Climate Prosperity

Joint Venture’s Climate Prosperity Program united local governments, businesses and institutions in defining and deploying initiatives that address the long range environmental challenges facing our region and our world. The program’s chartering document, Climate Prosperity: A Greenprint for Silicon Valley, put in place a framework and governing body for related regional initiatives focused on advancing renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean convenient transportation, and sustainable infrastructure.

The Climate Prosperity Program aims to accelerate adoption of programs and technologies that reduce our impacts on the environment while benefiting society and the economy. Representative examples of Climate Prosperity include:

• More energy-efficient homes and cars mean a cleaner environment, less money spent on energy and more disposable income in the community;
• Adding solar and other renewable energy sources to the grid reduces air pollution and GHG emissions, stimulates the regional economy, and generates long-term savings;
• More sustainable and energy efficient buildings create new jobs for construction workers, energy auditors, efficiency monitoring tools, network installers, and manufacturers of products such as temperature sensors and building components;
• Electrification of transportation and development of transportation alternatives reduce our use of fossil fuels, clean up the air, and have important lifestyle and health benefits;
• Livable, walkable, sustainable communities are more appealing to a new generation of talent we are looking to attract to our region;
• Progress on all these fronts helps California achieve its goal of reducing GHG emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

EV Infrastructure Group

The EV Infrastructure Group was a program established to provide a structured forum and meeting venue for local organizations and practitioners focused on setting up, managing and expanding their EV infrastructure. This interest group addressed key practices, challenges for scaling and deployment, solutions, resources, collaboration strategies and other themes relevant to this growing community of Bay Area employers. The group helped to facilitate development of a shared knowledge base and best practices for deployment of EV infrastructure at the workplace. The group served as a good representation of demand for workplace EV charging, and real issues faced by these organizations in deploying and managing EV infrastructure. This, in turn, becomes a useful forum for periodic engagement with government agencies, utilities, and third party service providers (suppliers) regarding solutions and approaches that are needed in the market today. An example of the group's work on integration of EV charging infrastructure can be found here: ‘Use Case’ Scenarios

Smart Energy Enterprise Development Initiative (SEEDZ)

The Smart Energy Enterprise Development Initiative (SEEDZ), focused on building the ‘smart energy’ network of the future here in Silicon Valley, was an initiative of Climate Prosperity that demonstrated power performance and sustainability benefits on a commercially based, community-wide scale. In Silicon Valley, energy use in the commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors generates nearly 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Smart energy advancements in vehicle electrification, commercial and industrial energy efficiency, and effective integration of renewable energy into the power grid have the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in our region – and ultimately the world. SEEDZ involved many leading Silicon Valley corporate energy customers, solution providers, municipalities, institutions and utility interests. The goals of the SEEDZ initiative were to:

• reduce local GHG emissions via expanded use of clean/distributed energy sources and increased electrification of transportation.
• implement new capabilities for efficient utilization of grid energy assets, improved reliability and affordability.
• provide global market expansion and brand enhancement for Silicon Valley companies developing and/or deploying smart energy solutions.
• attract smart energy-related technology companies, investment and research funding as a development/deployment hub.
• serve as a replicable model for other communities.

Upon the launch of the Silicon Valley Clean Energy Authority in 2016, the SEEDZ program was retired and its work was distributed to the authority and elsewhere within Joint Venture.