Jay Inslee: “Just one general one, and that is that the reason our approach to greening the Capitol works is that we are the…”

“Just one general one, and that is that the reason our approach to greening the Capitol works is that we are the optimists in this debate. We are the people who believe that options exist, that technologies will continue to grow, and as a result of that, Americans will have more choices of how they use energy and how they produce energy. We have mentioned some of those new technologies tonight. I will just give you an example of a couple I've learned about in the last year about how to produce green electricity. We have made a commitment to buy green electricity for the U.S. House of Representatives. I just want to mention a couple of new ways to produce it. One is wave power. If you have ever watched a big ship bob up and down on the waves, you understand how much power there is on the ocean. We have people capturing that energy and able to create electricity. This is a picture of a buoy. A similar one is going off the coast of Oregon this fall. The first wave power buoys in the world to be deployed were in Hawaii and are now powering some naval stations. These are designed to essentially capture energy. As these buoys bob up and down, they compress water or air, creating pressure, which drives a generator, creates electricity, goes to the shore on a wire. Each have the capability to power close to 1,000 homes. There is enough energy in the waves in a 10-by-10-mile stretch off the Pacific Coast to produce all of the electricity for the State of California.”