Sounds easy, right? Wrong. CSR data is notoriously complex. Putting together a report can mean pulling data from environmental health and safety departments, community and education programs, philanthropic giving records, supply chain partners and operations records. Historically, companies have pulled that data into Excel spreadsheets to create new data sets for CSR reports. But as stakeholders — and shareholders — show more interest in sustainability concerns, companies are beginning to eye more sophisticated software to help them manage and report that data. 

Traditionally, CSR reports were released on an annual basis, sometime after the end of the company’s fiscal year. Combined with year-end financials, such reports informed socially responsible investment groups and shareholder organizations about companies’ activities. “A lot of these groups that…need that real, deep level of data tend to review their companies on an annual basis,” says Suzanne Fallender, Intel’s corporate responsibility communications manager.

In today’s market, however, companies are recognizing a need to go beyond sustainability reporting with strategic management plans that take social and environmental issues into account. That means they need deeper — and more dynamic — visibility into their performance against specific metrics, says Scott Bolick, VP of sustainability solutions for SAP. “We want to get the data at a level where it’s manageable,” he says. SAP, which just released its own sustainability report two weeks ago, is working on new solutions that could help clients automate sustainability reporting using data from its existing software products, Bolick says; the company’s recent acquisition of Clear Standards was a step in that direction.

Intel, which released its first CSR report in 2001 and its most recent report last week, currently uses a variety of internally developed, customized databases and information systems to help measure and manage its environmental impacts. But now the company says its needs are outgrowing customized solutions that sit on top of other software programs. “We are actually starting to explore alternative software solutions,” Gary Niekerk, senior manager of Corporate Responsibility, wrote in an email. “While our internal systems have worked well, the growing complexity of data needs and our push for ever more transparency is requiring us to look for even better solutions.”

As companies choose these new solutions, they need to consider how that data gets used, Bolick says. While health and safety metrics may need to be monitored constantly, other data (such as employee turnover) might be more meaningful on an annual basis. As companies set annual sustainability goals, they may want accountability for meeting those targets tracked on a monthly or quarterly schedule. Bolick points to the example of air travel. SAP has made a public commitment to reducing its carbon emissions to 2000 levels by 2020. To see progress, Bolick says he needs monthly visibility into the flights taken and the carbon that represents.

That doesn’t mean companies are necessarily moving their reporting in a more granular direction, however. Neither SAP, Intel nor Microsoft say they’ve seen a demand for more frequent data. Fallender notes that a number of years ago, Intel tried reporting quarterly environmental health and safety information on its web site, but stakeholders didn’t end up using the information. Collecting, verifying and publishing the data was labor intensive, so the company went back to annual reporting. However, Fallender says Intel could revisit the issue going forward.

If companies move increasingly toward dynamic information about their environmental performance, they’ll need systems that can verify the numbers’ accuracy. “The concern is that part of what we do before we publicize anything is auditing,” says Microsoft Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard. SAP’s Bolick agrees: “The market is going to hold you accountable,” he says. “That’s why people are now saying, Excel spreadsheets aren’t going to cut it for me anymore.”

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

As Stacey has pointed out over at GigaOM, there’s a lot of potential for synergy between IBM and Sun’s cloud computing offerings, and the combined company would likely offer a robust enough array to help enterprise customers migrate to the cloud. That could be good news for Sun’s Eco Responsibility initiative, launched in December 2005. At the outset, the campaign was part of an effort to bolster sales of Sun’s new energy-efficient chips and server products with a “green” message, but Sun also made an effort to tie the campaign into its overall approach to computing. Because cloud computing and green IT have become so closely linked in many minds, an acquisition of Sun by IBM likely wouldn’t put a damper on Sun’s Eco Responsibility initiatives (though I’d be surprised to see IBM keep the “Eco Responsibility” branding).

By acquiring Sun, IBM would also gain control of Java, Sun’s biggest brand success, if not its largest commercial one. (Sun may have swapped its SUNW stock ticker for JAVA in 2007, but in 2008, the company earned just $200 million from Java on total revenues of $13.8 billion.) AMR Research suggests that Java, not Sun’s server and storage products, could be the biggest boon for IBM — including for IBM’s recently launched “Smarter Planet” campaign, which aims to use information technology for improving the efficiency and sustainability of diverse industries, from food and oil to water and electricity. Because Java, a pervasive and powerful development platform, is already an important part of many of IBM’s software and services offerings, bringing it in-house could give IBM a serious advantage over other enterprise software vendors — including those (like SAP) seeking to make their own sustainability management software plays.

Earlier this year, I spoke at length with Drew Clark, director of strategy for the IBM Venture Capital Group, about IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. He stressed the growing importance of the mobile handset; according to Clark, mobile access to the data generated from smart systems will play a key role in improving the effectiveness of such initiatives, particularly in the consumer space. In order to bring smarter tools to consumers — whether they be smart home energy management systems, smarter irrigation systems, or smart parking and traffic tools — Clark said making information accessible and actionable on a mobile device will be necessary. “The new IT platform has evolved from the desktop to the mobile handset,” he said.

For Clark, the mobile platform that can run such systems has to be three things: easy to use, easy to develop for (preferably with a developer community behind it), and “as open as you can be,” he said. “That’s the magic formula.”  By acquiring Java, Sun would add just such a platform to its portfolio of tools. (Sun’s Java ME is supported on Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry handsets — as well as unofficially on Android.)

However, that’s just my take. Unsurprisingly, neither Sun nor IBM would comment on the potential impact of such a deal on their green initiatives.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

On Monday, eMeter announced that Texas utility CenterPoint will use its meter-data-management system for a rollout of 2 million smart meters starting in March and finishing up in 2013. The system, called EnergyIP, will help CenterPoint’s Houston-area customers monitor and manage their electricity use and cost, as well as provide outage, restoration and connection and disconnection services for the company. While he didn’t say how much eMeter will earn from the contract, Chris King, chief strategy officer for the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, said that the IT system will make up less than 5 percent, or $32 million, of the cost of the $640 million program.

eMeter’s software essentially helps the utility’s older systems, like billing, work together with the new smart-grid systems, King says. The network includes automated controls for different appliances, and it will keep track of the appliances and report power outages. The software — and the smart meters it works with — enable peak-pricing and time-of-use programs, in which utilities charge more for electricity used during times of high demand, as well as demand-response programs, in which utilities ask a group of customers to reduce their usage during critical periods to avoid outages, in exchange for lower electricity bills.

In pilot programs, customers have been able to reduce as much as 40 percent of their household electricity use during critical peaks, King says. eMeter, which raised $12.5 million in April, claims its software works with all different smart meters, making it ideal for utilities that are still trying to decide which meters to use. The company licenses its software to utilities and helps them install it into their data center and integrate it with their existing software.

eMeter says it has signed a dozen contracts with utilities in the last few months, representing a total of 23 million smart meters, and has dozens more contracts in the works. About 5 million meters already are connected, with the remaining 18 million set to be installed within three years, King says.

That’s a significant number considering that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in December reported that 4.7 percent — about 6.8 million — of the 144.4 million meters installed in the United States are “advanced meters,” up from less than 1 percent in 2006. But with President Barack Obama calling for the installation of 40 million smart meters, King expects the growth to accelerate.

The stimulus bill the U.S. House of Representatives passed last week, as well as the version that the Senate plans to consider this week, both call for $4.5 billion for transmission funding that could boost smart meters and other smart-grid technologies. It already seems to be helping the late-blooming sector grow. “We’ve already spoken to a half-dozen utilities about using the stimulus funds to get going quickly, and they’re all very excited about it,” says King.

Other energy-management companies also have noted the increased momentum. “Believe it or not, most of what we’re hearing from potential partners is that energy efficiency is one of the areas investors are still excited about,” Matthew Smith, vice president of marketing for Greenbox Technology, which is raising its first round of funding for its software to manage home energy use, told us recently. “Finding ways for people to save money in a down economy is a good thing.”

Obama provided few details on how the green building makeover would work — or how many jobs it could provide — but he said he would start by replacing old heating systems and installing energy-efficient lighting. “Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that,” he stated. He said he would unveil more about the plan in the coming weeks and push to have congress start working to get the plan approved in January.

While clean energy initiatives like adding solar to the roofs of buildings tend to receive the bulk of attention, making buildings more energy efficient is typically a more cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions. There’s a great article in the Christian Science Monitor from November detailing how this works and some of the programs from energy-efficient building startup Sustainable Spaces.

The federal government has largely been slow to recognize the importance of making buildings more energy efficient, and states and local organizations have been leading these efforts. Oregon’s governor Ted Kulongoski wants to mandate a rating and certification program that would disclose the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of buildings that would start in 2011 for homes and in 2012 for commercial buildings. Nevada has a similar law.

But many in the building industry, green and otherwise, would prefer a national standard — Sustainable Spaces CEO Matt Golden tells us that state programs are part of the solution but that these need to be standardized nationally. Compared to varying standards across states and counties, a national standard could simplify and unify the effort to make buildings more energy efficient, as well as help to give a boost to the nascent market.

Under the agreement, RES will purchase communications controllers designed by Crystalline Technology Inc. that use Globalstar’s GSP-1620 and 1720 units. Each $1,000 modem connects to Globalstar’s satellite network, which relays the information on wind speeds and consistency to RES headquarters.

The process of assessing a potential wind-farm site can take years. It starts with the DOE’s wind-energy map which charts roughly the wind energy resources of the U.S. Once a developer finds an area it likes, it needs to talk with local landowners to set up an agreement to start the on-site assessment. Then a lattice of meters, gauges and telecommunication gizmos is erected to collect and transmit data. RES says it collects data for at least one year, and sometimes up to six years, before deciding on whether the location is a viable site for a project.

The business of siting and assessing wind farms is an industry unto itself. Twenty-seven-year-old Second Wind raised $4 million from Good Energies late last year for its “wind profiling” business. The company’s Triton Sonic Wind Profiler uses what’s known as sodar — for “sonic detection and ranging” — to bounce sound off of air turbulence up to 200 meters up and measures the echo to gauge wind speeds with no tower installed. The resulting data is relayed through Second Wind’s SkyServe Satellite Wind Data Service which also uses Globalstar’s CMDA technology.

RES says it will only use the satellite modems when the sites are out of cellular coverage; otherwise the towers are equipped with cellular transmission cards. However, if a site is too far away for cell service, it’s like also likely far from any transmission lines. Too bad scientists have yet to work out all the kinks of beaming power via satellite.

Of all electric car startups, Think has had some of the biggest names circling its little electric cars. Once owned by Ford, the company was bought by Norwegian investors from solar giant REC, and it has since partnered with GE to help put A123 lithium-ion batteries in their cars. Think also brought on Porsche Consulting to help design its manufacturing plant.

That plant, located in Aurskog, Norway, is supposed to produce 1,200 vehicles this year for distribution in Europe and the U.S. with that number jumping up to 10,000 in 2009. In April, Kleiner Perkins and Rockport formed the joint venture Think North America to handle distribution, and the VCs promised hundreds of TH!NK City cars for fleet operators would hit the streets by the end of this year and thousands for consumers next year. We’re still waiting to hear back from Kleiner and RockPort on the status of U.S. distribution.

So who will provide Think the funds this time? Alex Haislip from PeHub has some thoughts and notes that the company has already raised more than $97 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Rockport Capital, GE Energy GE Energy Financial Services’ VC arm, Element Venture Partners, Capricorn Investment Group (Jeff Skoll’s money), Wintergreen Advisers, CG Holdin, Hazel Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Image courtesy of Think Global.

The race for algae biofuels to take flight is on. Just last week, a new player spun out of Arizona State University’s Laboratory for Algae Research & Biotechnology picked up $3 million to further the research into and eventual commercialization of a kerosene-based aviation fuel derived from algae. Solazyme, meanwhile, which was founded in 2003, picked up $45.4 million last month. However, just like in terrestrial transport, there’s plenty of room for multiple players in aviation fuels. Solazyme estimates that in the U.S. alone, 1.6 billion gallons of jet fuel are used every month.

Still, Solazyme has a long way to go. CEO Jonathan Wolfson said recently that the company would be able to produce millions of gallons of biofuel from algae within three years, up from just thousands today. That’s an ambitious goal, especially given that the company doesn’t plan on breaking ground for its first commercial-scale plant until 2010. So until then, air travel will still likely destroy any attempt one makes to reduce one’s carbon footprint.

The announcement gives no legs to the rumors circulating about Daimler’s possible partnerships with a slew of cleantech startups. Last week, the Financial Times reported that electric car poster child Tesla Motors would be supplying the batteries for the Smart cars, but the release doesn’t say whose batteries will be in them.

It does, however, say that as early as next year Daimler could put that same lithium-ion technology into serial production for its Mercedes S 400 BlueHYBRID. Reuters had reported that battery giant Continental would be providing the lithium-ion batteries for the luxury hybrid, so perhaps this isn’t the deal Tesla Elon Musk said he was working on with Daimler? Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this year he was “in talks” with Agassi’s Better Place, but the Silicon Valley startup tells us that they are not involved with the e-mobility program.

The 500 “electricity filling stations” will be capable of identifying individual cars and owners allowing for charging of the vehicle and the credit card on account as well as “smart charging” or “vehicle-to-grid charging,” all features Agassi promises his charging stations will provide.

So far, the only partners announced in this project are Daimler and RWE, but we’re hopeful some cleantech startups will be helping with Daimler’s electro-auto-revolution.

Image courtesy of Daimler.

Most drives can shut down after a period of idleness to conserve power and reduce wear and tear. Unfortunately, many operating systems constantly write housekeeping data, such as registry information or timestamps, to attached drives. This keeps them spinning and, as a result, using power.

Adaptec is tackling the cost of storage with a line of RAID controllers that can reduce the power a drive uses by more than 70 percent, depending on the model, simply by powering it off. The new controllers — part of the company’s Green Power initiative — are smart enough to identify this housekeeping data. They store it in a battery-backed cache and only write to the drive when really needed. The controller can also periodically spin up long-idle drives to check their health.

System administrators can define power policies for storage systems, configuring when drives are idle, within the controllers’ configuration screens. Suresh believes the controllers may have other benefits, such as extending the lifespan of storage hardware and reducing the overall cooling of the data center.

There are limitations, of course. Only certain classes of applications, such as disk-to-disk backups, archival e-mail, and print servers will achieve the best power savings. And Suresh notes that many high-end storage systems already offer power management, so the new controllers are likely to primarily benefit OEMs and systems integrators.

But given the rising costs of data center operations, more efficient storage is a promising step in the right direction.

The speech, which was followed by a Q&A with John Podesta, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, provided some of the more innovative and forward-thinking policy ideas we’ve heard to date. Clinton emphasized the fact that the new clean energy economy has to deliver “good economics,” and if we aren’t convinced of the positive financials, we won’t be able to convince other countries to join us. So what’s the federal government’s role in ensuring all that? Here are Clinton’s top 10 suggestions:

1). Congress must pass legislation that puts a price on carbon and establish a cap-and-trade system. The alternative is passing a carbon tax, Clinton says, but adds that he tried that route already and it didn’t work out too well.

2). We need to renew and lengthen the tax credits for clean energy. The time frame needs to be longer than three years — more like 6 to 10 years. That is the only way to stimulate enough production of clean energy technologies.

3). It’s important to figure out the federal government’s role in modernizing the electrical grid, including both efficiency and carrying capacity. The grid wastes a lot of energy moving power, given that the wind blows and the sun shines in places where a lot of people don’t live. Tax payers should also be able to split the cost of modernizing the grid with utilities.

4). Utility decoupling should be federally mandated. That’s what California has done on a state level, separating its utility profits from electricity sales, and has thus become one of the most efficient energy states in the nation. While this has been an issue for the states, Clinton says the federal government should take on this task.

5). We should have legislation to accelerate replacing traditional incandescent lighting with LED lighting. This could save us the equivalent power of a dozen power plants over the next 20 years.

6). On the production side we need to continue to fund carbon capture and storage projects. China is bringing on a new coal plant every 10 days or so, so we need to figure this technology out.

7). We need to accelerate the move from corn-based ethanol to more sustainable biofuels. The conversion ratio is twice as good, but the enzyme process is twice as expensive. Many of the corn ethanol plants can be easily modified to produce cellulosic ethanol from the waste of farm crops. We can’t continue to raise the price of food and skew production patterns. It seems worth it to have differential tax incentives to do this right.

We should consider doing a joint investment with Brazil, potentially in the Caribbean, which would import sugar cane-based ethanol into the U.S, but it would not be subject to the tax that is placed on the rest of Brazilian ethanol. It might not be politically feasible, Clinton added.

8). We should have a program to shut down urban landfills and use them for either waste heat or fertilizer. The green house gas coming out of landfills is methane, which is pretty bad. “We do a lot of work around this area with my foundation,” he said. Organic landfills should just not be there — it’s bad for global warming, and it’s a public health nightmare.

9). We need to accelerate the move to hybrid and electric vehicles and modernize our railway system. After our party lost, Clinton said, we were succeeded by a group that thought high-speed rail was virtually closet communism.

Biofuels are also just a transition to electric and hybrid cars. We have this electric vehicle technology today, and it’s made in America. The technology would probably require larger tax credits, but it would be worth it because the prices for electronics would immediately drop — think the iPhone or a flat-screen TVs.

10). We need to demonstrate to the rest of the world that this is not an affectation for rich countries — that this is as big an opportunity for developing counties as it is for wealthy countries. The most popular thing the U.S. has done is its work with AIDS and Malaria, including work done by the Gates and Clinton Foundations. We need to also use this model for what we could do for clean energy development in the developing world.

The 500 GB [re]drive uses a combination of materials, power management and design to minimize its environmental footprint. The bamboo and aluminum case is 100 percent recyclable, and the specially-designed ridges on the casing act as heat sinks, cooling the drive without the use of a fan.

As far as power consumption goes, the [re]drive has a Energy Star level 4-qualified power adapter, automatically shuts on or off with your computer and features a low-power hard drive that the company says saves up to 40 percent in power consumption.

The green of this storage machine also extends to the manufacturing and packaging. Waste aluminum from the manufacturing process is mixed in with the raw aluminum to make parts. The box it comes in contains no extraneous materials and is 100 percent recyclable.

Or at it will least next year, says Steve Cummings, director with Hewlett-Packard, which today launches its data center in a container called HP’s Performance Optimized Data Center or, POD. From a power efficiency standpoint, these PODs are 38 percent more efficient than the average data center, partially because these containers can run hotter. Some customers will use these PODs as a stopgap for gaining compute power while the company builds out new data centers, while others will likely buy these on an as-needed basis.

HP’s POD or Sun’s Blackbox data centers literally come in self-contained shipping containers (HP’s are of the 20-foot or 40-foot variety). HP’s largest version can carry as much as 12 terabytes petabytes of storage and contains 3,500 compute nodes. That’s using HP’s gear, which you don’t have to do if you don’t want to. HP says it is using a standard chassis and layout to make deploying this thing as customer-friendly as possible.

The PODs also not to be confused with some of many data-center-in-a-box products, which are essentially pre-loaded and configured racks of servers that are shipped out ready to install in a data center.

“This is the first good example of a site that is of the scale that can potentially make a dent on the problem of carbon dioxide storage,” Dave Goldberg, the paper’s lead author, told Wired.com. Goldberg estimates the reservoir could hold about 150 years worth of U.S. annual emissions.

Located 100 miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, the basalt formation sits below deep water, and then under another couple hundred feet of impermeable sediment. That makes researchers think it’ll be very good at locking the carbon up tight. But that will also likely make it difficult to inject the carbon into the seabed in the first place.

The fact remains that many scientists think viable carbon capture and sequestration technology is over a decade away. So we’ll probably have to wait a good decade to see if the Pacific basalt is as good as the report claims.

This seabed does avoid one major hurdle, and that is liability laws. Much of the proposed basalt reservoir is in international waters, which means that it’s not subject to U.S. liability and mineral laws. Dale Simbeck, VP of technology of SFA Pacific, told us at the Berkeley Energy Symposium that without significant legal reform in liability and mineral rights laws, carbon storage “is just hopeless.”

But the location also opens up a can of potential maritime legal worms. There’s already an arms race surrounding who owns the seabed at the North Pole and the international community might not look kindly on the U.S. sweeping its carbon under international waters.

Earth2Tech: Why think about designing chips that enable energy efficient features?

de Vries: Even with changes made in materials and design, the biggest impact is not in the manufacturing of the chips. The biggest impact is conserving energy in the end applications. Be it laptops, cars or televisions. So that’s where we have focused quite a bit. We estimate that we have made in impact of a gigawatt annually. A desktop consumes about 300 watts, so if you can halve that on hundreds and millions of machines that adds up to significant savings.

E2T: Can you sell a “green” chip at a premium to similar chips?

de Vries: Certainly. Energy efficiency is going to be an argument in a sales position and that is true for business-to-business and for the consumers. The more energy efficient something is the more value it adds. It’s good business for us to be green.

E2T: Is this a design strategy for the entire world or only developed countries?

de Vries: We sell into any market because the relevance of this problem is the same everywhere in the world. We enjoy a growth in the emerging and developed markets.

E2T: What about other chipmaker’s efforts to greenwash their business or focus on low power chips?

de Vries: We are not unique in this initiative but we started this 10 years ago and that reflects a maturity of the solution and a long, continued effort in R&D. Manufacturing and the end of life part is almost a given in the chip industry. When it comes to being energy conscious internally and measuring the energy needed to produce a chip, that has been reduced by a factor of five over the last couple of years. But it’s the actual use of the silicon in the application that can have the biggest impact.

E2T: What are the next products that might benefit from a Green chip?

de Vries: We’re looking at an electronic road whereby we use a telephone module and GPS module to control road signs and traffic consistency to make traffic flow smoothly. In the automotive domain we’re working with tier one vendors in Germany, which is a fashion center for the automotive world

Today a car is an individual entity but it will be networked somehow. All these cars will be connected much like a computer is connected to another computer, and that is a big opportunity for an environmental impact

E2T: It sounds like an effort that requires far more cooperation from manufacturers, chip firms and even governments. Are NXP and other industries ready to create the kind of partnerships needed to make such a vision a reality?

The systems are very complex and it has to do with the chipmakers and regulatory bodies, so it has to be done in ecosystem that has an interest in such a development. These things don’t come overnight, but everything in the entire world will be connected and open. The challenge is to create systems that are open and that add value to the whole infrastructure. Open in that the interfaces are well known, and others can build applications around them.

E2T: So a chipmaker can change the world?

de Vries: The story is we see that if we want to apply our semiconductor technology smartly it requires a understanding of the bigger systems where that prodct is to end up in, be it an OEM or in a regulatory environment. It’s only through that where you can make a significant impact, and that is what we’re trying to do.

Computers are using more and more power — and costing IT departments a lot more money. Chalk it up to the ever-growing mountain of information that computers needs to sift through, and quickly. This has prompted search engines such as Google to use servers stacked with fast DRAM memory to rapidly offer up search results.

Traditionally, the way to handle more information has been to buy more servers in order to get more DRAM (Micron is offering lower-power DRAM as a “green” product). Spansion hopes to change all that by using a proprietary Flash memory called EcoRAM that replaces DRAM.

Flash doesn’t need to constantly refresh the data on the chip the way that DRAM does, so it consumes about a tenth of the power when handling a gigabyte of data. Plus you get more memory using EcoRAM (up to 128 gigabytes compared to 32 gigabytes for straight DRAM), which could translate into fewer servers, at least if you’re buying them primarily to boost memory speeds. Flash is slower, but Spansion maintains that EcoRAM is only slightly slower than DRAM yet costs about the same.

Spansion is working with Virident Systems, a startup in Milpitas, Calif., to deliver this new memory technology. This is a big opportunity for Spansion, because if EcoRAM succeeds it gives the memory company a product with higher margins than traditional Flash, which is a commodity offering. EcoRAM isn’t going to replace DRAM in every server, but if it finds a big enough market, lowering power consumption could raise Spansion’s bottom line.

Newsom traveled to Israel last week to meet with representatives of the company. The mayor’s office tells us that during a luncheon with Moshe Kaplinsky, CEO of Project Better Place Israel (pictured after the jump with the mayor), and Aliza Peleg, a rep from the startup’s U.S. offices, Newsom offered to work with Project Better Place if it would consider doing a test project in San Francisco. Newsom also met with the company’s chairman, Idan Offer, at a reception earlier.

The city is already in early talks with private companies that could potentially work with Project Better Place to build an electric vehicle infrastructure, according to the mayor’s office. Newsom was also said to be “very impressed” with the Project Better Place’s team in Israel.

If San Francisco does do a deal with Project Better Place, it would be the first city in the U.S. to get on board with Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure plan (with three cars, San Francisco currently has one of the largest plug-in hybrid fleets in the country). This is the first we’ve heard of Project Better Place being in serious discussions stateside; we’ve tried to contact them for comment and when we hear back, will update the post.

Project Better Place also showed off a prototype of its electric vehicle in Israel over the weekend. But by then, Newsom had already jetted back to the States to speak at the New Yorker’s “Stories from the Near Future,” conference. In his talk, he described Project Better Place’s plans in Israel, saying that San Francisco wants “to be the first city [in the country] to adopt that strategy.”

Video courtesy of Israel21c. Golden Gate Bridge photo courtesy of http2007.