Green Wombat

Earth Day is April 22 and enviro
mania is in full swing. The magazine racks are chock-a-block with special "green issues" – Vanity Fair, Outside (the cover boy is California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), Newsweek (Arnie again) and Time. (Always looking ahead. Business 2.0, where Green Wombat is an editor, did its green thing in February.) Meanwhile down in Silicon Valley, Earth Day weekend kicks off April 20 with Applied Materials (AMAT) CEO Mike Splinter talking about "Unlocking the Potential of Solar Energy: Silicon Valley’s Next Big Opportunity to Change the Way People Live"  at Santa Clara University. The same day over in Palo Alto you can learn about "Options to Reduce C02 Emissions at the Electric Power Research Institute.

Yesterday, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group hosted an "Alternative Energy Solutions Summit" at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)’s redwood-studded corporate campus in Sunnyvale. The event, which attracted some 300 tech execs, government officials,
California Senator Barbara Boxer and Stanford University president John Hennessy, showcased the speed and fervor with which the valley has embraced green tech and the fight against global warming. (It wasn’t all that long ago, after all, when the big environmental issue in Silicon Valley was toxic pollution from chip and hardware manufacturing plants, with tech companies facing off against green groups.) "Win not whine!" exhorted Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Leadership Group, the main lobbying group for valley tech companies. PG&E (PCG) exec Bob Howard, who brought the utility’s plug-in hybrid Prius to the event to demonstrate how such cars can power the grid, captured the mood in the valley these days: "Addressing climate change can serve as an economic opportunity, not an economic burden," he said. "There’s no better region positioned to make a difference."

Companies like SunPower (SPWR) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) obviously see a big opportunity to profit from the war on global warming as well as cut their own operating costs by going clean and green. Sun Labs executive director Mark Monroe said the computer company had saved $70 million in recent years as half its employees took advantage of its work-anywhere program that lets them telecommute from home or satellite offices near where they live. AMD senior strategist Larry Vertal said the chipmaker is building a new 2,500-person facility in Austin that will run completely on renewable energy. The valley’s embrace of solar energy was also on display. "Solar is really the only big solution out there," said Charlie Gay, general manager of Applied Materials, which is retooling its chipmaking equipment to manufacture solar cells. "If we lower the cost of solar by a factor of 2 or 3, solar will be competitive with coal. This doesn’t require any magical technological leap. We just need to scale up."

The valley’s alliance with giant utilities like PG&E and powerful politico’s like Boxer, the

chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is creating a new political
dynamic to counter the influence of the oil, coal and auto industries. "This whole issue of global warming has taken on a life of its own," Boxer told the assembled tech execs, some of whom were to travel back with her to Washington, D.C., to lobby Republicans to enact a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions.