West coast city exemplar of all things green

INTERVIEW:Palo Alto's technology background is fusing with creative enterprise to create sustainable solutions, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

IF YOUR city is considered the beating heart of Silicon Valley, you’d expect to find technology and entrepreneurship to the fore when you tackle the problem of creating a greener, more sustainable city.

And that’s exactly the case with Palo Alto, the little city south of San Francisco and north of San Jose, where two men, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, famously started up a little technology company in a garage in the 1930s that would define the whole Silicon Valley model.

As Palo Alto mayor Patrick Burt noted to an audience at the Science Gallery in Trinity College last Friday, the challenge of creating a more sustainable city of 65,000 residents draws heavily on the creative technology strengths of the region and the ability to draw upon a research centre like Stanford. It also uses the social entrepreneurship of many of its wealthy residents who, sometimes for philanthropic reasons alone but more often out of sound business sense, are willing to put money into green-focused projects.

It helps to be in a place that relishes looking at problems and finding solutions, Burt says. “Innovation is actually treated as the norm in Silicon Valley,” he says. “It’s a collective culture that has just evolved. There’s just a synergy that’s evolved here that makes things so easy.”

And even though Palo Alto is one of the smaller cities in the region, its unique history as a technology powerhouse means it is doing many things that might serve as models for other cities.

The presence of Stanford alongside the entrepreneurs, companies, and wealthy angel investors and venture capital community based around Palo Alto creates an unusual environment in which bigger issues can be tackled.

“In most places people are either in the private sector or the university,” Burt notes. But in Palo Alto many people move between the two, with entrepreneurs setting up successful companies and then returning to academia. Burt points to Stanford president John Hennessy – an engineering academic at Stanford who set up successful technology companies but returned to serve the university.

The public sector also has a unique relationship with the private sector. Facebook, for example, is partnering with the city of Palo Alto to promote sustainability, the mayor says.

The city can boast green technology start-ups. Tesla, the stylish electric car manufacturer whose cars can go from 0 to 60 mph, faster than a Porsche, Burt notes, is based near Stanford University, close to the ancient redwood – named “El Palo Alto” by early Spanish missionaries – that gives the city its name.

The city also is the base for entrepreneur Shai Agassi’s venture-backed company Better Place, focused on developing infrastructure that would support electronic vehicles. Palo Alto is home to other start-ups in several areas of energy generation, energy efficiency, and other sustainable technologies, Burt says.

Because the entrepreneurs and workforce in many of these firms is international, many technologies will be carried back to their home countries. Palo Alto and Silicon Valley are thus at the heart of the globalisation of clean tech, Burt says.

He emphasises a key element of this green innovation and social entrepreneurship is the ability to monetise the technologies – it isn’t just about improving the world, but doing good while making a profit.

“There’s nothing wrong with doing well, even while they’re motivated towards doing good,” he notes. He cites one local entrepreneur who has energy-retrofitted one of the city’s older buildings to offer green offices to businesses and organisations, but who predicts investment will make profit within five years.

But there are major environmental challenges facing communities and governments which may not be financially attractive to entrepreneurs because little intellectual property can be created.

That’s where partnerships between cities, states, and national governments can come in and lead to innovations that benefit the population, says Burt.

“Governments couldn’t possibly solve these problems without harnessing the private sector. But it has to be a partnership.”

The very location of Palo Alto and other cities in the Silicon Valley area mean the population is aware of some of the most urgent environmental problems.

For example, he says, 1m (3ft) of sea-level rise “could have a drastic effect on our communities”, many of which are barely above sea level.

Water shortages also are a major issue, and a receding snow pack in the mountains – the region’s traditional water source – is a deep concern.

Palo Alto has tried to do its part by establishing a climate-protection plan within city government in 2005, aiming for a 5 per cent reduction in energy consumption; the city actually achieved 12 per cent.

A bigger challenge will be to find more sustainable sources of energy. The city has a programme where businesses and residences can buy into renewable carbon offsets, he says. And about 80 per cent of the city’s power will come from renewable sources in future.

He thinks that just as Palo Alto has been able to serve as a model of sustainability, so could Dublin be a model for cities the next step up.

“Dublin has scale – you can galvanise more,” he says. “With the compactness of Dublin, you have the opportunity to do some great things.”

A lesson from Palo Alto: Sustainability in Dublin

WHILE NOT exactly having the same ingredients as Palo Alto, Dublin has some similar features that could make it a role model for sustainability, says Mark Bennett, Dublin City Council’s green business officer.

“There’s a certain critical mass forming around sustainability,” says Bennett. This has led to the formation of the Sustainable Dublin Framework, an initiative to promote sustainability.

“We’re trying to bring academia, the public and the private sector together to look at the needs of the city.”

Bennett feels Ireland has the indigenous industry, creative universities and the smart employees to address many of Dublin’s sustainability needs – for example, to create the software for managing utilities or to design renewable energy sources.

He sees partnerships between business and the public sector as central. He echoes the thoughts of Palo Alto mayor Patrick Burt: “There should be a vested interest in terms of securing our future, but also in making money. It’s . . . possible to do the right thing and to make money too,” Bennett says.

As for what’s actually happening on the ground in Dublin, he points to small-scale, Unesco-supported initiatives to encourage green entrepreneurs, Dublin’s annual Innovation Dublin event, and organisations that promote sustainable living, such as Dublin’s Cultivate centre.

On the large scale, he notes major initiatives such as IBM's Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin and the Green IFSC proposal to provide financial and management infrastructure for global green business. – KARLIN LILLINGTON