San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, Councilmember Sam Liccardo, FST CTO Chris BeekhuisEditor's note: Sonia Aggarwal lives in San Francisco, and channels her passion for breakthrough renewable energy technologies into the Bay Area's lively world of cleanteach PR.

This Fourth of July, Fat Spaniel Technologies and the mayor of San Jose celebrate green as the new red, white and blue. On Monday, I headed south for a good old block party with a seriously high-tech twist.

Fat Spaniel founder and CTO, Chris Beekhuis, invited people to his house to charge up everything from electric vehicles to laptops using the excess power created by his solar energy system. Right now, if you use less electricity than your solar panels produce, you're exporting extra energy to the grid. However, you can't get a check from the utility company – you can only get a credit. This Energy Independence Day, Chris decided to share his sizeable solar credit with his neighbors and friends. He hasn't paid an energy bill in years because he got in on solar's ground floor.

He says, "In 1998, we installed a solar electric system on the side of our house. It was the second house in San Jose to do so. At that time, the utility did not have any standard testing procedures and we were expecting a return of something along the lines of 37.5 years. It was an act of passion, what I call Cleantech 1.0. Today things have really changed – our payback time has significantly improved."

Fat Spaniel Technologies was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Chris, a dataphile at heart, decided he wanted to measure exactly how much solar electricity his system was producing. So, he invented a software system that would make the revenue-grade information visible and accessible in real-time from any web-enabled device. Soon, the Fat Spaniel offering evolved into a highly visual dashboard displaying critical energy production information as well as fun tidbits like greenhouse gases avoided.

On this particular Monday afternoon in San Jose, it was so sunny that Chris couldn't give away enough energy to import anything from the grid…even though (true to Silicon Valley form) there were Blackberries, Trios, and electric vehicles galore sucking solar juice from the system. In a gratuitous effort to use up the three excess megawatt-hours of power, people brought vacuum cleaners to clean up the driveway, hair dryers (just in case the eighty degree weather wasn't enough) and an electric guitar for a solar-powered concert.

Mayor Chuck Reed touted solar's current reality and future potential:

We want to demonstrate the technology that's now available in Silicon Valley, where we are going to be the solar technology capital of the world. 95% of San Jose is already built. So that retrofit market is really important to achieve our overall goals of energy independence and getting as much energy as possible distributed in a way that it doesn't matter if the grid goes down, we're not out of business.

Try as we might, we only got to see 5% of Chris' extra clean power count down, but I would still say the event was a great success.