San Jose mayor announces 'green' award recipients

Female Speaker: The city of San Jose wants to be the center of Green Tech for companies in Silicon Valley. San Jose's Mayor Chuck Reed recently talked about the city's green strategy and announced the winners of its inaugural Green Vision Innovation awards. ZDNet also spoke with some of the award recipients about what they're doing in the area of clean-tech.

Male Speaker 1: A little over a year ago, the council adopted San Jose's green vision which is our road map to becoming the world's center of clean-tech innovation. We have 10 long term goals spread out over 15-year time period. One of those goals and my favorite goal is the creation of 25,000 clean-tech jobs. We've had some great success in that in San Jose already. We have approximately 3,000 clean-tech jobs in the city. Today we've had companies like NanoSolar, SoloPower, Stion SVTC, and Underwriters Laboratories locating in San Jose in the solar industry and other clean tech companies here, not the least to which is not yet here, but Tesla Motors of course has announced that they're going to build a factory -- move their headquarters to San Jose creating a thousand jobs, clean-tech jobs in Tesla Motors and a couple of thousand other vendors and suppliers jobs. So we've had some good progress, but we got to keep growing these companies. We have to have new companies, new ideals, new technologies, new innovations that have come to fruition and that's why we got engaged in the clean tech open. I have six companies, six divisions, six winners and if you're here, wave, so the media knows who you are so that they can talk to you. Renewable fuel technologies, BottleStone, ElectraDrive, Power Assure, Over the Moon and Focal Point Energy. Congratulations to all of you.

Male Speaker 2: We produce, market a solid fuel that we call BioCoal. And we make BioCoal from the biomass and then we sell that BioCoal to industrial plants -- coal burning industrial plants. And the advantage of our BioCoal over a traditional fossil fuel is that it has low emissions, much lower emissions, no mercury, no sulfur. It also is renewable and it's carbon natural. So, you switch over to our fuel from fossil fuel, you'll convert coal burning industrial plants to something that's renewable and carbon neutral and carbon emissions.

Male Speaker 3: Power Assure is a software company that creates energy efficiency in data centers. We can save up to 50% in data centers and their energy consumption by modulating facilities and IT equipment to work together.

Male Speaker 4: Well, we hope to make a big change. ElectraDrive is all about converting existing vehicles to electric tractions. So, we will take any existing vehicles that's gas powered and with our ElectraMount technology, we will convert it to a plug in. So, what we actually do is we take out the existing gas drive train, we put in our ElectraMount which is an adjustable component frame that will fit any size engine bay, any size vehicle and then we will put in the best of three components: the battery, the motor and the gen set and convert a car into and efficient electric vehicle.