City Profiles / Large Cities / San José, CA

San José, California

San José's Clean Tech strategy aims to get progressive businesses to move to the city, which Mayor Chuck Reed calls "fertile ground for new technologies." With an established workforce of engineers, venture capitalists and high-tech innovators, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley" is championing a cleantech revolution. Tesla Motors, electric-car maker and creator of the coveted electric Tesla Roadster, recently decided to relocate their green headquarters to San José in the summer of 2009, which will create about 1,000 jobs for the residents. And to make electric car ownership more practical, San José is developing the infrastructure for them, including plug-in charging stations and battery-swapping, which Mayor Reed says will be a model for other U.S. cities.

San José is also a capital of solar energy. The city hosts numerous large solar manufacturers including Nanosolar, Solopower and SunPower. Partly because of this, Underwriters Laboratory opened the world's largest testing facility for solar products in San José in August 2008, and it already has plans for expansion. By luring cleantech companies to the city, San José has more than doubled the number of its jobs in the green sector since October 2007.

Currently, the city diverts an impressive 62 percent of their waste to recycling. For the future: They are working to become a zero-waste city, and their Green Vision includes a plan to successfully recycle 100 percent of water captured in wastewater treatment plants for beneficial reuse in landscaping, cooling towers and eventually potable purposes within the next 15 years. The rigorous plan also calls for 25,000 clean-tech jobs, reduced per capita energy consumption by 50 percent, and for 100 percent of the city's electricity to come from clean, renewable power.

Over three-quarters of the housing built in San José since 2000 has been for multifamily use, reflecting smart-growth planning principles. Utility bills are fairly low in San José due to a moderate climate and a history of conservation awareness efforts—and may soon be getting even lower—and the unemployment rate is small. If all goes according to plan, San José may prove to be a leading example in the success of a green economy for the rest of the nation.