The mayors of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, Calif., have joined with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Bay Area Council, and mobile network-technology provider Better Place to foster the development of plug-in electric vehicles and other elements of green infrastructure.
“This initiative will help to put the Bay Area in the forefront of developing the science, engineering and public-policy innovations that simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lead us to the next economic boom — the clean energy century,” said Dan Kammen, director of the transportation sustainability research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
A Proving Ground
Better Place has already deployed an open model for both fixed-battery and battery-exchange electric vehicles to operate on mobility networks in Israel, Denmark and Australia. The company estimates that a $1 billion investment will be required to fully deploy this model for the Bay Area.
Infrastructure deployments are slated to begin in 2010, with the goal of having electric cars available as mass-market offerings in 2012. This should make the Bay Area a proving ground for how the nation can move to a sustainable mobility model, the plan’s promoters say.
“The green-technology industry is going to boom, and it is our job is to ensure it booms here, in the Bay Area and California,” said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council. “We have the venture capital, we have the research universities, we have management talent, and, perhaps most importantly, we have the visionary elected leaders [to] clear the field for green-tech companies, like Better Place, with progressive public policy.”
Introducing Innovation
The Bay Area plan is in sync with Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recommendation that the nation put millions of plug-in electric vehicles on the road and fuel them with green electricity. The goal is to cut oil use for cars by…