Cities Striving to Be Green

Some places in the U.S. are way ahead in policies to reduce carbon emissions. Here are the seven best spots to start a clean tech company

By Amy Westervelt

Before the stimulus package or the congressional bill to reduce carbon emissions, U.S. mayors decided to adopt their own climate policy.

Cities including Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle sent the government a "we'll do it on our own" statement in response to the lack of federal policy. They signed on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to reach the greenhouse gas reductions targeted by the Kyoto Protocol.

Since the 2005 agreement, some 500 more cities and counting have signed on. And while some cities simply signed the document and moved on, others have used the initiative to draft further strategies that deliver meaningful reductions in emissions.

Early Adopters of Green Products

The most effective strategies, by far, have been those that bring sustainability initiatives into the office of economic development and turn cities into early adopters of "green" products and services. It's exactly this sort of strategy that makes the following cities the best in the country for a cleantech startup. In a May report, Living Cities interviewed sustainability directors around the country. We've landed on the following seven as the best spots to start a cleantech company (more interviews from the report here).

1. San Jose Before Portland, Ore., and San Francisco started competing for the most expansive plug-in electric-vehicle infrastructure, San Jose was a proving ground for the technology. It's part of the city's innovative economic development strategy. "We want to be the R&D arm for the country," says Collin O'Mara, cleantech policy strategist for the city. In addition to having an entire cleantech strategy team, the city has become a liaison between local community colleges and companies in an effort to help create real "green jobs," launched a $3 million venture fund to invest in cleantech back in 2007 (the Economic Development Catalyst fund), and helped bring in the country's second Underwriters Lab testing facility.

It also doesn't hurt that the city is close to the big cleantech venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, as well as a huge pool of talent compliments of neighboring Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. So far, that heady combination has wrestled a Tesla plant away from New Mexico and tempted a number of other cleantech companies, including SunPower and Nanosolar. In fact, O'Mara was so successful as the lead strategist for San Jose, he was just snatched up by the state of Delaware. (This week, O'Mara was nominated as the state of Delaware's Secretary of Natural Resources & Environmental Control, so we may be seeing big things coming out of Dover.)

2. Boston A decade ago, no one in Boston wanted to hear about sustainability; it was too "crunchy granola," said Brian Glascock, director of the office of energy and environment for the city of Boston. That's until they realized they needed to talk about efficiency, which led to fiscal policy, Glascock said. Now the city boasts a $500 million solar initiative, a $2 million green affordable housing project, and building codes that require green construction. In addition, the city is preparing for the carbon market by looking at a green fund that would aggregate small-scale carbon reduction projects into a larger fund that could participate in the market. Companies such as demand-response darling EnerNoc, lithium-ion battery company Boston Power, and solar inverter-maker Satcon operate in Boston, and the city has easy access to talent from both Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.

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