San Francisco's green plans

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>> We want to be the electrical vehicle capital in the world. We're already doing more on hybrids; we're already going to be doing more because of the commitment of Chevy Volt and others on plug-in hybrids the new phase, the next technology, the game changer will be getting everything on the electrical grid and then making sure our source of where that energy is coming from in terms of that electricity is more sustainable and benign. This is an area where information technology; this is an area where technology generally needs to take shape and needs to keep pace in order us for it to achieve our very ambitious goals. We already have a great demonstration project we just put in 2 weeks ago in front of City Hall if you're ever driving by you'll see that a Green demonstration we're actually doing hybrids and hydrogen and CNG's as well as plug-in electrics sort of the panoply the menu. And as you know Shi's ideas you ultimately Obama just picked us up last week when he was down in Pomona and referenced some of our work. The whole idea is that you go into instead of a gas station you go into an electric charging station you flip out the battery in less time it takes then to fill up a tank of gas. All of sudden you dealt with the limitation on range issue by having, again, that ubiquitous connection to these charging stations or switching stations throughout an entire region thus limiting the one argument seems to be remaining around electric vehicles and that's range beyond that the technology is caught up and the battery operations are becoming much more efficient and more effective. Final 2 points, I'd be remiss, I can't help myself. You asked a politician to start what do you expect? Just a few miles away on Ocean Beach about 5 miles off the coast on February 27th of this year we asked after years and years of study -- finally, another reason to want to run for Governor is to deal with the regulation associated with the Green Tech space which to me it should be the first place we reform if we're serious and committed. But to do a wave project off Ocean Beach it'd be the first commercial wave project of its kind. We believe as much as 100 megawatts can be produced we're gonna start with a project up to 30 megawatts in our round 1 but up to 100 at peak just this one demonstration project. I was just down in Santa Barbara and I was at a Town Hall and we looked outside and I counted 9 offshore oil drilling platforms, which, you know, God forbid if they were up here I'd be even more rabid in my opposition to oil drilling off the coast of California but you can appreciate the intensity particularly after they had that big oil spill in '69 down in Santa Barbara their desire to move away from that whole industrial framework and footprint. And we talked about a vision of replacing those oil platforms with these wave generating platforms that are barely perceptible off the coast that can harness mother nature's energy; this is real; this technology is being advanced; this is something that's not science fiction, it's not something in Discovery magazine it's something that is absolutely available and commercially achievable but we need to take advantage of these technologies and take it upon ourselves to advance them. Second and final, right below the Golden Gate Bridge, right at the mouth of the northern part we did some Doppler radar underneath just recently it was about the 4th year of studies and we finally determined the exact place to do a tidal flow project where we literally will put we'll be out there in a big barge and we'll drop a tidal generating. Basically take the idea of a wind generating or wind farm and put it under water and take advantage of mother nature it's very dense consistent energy that comes in and out of the Bay basically a flushing system. As you can imagine the entire Bay region in and out 24/7 every day of the year through millennium. Now the opportunity to harvest that exists, again, something that's happening in some large rivers around the world, something that's happening certainly in Scotland, England area, something that hasn't happened out here in California and that's unacceptable. And so we're very close to finally getting a small pilot there we may have over-promised what that meant versus wave but we don't want to under-deliver in terms of its potential impact and that's certainly an area where, again, technology is catching up and the opportunity to connect that to a smart grid something, again, you'll be talking a lot about today so I don't want to overburden you with the self evident and obvious reasons we need to be focused on that. This is the opportunity and this is the entrepreneurial life that we all have led out here and now this is the potential. The potential to me is self obvious to connect that passion with real action.

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