Do You Know The Way To San Jose?

No problem, now you’ll have environmentally friendly LED lights to show you the way.

In 2005 San Jose, California adopted a 15 year plan with goals focused on three elements: Clean Technology, Sustainability, and Green Mobility.

Towards that goal, last week the city announced a trial of smarter, more energy-efficient street lights, which will be powered by low-energy LED bulbs and monitored across a smart network.

Launching this summer, the test will encompass 125 streetlight network which will function in a similar way to a smart electricity grid. Choosing it’s own home based Echelon Corp. to implement the project.

It costs San Jose, the tenth largest city in the country, $3.5 million to power the city’s streetlights for a year, not including the cost of replacement and maintenance. Echelon said streetlights networked using its intelligent controls for smart networks can significantly reduce a city’s energy and maintenance costs while improving light quality, decreasing light pollution, and providing increased safety. The new streetlights will use energy efficient LED lamps equipped with Echelon’s power line networking technology and segment controllers.

The smart, networked LED streetlights can be remotely dimmed late at night to save energy and to reduce light pollution, a key concern for the Lick Observatory, an astronomy research center located just east of the city.

San Jose’s Green Vision Goals, Within 15 Years :

1. Create 25,000 Clean Tech jobs as the World Center of Clean Tech Innovation
2. Reduce per capita energy use by 50 percent
3. Receive 100 percent of electrical power from clean renewable sources
4. Build or retrofit 50 million square feet of green buildings
5. Divert 100 percent of the waste from landfill and convert waste to energy
6. Recycle or beneficially reuse 100 percent of wastewater (100 million gallons per day)
7. Adopt a General Plan with measurable standards for sustainable development
8. Ensure that 100 percent of public fleet vehicles run on alternative fuels
9. Plant 100,000 new trees and replace 100 percent of the city’s streetlights with smart, zero emission lighting
10. Create 100 miles of interconnected trails that will allow residents to walk or bike to many places instead of using a car.

Under the Green Vision plan, San Jose also plans to install some of the State’s first public charging stations for electric vehicles.

San Jose, California – You ROCK !!

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Tags: clean technology, Electric power, energy, Lick Observatory, Light pollution, San Jose, Street light, Technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Going Green, Green Living, go green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.