oils from green matter have struggled to reach economies of scale and have faced political headwinds in Europe. And biofuels based on rendering animal and food waste have run into rough waters.

Alone among the biofuels remains algae, a prolific reproducer that is the current great hope among venture capitalists and other investors.

If conventional wisdom mattered, super venture capitalist Vinod Khosla could not have picked a worse time to launch a massive venture capital fund focused on extremely risky green technology investments. Yet Khosla, a VC legend in Silicon Valley, not only pulled it off but ended up money away, according to the New York Times.

In fact, many of Khosla's investors are gun-shy state pension funds, still smarting from nasty losses suffered in venture capital and private equity placements that went horribly wrong in the economic meltdown of the past two years.

Larger transactions and increased investor confidence pushed clean technology ("cleantech") venture capital investments higher in the second quarter of 2009. Investments in companies dealing with energy efficiency and solar power led the overall market, which surged 73 percent quarter-over-quarter. A study by Ernst & Young, with data from Dow Jones VentureSource, suggests a sharp up-tick in cleantech venture capital.

Venture capital investment in cleantech companies hit $572 million last quarter. Forty-eight financing rounds were completed, representing a 100 percent increase in quarter-over-quarter transaction count. Compared to the second quarter of 2008, which was the second best cleantech quarter for venture capital investment, capital put to work fell 59 percent, with the number of transactions down 16 percent.

China may be the biggest green technology and clean energy equipment market in the world. But don't expect the Chinese government to let any foreign companies get a foothold in the Middle Kingdom's nascent green tech sector.

That's the message we get from a thoroughly researched New York Times piece titled "China Builds High Wall to Guard Energy Industry," which quotes high placed executives from General Electric (GE), Siemens (SI), and other companies. My only question is -- are they really surprised this is happening? China has long sought to build stiff barriers to competition in areas it considers essential to its economic future, a model previously employed by Korea and Japan.

We've all heard about the promise of green technology in regards to carbon emissions, the ozone layer and polar bears up on the ice cap. But, it could also save your portfolio. Recent private investment activity in this sector stands out in a depressed marketplace, suggesting that there is considerable upside potential for early investors, not to mention a future for the sector that will later be available to the public.

Four new clean technology deals were recently announced signaling that early stage private investment trend is gaining steam. Some transactions bring new participants to the table, while others reflect the commitment of repeat investments. Investment in clean technologies is robust -- a rare breed in today's market -- and the amounts are far from trivial. Further, they span all stages, from angel financing through private investment in public equity.