Run on Sun Featured in Pasadena Weekly Article — The City of the Future

The April 28, 2011 edi­tion of the Pasadena Weekly has a very nice arti­cle by Sara Car­dine titled, The City of the Future, which includes an inter­view with Run on Sun Founder & CEO, Jim Jenal.

Part of its month-long series of arti­cles on going Green, Cardine’s piece looks specif­i­cally at how Pasadena has taken long strides toward turn­ing itself into a truly Green City.  Start­ing with its adop­tion of a “Green Action Plan” in 2006 — the same year that Run on Sun was founded — Pasadena is work­ing hard to turn its good inten­tions into prac­ti­cal actions.  For exam­ple, Pasadena has made major reduc­tions in its own energy usage and is push­ing to do much more.

From the article:

Since the Green Action Plan was estab­lished, the city has seen improve­ments on mul­ti­ple lev­els, said Ursula Schmidt, the city’s sus­tain­abil­ity affairs man­ager. In addi­tion to increased water and energy con­ser­va­tion, renew­able energy use and recy­cling, the city is also mak­ing head­way in its green build­ing pro­gram and in an effort to estab­lish an alternative-fuel fleet.

Last year alone, Pasadena trimmed its peak power demand by 4.45 megawatts and saved enough energy to power 3,640 homes for one year. Offi­cials now hope to see a city­wide reduc­tion in green­house gas emis­sions of 25 per­cent by 2030, along with an increase in the city­wide use of green energy sources beyond recently adopted statewide stan­dards. Last month, state law­mak­ers passed SBX1 2, a law requir­ing that 33 per­cent of the state’s energy come from renew­able sources by 2020. Pasadena is already push­ing itself past that bench­mark; last year the City Coun­cil adopted a com­pre­hen­sive inte­grated resources plan that set a goal of 40 per­cent renew­able energy use by 2020, accord­ing to Gur­cha­ran Bawa, PWP assis­tant gen­eral manager.

Encour­ag­ing com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial cus­tomers to Go Solar is a big part of the strat­egy to meet those goals.  Cal­tech, one of the largest energy users in the City, has installed over 1.3 megawatts of solar power on its cam­pus with more planned.  Yet some cus­tomers have been reluc­tant to fol­low Caltech’s lead.  To get the installer’s view, Car­dine inter­viewed Jim Jenal and quoted him as he described the process of work­ing with an installer to get a pro­posal and ulti­mately, an installed system.

Please check out the arti­cle online or pick up a print copy (which fea­tures a won­der­ful pic­ture of Jim with that famous Solar Kid) and let us know what you think.

As Car­dine concluded:

“This isn’t rocket sci­ence — it’s truly some­thing nor­mal, every­day peo­ple can under­stand and feel com­fort­able with,” Jenal said.
It just begins with a lit­tle knowl­edge and the com­mit­ment to make a difference.

We couldn’t agree more!