Bay Area Sees Challenge From Los Angeles Cleantech Surge
Interesting opinion article in the San Jose Mercury News today, about how Los Angeles is seriously challenging the Bay Area in the clean technology industry:
In this month’s election, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs successfully defended our state’s clean economy from Proposition 23, the oil-backed attempt to suspend California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act. However, this is no time to rest on our laurels. The Bay Area faces another challenge from the south.
While this area remains California’s epicenter of clean technology development, Los Angeles is poised to surge ahead when it comes to widespread development of decentralized renewable power projects that put these technologies to use.
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This will position Los Angeles as a cleantech leader and create more than 11,000 local green jobs, according to UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation…
To keep the leading edge in clean energy, the Bay Area business community must lead the charge for legislation to encourage widespread decentralized generation of clean energy. Otherwise, Los Angeles will move forward without us.
I’m not sure why our fellow Californians up north as so threatened (isn’t economic development across the entire state good for everyone?) — but, at least it appears that there’s some outside belief that Los Angeles is doing the right thing in this area…
I think that the article is off the mark in painting things as a competition… having shuttled between Nor Cal and SoCal for the past couple years in both the web and cleantech venture world, I see alot more collaboration between North and South on cleantech than I do in web services, software, or even media ventures. I see SoCal investors looking at Nor Cal cleantech deals and vice versa.