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In honor of our 42nd year printing the news and raising hell, the Guardian imagines a sustainable future for San Francisco, with visions for energy, land use, food, transportation, culture, and the economy. A city transformed:Fighting the power structure, and building a sustainable community, for 42 amazing years People's power:A sustainable energy system is well within San Francisco's reach First, do no harm:A sustainable land use plan is about what we don't allow as well as what we do Beyond the automobile:The road to sustainability has lanes for more than just cars Just Food Nation:Transforming how we eat will address poverty, public health, and environmental sustainability Culture isn't convenient:Sustaining entertainment and nightlife in San Francisco requires awareness and a policy shift The money at home:A sustainable local economy starts with small business - and the public sector

Expatriate Australian solar power company Ausra was one of the companies that featured heavily in my post on concentrating solar thermal power earlier in the year. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has opened Ausra's first plant, a 5 MW plant at Kimberlina in central California (the first to open in 20 years) which will generate enough electricity during peak hours to power 3,500 homes. Ausra's next plant will be a 177 MW plant nearby in San Luis Obispo County. The SMH quoted Schwarzenegger as saying "This next generation solar power plant is further evidence that reliable, renewable and pollution-free technology is here to stay, and it will lead to more California homes and businesses powered by sunshine. Not only will this large-scale solar facility generate power to help us meet our renewable energy goals, it will also generate new jobs as California continues to pioneer clean-tech industry".

With a new President and Congress, we have an unprecedented opportunity to transform our fossil fuel economy to one based largely on clean energy, while creating millions of jobs in the process. Last month, we offered a Clean Energy 2030 proposal for how the U.S. can dramatically scale up renewable energy, become smarter about how we use energy, and deploy millions of plug-in electric cars. Our energy team has continued crunching the numbers and just posted new data on job creation and cost savings on our knol. We'll keep updating the information and encourage everyone to take a look and comment - and offer alternative approaches if you disagree. Reaching the goals of Clean Energy 2030 will require a comprehensive effort by the new President and Congress.

That's what you get from fuel cells, as long as they're subsidized by generous grants By the time Hartford's Blue Hills Avenue reaches Bloomfield, it has turned into an economic-development director's fevered dream, with a parade of major corporations lining both sides of the wide avenue.

Researchers developing alternatives to fossil fuels are working with everything from algae to babassu oil to corn, but a California company says it can recycle carbon dioxide into fuel. Carbon Sciences claims it has developed a way of using the CO2 emitted during the combustion of coal, oil and other hydrocarbons to create transportation fuels like gasoline and jet fuel. Should Carbon Sciences - or any of the other firms working on similar projects - accomplish this on a large scale, it could bring a reduction in CO2 emissions as well as an abundant supply of renewable fuel.

WorldChanging has a brief post pointing to a symposium on urban life after oil - Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil. A number of great journalists were covering last weekend's Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil symposium in Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Penn Institute for Urban Research hosted this conference, which was organized with support from the Rockefeller Foundation to address the need to re-imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without oil. Our own Alex Steffen gave a mainstage talk at the international event, which featured a number of thinkers whose work we've written about before here, like Bull Dunster, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert Socolow, Andy Revkin, William J. Mitchell, David Orr, Neal Pierce, Bill Rees, Thomas Campanella, Harrison Fraker, and ARUP's Sir Peter Head. From brief recaps of plenaries and workshops to lengthier discussions of the theories presented (and their presenters), the pieces posted to the Next American City liveblog offer a taste of what was seen and heard at this innovative gathering of great minds.

Have you ever sat by the ocean and wondered at the power of waves? They continually come-one after another-never stopping their onslaught. The energy it takes to propel these waves is to put it simply, incredible. Now, consider what this means for energy production. The World Energy Council has estimated that approximately 2 terawatts (2 million megawatts), about double current world electricity production, could be produced from the oceans via wave power.

A MIT researcher has demonstrated a reaction which resembles the photosynthesis process that plants make each day which means that from now on solar power could be deployed at world scale. Using catalysts developed by the chemist, he showed a video where oxygen was generated from water, just like plants do it in photosynthesis. "I'm going to show you something I haven't showed anybody yet," said Daniel Nocera, the MIT chemist. After the lights were tuned off, he pointed to the video and asked - "Can you see that?" Then he explained - "Oxygen is pouring off of this electrode. This is the future. We've got the leaf." This means that the most difficult obstacle was overcame as from now on we efficiently produce hydrogen gas by splitting water thanks to his catalysts.

Since 1995, West Palm Beach-based Florida Crystals Corp. has been operating the largest biomass-to-electricity facility in North America, the Okeelanta Co-Generation Plant next to its sugar mill and refinery plant south of South Bay. The plant uses 850,000 tons of sugar cane residue known as bagasse and 900,000 tons of clean wood material from construction and yard wastes to produce 140 net megawatts of electricity each year. The power is sold to Florida Power & Light Co. to provide electricity to 58,000 homes, said Florida Crystals spokesman Gaston Cantens.

Our American way of life is unsustainable; rather than attempting to perpetuate it, we must transition beyond it-quickly. Should we fail to do so, our society will collapse-in the not-too-distant future… Message to mainstream America: our American way of life-300+ million people enjoying historically unprecedented living standards-has been enabled by our increasingly dysfunctional ecological and economic behavior over the past 200 years. Our existing way of life is therefore unsustainable; in fact, America is facing imminent societal collapse.

tullamarine interchange, tullamarine solar power, solar power, solar sound barrier, solar power barrier, sound-proof solar panels, noise reduction solar barriers In the search for a solar solution to power our cities, one of our biggest obstacles is the massive acreage required by conventional arrays. Photovoltaic panels are flat and expansive, and urban centers are at a serious loss for free space. Now Australian renewable energy retailer Going Solar has conceived of a clever strategy that infuses urban transit systems with energy producing potential - install solar panels in highways as sound barriers!

The Peruvian alternative energy company Iberoperuana Inversiones SAC has commenced construction on a 240 megawatt wind energy farm. It is Peru's first major alternative energy project. Iberoperuana Inversiones plans to invest $240 million in the farm, which is projected to provide clean electricity for an estimated 80,000 families in Peru's southern desert region of Paracas. The wind energy park will be located near the city of Ica (near Paracas National Park and the Nazca Lines) and will be known as the "Parque Eólico San Andrés" (San Andrés Wind Park).

It is time to pay close attention to President Eisenhower's warning. In the past six months, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has begun a major effort to define the future of energy supplies for the U.S. and for its military allies. If military brass reach their goal, the transportation fuel of the future will be based on coal. According to Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson, the USAF plan is to:

While still a small percentage of overall electric generation, there's no denying that wind power has been growing consistently in the United States. In 2007, an additional 5,329 megawatts of capacity was added, an amount which was slightly more than a quarter of all new global wind capacity that year. Currently an additional 8 gigawatts of wind capacity is under construction and scheduled to be operational by the end of 2008. The result: This will be the third straight year that the United States leads the world in annual wind power installations, according to a new study by Emerging Energy Research.

By changing the way that conventional silicon solar panels are made, Day4 Energy, a startup based in Burnaby, British Columbia, has found a way to cut the cost of solar power by 25 percent, says George Rubin, the company's president.

At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, the scale of some of the new solar power plants being announced over the past few weeks are just astounding. PG&E has contracted with a 250 MW and a 500 MW solar plant in California, a 250 MW integrated solar plant/manufacturing facility is being built in India, and the Clinton Foundation is discussing building a similar 5,000 MW facility in a different part of India. At the beginning of the summer a new 10 MW thin-film facility was claiming the record for that category and a 400 MW solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert was big news. Furthering the great solar scale-up:

New satellite measurements show that crucial sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has plummeted to its second-lowest level on record. Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But more and more ice is being lost and not recovered. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, announced Wednesday that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point on record is 1.65 million square miles set last September. With about three weeks left in the melt season, the record may fall, scientists say.

The University of Twente (UT) has devised a concrete capable of converting the nitrogen oxide from car exhaust--the source of smog and acid rain--into a nitrate, another chemical that will wash away in the rain.

Construction on the nation's first solar demonstration project in a highway right of way has begun. At the Interstate 5 and Interstate 205 interchange in Tualatin, Oregon, 594 solar panels are being installed on a strip of land beside the highway roughly the length of two football fields. Governor Ted Kulongoski, with transportation and utilities officials, broke ground on Thursday on the all-Oregon project.

We've written with great fanfare about Beluga Skysails, the cargo ship that has successfully used a large kite to generate energy for operations during windy periods at sea. The billowing kite cut energy around 20 percent during a trip from Venezuela to Germany and up to Norway earlier in 2008.