While the Western world slept, India’s next generation of tech entrepreneurs was meeting to discuss the future of cleantech at Startup Saturday, a monthly event. On the verdant campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore campus, nearly 80 people gathered to talked about the challenges and opportunities of meeting India’s future energy needs through innovation, reducing consumption and even converting human motion and waste into electricity. Bangalore has been one of the world’s startup hotspots for much of the past decade, so it’s not as though the West was unaware of the meeting.  Any meeting at 11 am Bangalore time is the middle of America’s sleeping hours.

Although we got to the event late, I still got to see a couple very interesting presentations. Karthee Madasamy of Qualcomm Ventures (whose list of succesful exits includes PayPal) spoke about cleantech companies in which his firm invests, both in the U.S. and Asia. One of the most shocking revelations of Madasamy’s talk was the opportunities available entrepreneurs who can reduce the power consumption of India’s mobile phone towers. Madasamy said that after the Indian Armed Forces and national rail system, celular phone towers are the number three consumers of diesel fuel in the entire country. Only 10 percent of towers are “off-grid.”

In such a massive country, disparate country, I still had a hard time believing a cellular tower network could consume so much energy, but with the number of mobile phone users booming in India, it’s not such a stretch of the imagination. In the process of researching for this article, I found this post, about Indus Towers becoming the first company in the world to install its 100,000th tower. Cellular towers need to be working 24 hours per day, and with sporadic power in rural areas, a diesel generator is the only way to ensure reliable service. That’s a lot of power!

Another presentation was from Elmar Stroomer of Enviu, a media-savvy Dutch company based in Rotterdam. Enviu helped to developed the Sustainable Club, an electricity-generating dance floor that harvests motion energy to power club lights and speakers. Enviu also sponsored a design competion with universities in The Netherlands and India to create a hybrid auto rickshaw that uses less fuel and can burn renewables to cut down on pollution. The goal of the design competition is to outfit 1 million Tuk Tuk’s in 10 years. There are 3 million auto rickshaws in India, according to a New York Times story about Enviu, but from my experiences, it seems like there are that many in Bangalore alone. Regardless, any effort to reduce the amount of carcinogens these essential transport vehicles spew into the atmosphere is a great first step, even if it never becomes a $100 million business.

To my surprise, there were a number of women in the audience, perhaps eight or more, though the ratio was about 10-to-1 in favor of men. The Startup Saturday meeting was highly sophisticated and organized, with loads of help from Head Start! Network volunteers. In India (or Bangalore, at least) it seems everyone wants to be a Web entrepreneur. Interestingly, my roommate, Anu, echoed a statement I heard many times in Brazil, that the culture here does not encourage entrepreneurship becuause it carries the inherent risk of failure. It’s thought of as better for well-educated grads to stick to the safe path and secure a job with an established company than to make their own foray into the untamed realms of small business ownership. In spite of familial caveats, I met a number of bright and excited entrepreneurs at the meet-and-greet that followed the scheduled presentations.

I was barely able to make it out the door before I was accosted by entrepreneurs and handed a number of business cards with impressive titles. (OK, showing up with an SLR camera and announcing myself to the room might have been part of the reason) I chatted with several eager folks involved in cleantech, cleantech consulting, and other web-based business. Two recent graduates I spoke with want to get Bangalore’s 30,000 restaurants online, similar to Seamless Web or CitySearch, though they have only gotten as far as registering a domain. When I pressed them for answers (as a journalist is prone to do), they said they were trying hard to get their friends to help them with the startup instead of taking on jobs. While I was unaware of any comparable monthly startups meeting currently happening in the Brazilian technology scene, I wouldn’t be surprised to see something comparable emerge in the next two-to-three years.

On the whole it was a really great morning. I loved the energy in the room and I was overcome by the beautiful campus. I wish we had more time to roam through the acres of trees and low-slung, concrete block buildings that were unlike any college campus I’ve ever visited. I was told the IITs have even more to offer in terms of scenic beauty, so I can’t wait. Nevertheless, we had to head off into the fray. There were meetings to attend and deals to make. Bangalore never sleeps.