Starting this month, Wal-mart’s Texas stores are meeting 15% of their energy needs with wind power. Austin — with decades of effort in clean energy — today has only 10% of its energy mix from renewables. How can Wal-mart be ahead of Austin Energy in the use of Green Power?
6 users commented in " Is Walmart outgreening Austin? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackWhile this is a startling development, it likely stems from the fact that Wal-mart does not own a bunch of fossil fuel plants (while Austin Energy does) and therefore Wal-mart has more flexibility to acquire the kind of energy it wants. Change is very hard. Austin continues to use what it owns first – which is coal, gas & nuke plants — and then squeezes in renewables as a second priority.
As long as Austin associates burning stuff with making money for the City, it will be a slow, difficult process to reduce carbon emissions and transition to cleaner power. If that linkage can be broken, however, change can happen rapidly as it has for Wal-mart.
Interestingly, Austin’s renewables goal is striving for 30%, while Wal-mart is already aiming for 100% clean energy.
For whatever reason, Austin’s investments in renewable energy make the local papers, but the much larger expenditures for fossil fuel rarely do. Case in point, Austin’s recent solar project commitment amounts to a maximum of $10 million per year (about $25 per customer per year) while the 2009 Austin Energy Capital Improvement Project budget — which includes building a new natural gas peaking plant — is almost $350 million (about $850 per customer this year alone). The new gas plant impacts the City’s current ability to keep libraries open & pay park police, while the solar plant expenditures are still years away and have no impact on the current city budget.
The FUNDAMENTAL DIRECTION of the community’s energy supply – whether more GREEN, more FOSSIL fuel, or BOTH — is among the most important questions shaping Austin’s future.
Significantly, Austin Energy’s current draft generation plan not only keeps all coal and gas plants operating during the next 12 years, it specifies adding even more fossil fuel plants in the future. (http://www.austinsmartenergy.com/divison.php?page=learn_more&sub=fact_sheet)
Hopefully citizens will take the time to educate themselves and press City Council candidates on what they plan to do if elected.
After all, Austin’s citizen are the owners of the local utility and if we don’t want our #1 fuel source to be coal (as it is currently), we need to speak up.
[...] March 25th Texas Green Network meeting, are viewable at the Austin Clean Energy blog. Also note the blog post at the site that wonders whether and why Walmart is outgreening Austin Energy. Categories: UncategorizedTags: [...]
“”the fact that Wal-mart does not own a bunch of fossil fuel plants (while Austin Energy does) and therefore Wal-mart has more flexibility to acquire the kind of energy it wants.”"
I agree with you Mike. It isn’t easy to change your you business system once it is running.
I am so happy to have read this post. Finally I can say: Take notes on Wal-mart, corporate America!
On a serious note, I think green tech needs to be made more affordable so more businesses see the investment as affordable. I’ve discussed this issue with many builders and the answer is always the same: Builders pass on green tech because it’s too expensive, and they cannot easily pass that expense on to buyers.
Wal-Mart has the capabilities and resources to quickly alter the way it consumes energy. Austin is going in the right direction, and headed there more quickly than other cities, but Wal-Mart has the purchasing power to battle against the higher pricing structure of green technology and energy sources.
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