Jerry Brown unveils clean-energy plan in Silicon Valley

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Create a "California solar highway" by placing gleaming solar panels along the banks of state highways. "Fast track" projects to get green energy to consumers sooner. Create nearly a half-million jobs by generating 20,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2010.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor, came to Silicon Valley this morning to announce those and other parts of his new "clean-energy jobs plan."

Brown, who faces a bruising battle with eBay billionaire Meg Whitman, spoke at Microsoft's Mountain View campus to about 200 valley executives and other members of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

Depicting himself as a bureaucracy-busting crusader who has the experience and political cred to restore California's luster, Brown bemoaned the decline over the past two decades of moderate politicians of both major parties.

"The way forward is collaboration, not confrontation," the former two-term governor said.

The state he wants to lead again, Brown said, has always been "a place of imagination and ideas" — whether finding better ways to mine gold, creating productive farmland out of vast deserts, or discovering new miracle drugs through biotechnology.

Becoming the world's center of clean energy, he said, "is very much in keeping with our character" and the key to the state's economic future.

Brown said investments in clean energy generate two to three times as many jobs per dollar as


Chose in the gas, oil and coal industries. And dollars invested in clean energy tend to stay in California as opposed to being shipped to other states or even overseas, Brown said.

He said California has the ability to produce at least 1.3 million megawatts of renewable energy — about 22 times its current capacity.

Brown's plan calls for:


Generating 12,000 megawatts of "localized electricity" by the end of the decade. That would include installing solar systems on hundreds of school roofs.


Creating 8,000 megawatts of clean energy from large-scale projects.


Developing better energy-storage systems.


Eventually requiring new homes and commercial buildings to use "zero net energy."


Appointing a "renewable energy jobs czar."

After Brown's speech, the Whitman campaign put out a statement saying "there doesn't appear to be anything new here," noting that Whitman also had called for creating jobs through clean-energy projects.

Brown and Whitman have been on opposite sides of AB 32, the state's landmark global-warming law.

Whitman has proposed a one-year moratorium on the law, calling it a threat to job creation.

But most Silicon Valley leaders seem to agree with Brown, who this morning told the high-tech executives that the law will create many more jobs than it will destroy.




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