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<\/a>Now here’s a city that’s acting decisively in, you might expect it, the Silicon Valley. San Jose, CA, in 2007 announced its “Green Vision” \u2013 a 15-year plan that includes reducing per capita energy use by half, becoming a zero waste city, recycling and reusing 100 percent of the city’s water, and moving to 100 percent renewable energy. Right on!<\/p>\nSan Jose’s resolves are especially pertinent because we’ve also been writing about the progress toward launching electric cars. \u00a0A detriment has been the lack of charging stations along highways and byways. But San Jose is doing someting about that.<\/p>\n
The California city recently installed the first of 1,600 planned charging stations in the Bay Area as part of the ChargePoint America program<\/a> to encourage the use of electric cars \u2013 by those who can currently afford the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf or the Ford Focus EV, anyway.<\/p>\n San Jose is aiming to break the chicken-or-egg dilemma over which comes first toward reaching a green future. \u00a0Encouraged by San Jose’s resolve, Couloumb Technologies<\/a>, the maker of that city’s first charging station, is expecting to have 4,600 of them around the country by October, 2011, in areas including Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C. and Orlando.<\/p>\n San Jose’s first charging station is inside a parking garage, appropriately enough \u2013 except, of course, that you’d first have to pay a parking fee to reach it. But who can quibble over a city as resolutely aiming for a greener future as San Jose appears to be?<\/p>\n