As a warm-up to 350.org’s “Do The Math Tour” presentation on Saturday, November 10, tour Palo Alto's 1st “Beyond Platinum LEED, Net Zero Energy, Passive House,” and potentially shake hands with our surprise guest at 3pm for the ribbon cutting ceremony of the nation's 1st curbside residential electric car charging station, plus the opportunity to meet electric vehicle owners and take drives in their cars.

Vanessa Warheit, with Al Gore's Climate Reality Project, will give a short Climate Change presentation at 2pm, after which Sandra Slater will discuss Palo Alto’s Cool City Challenge.

When: Saturday, November 10, 1:30-4:30pm.

Where: 314 Stanford Ave. Palo Alto

Cost: Free, $10 (or more) donation requested at the door, to your pick of: 350.org, Acterra and/or Sierra Club.

And if you have in season home-grown fruit (lemons, persimmons, figs, apples etc), feel free to bring to share with the crowd.

Parking is available in the residential neighborhood, the home is 4 blocks from Caltrain’s California Avenue station and 1 block from El Camino’s bus lines. Cycling and walking is, of course, encouraged!

Co–Sponsored by: 350.org,  Plug In America, CalCars, Acterra, The Loma Prieta Sierra Club, the Clean Coalition, College Terrace Green Team and the Bay Area Climate Collaborative

Delta Products Corporation, a provider of energy-efficient and renewable energy solutions and products, has broken ground for new headquarters for the US-region in Fremont. Poised to be a LEED Platinum-certified building, the new headquarters is expected to become Fremont’s first net zero green building. The company plans to use its own solar panels, inverters, wind turbines, LED lighting, electric vehicle chargers, displays, motor drives and other products in the building.

Read more here.

- as seen on the Daily Bright Spot www.cabrightspot.org

Last Friday, the Packard Foundation revealed its new headquarters in Los Altos, after a 5-½ -year undertaking to construct the most environmentally sustainable headquarters possible. The building, which cost approximately $37.5 million to build, exhibits a myriad of innovative and sustainable features, including solar paneled roofs, floor-to-ceiling windows and skylights to provide sunlight instead of using electricity, and a revolutionary irrigation system that uses filtered rainwater to reduce the building’s water usage by 40%. The building is one of only two dozen LEED Platinum-certified buildings in the country. Replicability was a key target, and the Packard Foundation hopes that the new headquarters will inspire other companies to follow in the Foundation’s footsteps and construct environmentally sustainable facilities as well.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Pacific Gas & Electric and the City of San Jose have released a new report, “Smart Grid Deployment and the Impact on Silicon Valley”, that places Silicon Valley’s 2010 “smart grid-related” job count at nearly 17,800, up from 12,560 in 2009. This growth includes a five-percent increase during the 2008-2010 recession when California’s total employment plummeted. Fifty-eight percent of these green jobs can be found in the category of distributed generation, another seventeen percent in energy storage, and nine percent in transmission and distribution.

While these statistics strongly reinforce Silicon Valley’s claim that it is the center of greentech innovation and investment, the numbers also indicate that the region has room for even more growth -- particularly when it comes to categories traditionally classified as “smart grid” such as energy transmission and distribution, and especially when compared to job growth within the region’s core IT sector.

You can find the 2012 Update to the Silicon Valley Smart Grid Jobs Report here.