MAYOR HAMILTON:
We are proud to have Calisolar as a growing member of the Sunnyvale business community and I want to thank you all for joining us in congratulating Calisolar with their success. (Applause) And now it is my privilege to welcome Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the podium. (Applause)

GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER:
Well, thank you very much, Mayor Hamilton, for your nice introduction. And you actually make a nice MC. I mean, what a good job you're doing here. Thank you, Mayor and thank you, Roy Johnson, CEO of Calisolar and your partners and Secretary Vickie Bradshaw and Supervisor Kniss and everyone for taking us around this plant here and giving us a great tour and educating us on how really to build those solars. I mean, we can now go out there and create our own panels, we have so much information now from all this education we have gotten.
It's wonderful to be here today because this company is what California is all about. It creates such great contributions to our environment, such great contributions to our economy. It's a perfect example that you can put the two together, the economy and the environment and protect both. And so we want to congratulate this company, Calisolar, for the great, great work that they are doing.
And, of course, I'm always a governor that enjoys going to celebrations, of ribbon cutting or of celebrating when people hire more workforce or expanding the company. Here, this company does it all. We're expanding, we're doing the ribbon cutting, we are hiring more people and this is really terrific for us all. There's a lot of action here and expansion.
And this is very important, to create jobs and in these tough times there is nothing that is more important than jobs. I mean, I just have said that during my State of the State address. I said we have a lot of different challenges ahead of us but there is no challenge that is more important than creating jobs and that's why I said it's all about jobs, jobs, jobs this year. And so we have been concentrating and campaigning up and down the state of California to talk about jobs. And I promised the people that I would not stop fighting until we get everyone a job. Anyone in California that is willing to work ought to have a job.
And last week we delivered on that promise. On Wednesday I signed Senate Bill 71, that the mayor has mentioned, to exempt green-technology manufacturing equipment from sales tax. I mean, it was crazy that up until now manufacturing equipment in green technology was charged a tax, a sales tax. Well, now we have exempted that manufacturing equipment in green technology from that.
But I think that we should actually exempt all manufacturing equipment here in California from the sales tax, because that's what most other states are doing. There are only three states left that are taxing manufacturing equipment and I think that that does make us really as competitive as other states. So in order to be competitive we've got to get rid of those kinds of sales taxes on all manufacturing equipment.
And I will be working with the legislature on that. The legislators feel a little bit reluctant about that because they think that will take money away from the state. But you know, if I have a choice of giving tax incentives for manufacturing equipment and not charging a tax, or going and paying those hundreds of billions of dollars for state employees' pensions, I'd rather use it for this because this really stimulates the economy. So this is where my head is at and I will be campaigning for that. (Applause)
Because let's not forget, as I read today in the LA Times, that when Lincoln talked in the Gettysburg Address about government he said, "Government is of the people, by the people, for the people." He didn't talk about it's of the state employees, by the state employees and for the state employees. There was no mention of that. So we want to make sure that we keep that promise and we make government for all of the people, especially for companies like this that are producing so many great, great jobs.
By the end of this year the capacity of this facility will be increasing; it will increase from 150 employees to 250 employees. And that's what I love about this. That's why I wanted to come here to say personally as governor and representing all the people of California, say thank you to this company here for the great work that they are doing here.
And what is terrific also is as this company expands I'm proud to say that they also will be able to take advantage of the two tax exemptions. What they will do is, by saving this money, by not being now taxed for the manufacturing equipment, they will use that money now to expand -- and we just talked about the great plan that they have to expand -- and they will use that money for hiring more people and this is what it's all about.
And what is such a jewel here also and why I love this company, is there's exciting news that Calisolar has recently hired several of the workers who used to work at the NUMMI plant in Fremont. Now, we all know the tragedy there, that they went out of business and they moved on. They closed the plant down and there are thousands of workers there that are unemployed. But those are very highly skilled workers, so now at this company here looks at those workers and says, "Wait a minute, there are some smart people and talented people there. They don't have to be retrained or anything. Let's bring them in." And that's what they're doing right now, so congratulations. Let's give them a big hand also for that great action. (Applause)
SB 71 will send a clear message to every CEO, every innovator and entrepreneur, that if you invest and if you do something that has to do with the clean and green future of California, California will invest in you. And this is what this company is all about. So I want to say thank you to the legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, that have worked together so hard in order to get this package sent down to me, to pass it upstairs in the legislature, send it to my desk and for me to sign it. And that's exactly what we did last week.
Now, I talked a lot about the awesome potential of green jobs and green economy. Of course there are a lot of people that are also skeptics about all of this. But let me tell you something, that numbers don't lie and statistics don't lie. Let me just give you some examples. In 2009, while a terrible recession strangled economies all around the world and we have seen the economic slowdown, the biggest since the Great Depression, clean energy was the one bright spot, was the one bright spot all over the world.
    * Last year more than $60 billion were spent around the globe just on wind farms alone. That's a 24 percent increase since 2008. That just shows you, while the rest of the economy went down, a 24 percent increase in wind technology.
    * And the global biofuel market rose 30 percent to $45 billion, also at the time when everything else went down.
And look what's happening here in California. Since 2005, green jobs in California have grown ten times faster than in any other sector. And we lead the nation in clean energy business with more than 10,000 and we attract more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. So think about it, 57 percent of venture capital from the United States comes right here to California in green technology.
Three decades ago it was the aerospace industry that propelled and that powered our economy. Then it was the computer industry that did exactly that and really pushed our economy forward and created great revenues for the state. And now it's clean technology; that's the next wave. And that's why the Wall Street Journal has already said that this is California's new Gold Rush, green technology.
So let me once again say thank you very much to Roy and to his partners and to the whole company here, Calisolar, for the great, great work. And also thank you so much to all the employees that are working very hard and that are creating the action right here. So let's give them all a big hand also for the great work that they are doing. (Applause) I want to thank all of you for the great contributions that you make for California. Keep up the great work. And I promise you, I'll be back. (Laughter, applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
And now I would like to have Roy Johnson come out and say a few words. Thank you.

MR. JOHNSON:
Thank you so much, Governor. Thank you for coming today and spending time with us. And also, thank you very much for the leadership that you showed on SB 71. This is very important legislation for our industry and for our company.
As the Governor said, the taxing of manufacturing equipment, the sales tax on manufacturing equipment, is very counterproductive. It makes it much harder for us to finance our growth, to expand and to continue to expand in California and that is certainly our intention. As the Governor said, we're at 150 people in this facility today, we'll be at 250 people in the next year. And we don't know how much further beyond that it goes. If the company is successful and we continue to expand, this is just a down payment on how big this company can get as we go forward.
One of the critical things that we need is this level playing field and this legislation has helped to level that playing field compared to companies in other jurisdictions. We count on support from the government, or at least neutrality, as we go forward. And we know that we own a lot of the responsibility for making this successful. We've got an awful lot of very, very smart people in this company here in Sunnyvale, in our facility in Berlin, in our facility in Toronto, that have all been very, very critical to our success and our ability to create a cost advantage in the industry. And one of the things that we will do as we go forward is we believe that we can be one of the low-cost producers of solar in the world, compared to anybody, compared to any Chinese company and European company, anywhere else and that is absolutely critical. (Applause)
And for years people have been saying you can't really manufacture in Silicon Valley anymore and I think the solar industry in particular - not just Calisolar but other companies that are in Silicon Valley, Solyndra and a whole series of others that are manufacturing here -- are continuing to prove that if you're smart about the way you work and you're smart about the way you develop technology you can take advantage of the very, very capable workforce that you have in Silicon Valley and be competitive on a worldwide scale.
So thank you all for coming today. Let me thank especially the Calisolar employees who have worked so hard to get this facility built and online. (Applause) When this company - it's hard to believe that in only four years from the time that Kamel and the other two founders came in to talk to a couple of our VCs -- Ullas Naik is here from Globespan and Advanced Technology Ventures -- who funded us in the very early days when it was three guys and PowerPoint pitch. And this is classic Silicon Valley story where here we are with 150 people in this facility a little less than four years later. So we have revenue, we have customers and it's all going uphill from here. So thank you very much. (Applause)
At this point, Governor, I think we'd like to step back here and cut the ribbon to open the facility officially. And if you'd join us back there? Thank you. (Applause)