San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and Stanford scholar Jeffrey Ball recently spoke at the SunPower headquarters in San Jose; Mayor Reed spoke of his “Green Vision” campaign and Ball discussed solar relations between the U.S. and China and the direction that global solar is heading. Randy Zechman, Clean Solar CEO and CALSEIA (California Solar Energy Industries Association) Bay Area chapter president, moderated the event, which included attendees from CALESIA, Clean Solar, Wesco and SunPower.
Mayor Reed’s “Green Vision” campaign is a comprehensive environmental guide for San Jose over the next 15 years. The plan includes 10 goals aimed at creating thousands of new jobs and demonstrating how deploying clean and green technology is fiscally responsible.
San Jose ranks fourth in the nation for the amount of solar installed, according to Mayor Reed. On the local level, Mayor Reed spoke highly of the new PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing program. As of December 2013, the city of San Jose opted to allow green energy and energy conservation upgrades to now be financed through property taxes. This alternative method of financing will allow many more residents of San Jose to afford solar.
Since the plan’s adoption in 2007, the city has become the first to add LED traffic lights and recently added 50 electric vehicles (EV) to the city fleet. Altogether, San Jose is a leader in clean and renewable energy and Mayor Reed sees the next step as having to “figure out how to get others to do it.” San Jose is looking to generate 100% of their power from clean energy by 2020.
Ball, the scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, heads “Avoiding Sunstroke, a project that explores the global solar race and specifically U.S. and China solar relations.
Ball discussed the U.S. and China’s positions in the “solar race” and how each might deploy clean energy capital more efficiently if each one played to their own economic strengths. As part of their study, Stanford invited 20 solar company CEOs from around the world to their campus one year ago. Over the course of a day and a half, the topic at hand was to discuss “What will the globalizing solar industry look like in 2025?” Ball concentrated on the four scenarios for the global solar industry in 2025 which are dependent on low to high barriers and low to high solar penetration.
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