City Profiles / Large Cities / Sacramento, CA

Sacramento, California

As the capital of California, a state with demanding environmental requirements, Sacramento works to lead by example in the state's push to lower energy emissions, conserve resources and create healthier urban environments. It addresses this with its Sustainability Master Plan and progressive publicly owned utility—Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).

SMUD uses geothermal energy, hydropower and solar power for electricity, offering a 100 percent clean and renewable power option for a few more dollars a month than its conventional power plan, and the city reports that the region has comparatively low electricity bills. For residents interested in solar power, OurGreenCommunity.org is a community website powered by SMUD that features a map of all the solar installations in the city identified as residential, commercial, municipal or utility, and can provide the solar potential of any address in the city, including its cost and carbon savings. SMUD also offers free shade trees to residents to create passive cooling in homes and increase the canopy cover in the city.

Currently suffering from urban sprawl and transportation congestion, Sacramento is predicted to grow by 65 percent by 2035, exacerbating these problems. Already, transportation accounts for 60 percent of the region's emissions, which suffers from poor air quality exacerbated by hot summers. To combat these ills, the city's Sustainability Master Plan and Metropolitan Transportation Plan for 2035 (MTP2035), along with collaborative regional efforts from the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, detail mixed-use development, improved transit and air quality, and compact growth.

About 84 percent of city residents live within walking distance of a transit station or bus stop, and the MTP2035 plan—developed over two years with public input from more than 8,000 individuals—calls for a $14.3 billion investment in transit and $1.4 billion in pedestrian and bicycle projects. In November 2008, California voted to build a high-speed rail system connecting all the state's major cities, including Sacramento on the northern end. The system will create jobs and, with trains that run at 220 miles per hour, divert large numbers of people from intercity air and car travel. It will cost less than half as much as expanding highways and airports for the same capacity, will cost passengers less than flying or driving, and use one-third of the energy of an airplane and one-fifth of that of a car for the same trip.