Alex and I recently attended the Machine Learning for Sustainability workshop at the NIPS 2011 conference:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/kolter/mlsust11/doku.php?id=introduction
I was presenting my work on energy disaggregation and Alex was giving an invited talk on the smart grid. Both talks generated quite a bit of interest for the work we all do in ORCHID, so anyone working on sustainability issues might be interested to take a look at the workshop. The website lists the invited talks and also the accepted papers. The next workshop will be help at NIPS 2012 in December.