I was a founder of Renewable Choice, the company Whole Foods selected as their wind vendor. Quayle, the CEO of Renewable Choice, has been working with Whole Foods on this big deal for the past six months.

Whole Foods is going all the way on this. The deal will cover all their stores, and I'm pretty sure it also covers their corporate offices, bakeries, and distribution centers.

I do know that there was A LOT of support internally within Whole Foods for making this happen. They are walking the talk on this one.

You can get lots of details, including the pollution they are saving with their purchase, by clicking over to the http://www.renewablechoice.com/m/wf.html>Renewable Choice site.

I'll be posting some background info on Renewable Choice at www.sheagunther.org (my blog), if anyone is interested in hearing about a little wind company that could.

If anyone truly deserves our support, it's Whole Foods. Time and time again, they show that they are concerned with doing the right thing and leading the way with environmentalism, animal welfare, health, and so on.

Now if there was just a closer store to my car-less self... :P

Wind is great as a talking point, but in the US it is such a small part of the energy supply that it has virtually no impact. Even by 2010, it will only be 1% of the energy supply. I've got the math at Earth Sentinel, which covers peak oil, renewable energy, and climate change.
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I don't dispute the numbers but point out that context is everything when discussing importance of locally generated renewable energy. Hydroelectric power is the single largest source of renewable energy in the nation today. In some regions, say around Buffalo NY or in the Pacific NW for example, hydro is a dominant source. When numerous hydro facilties were installed in the first half of the last century, largely with government subsidy, concentrated in the West and South, one could have said the same thing about hydro (that it was a small fraction of what was available). Compared to the original hydroelectic facility equipment , the efficiency of modern hydroelectric turbines is almost double what was originally available; and upgrading the old ones will be one way to increase the amount of renewable electricity available to the nation.

Various analysts have pegged the optimum prospective amount of wind power to be fed to the grid at around 30%. Some say more, some less. I think wind will end up close to that level of significance because we will have no choice. But I do not think we will get there only by constructing more wind farms. I think we'll get to the 30% level by reducing our dependence on non-renewable sources of carbon emitting fuels while at the same time we up the capacities for renewable electricity plus nuclear. Where will the reductions come from? The most glaring example of wasted electricity -- and I'd live to see a ballpark estimate of how much carbon is entangled with it -- is needless lighting of public spaces, buldings, and streets. I have yet to see a well corroborated study which demonstrates that lighting leads to reduced crime rates in developed areas. If such a correlation were established in a scientific manner, then I'd next like to see a study that determines the cutoff point where lowering average street level luminosity and increasing the standard spread results in an increase in criime. And a study that determines the "no effect" upper boundary whereafter increased lighting offers no further benefit beyond the subjective allaying of unreasoned fear. As I say, context is everything. Future sacrifices will not be determed by yesterday's priorities and fears but by what must be done.

Ok, I need to finally ask. What is the point of these kinds of "credits"?

Whole Foods isn't actually using wind energy to power their stores, so who gets the money they are spending on the credits, and why? Are the organizations that are paid for the credits turning around and giving out free wind power to other people?

Wouldn't it make more sense for Whole Foods to invest in putting actual windmills on their stores/wharehouses/bakeries, or maybe donating the money to the local communities so that the communities themselves can install their own windmills to power the community?

Turil,

I didn't actually understand how this worked either, until I saw a panel discussion on 'greentags'.

The money for the greentags helps pay for building and operating the windmills. Better to let windmills be built where they are accepted and/or are most effective, and let the credits be sold to fund the construction of more. At the least, it makes wind energy more lucrative and appealing to mainstream investors (who have most of the capitol)

Please.

Can we change the very misleading title of this post? Whole Foods is NOT going 100% wind power for 2006. They are buying credits to greenwash business as usual.

Here are the top ten "green" companies:

Whole Foods Market Inc.
Johnson & Johnson
DuPont & Co.
Starbucks Corp.
IBM Corp.
Safeway Inc.
HSBC
NatureWorks LLC
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
WhiteWave Foods

From here:
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/01/11wholefoods.html

Hardly a pantheon of environmentally responsible corporate citizens. The headline on this post should be "Whole Foods purchases wind power credits for 2006." Treehugger should not uncritically post Whole Foods press releases.

Perspective.

Further explanation seems in order. Certainly we would all agree that the majority of US citizens can not have their own wind turbine: a consequence of living in a big city, in an apartment, on a small lot, or where low wind velocity or zoning regulations make it unpractical. Given that we meet less than 2% of our natonal electicity demand with wind power, the challenge before us is to create incentives to boost wind generation capacities. And as stated, the majority of the populace will benefit via the regional grids and national interconnections of these grids, both in terms of access and the reduced emission that mitigate climate impacts. It is the same in every nation of the world.

This is not to overlook the pioneers who did and continue to to install their own wind capacity. Bravo to them. But the reality is we must do more for society as a whole.

Whole Foods then is a pioneer of a different sort. They are exploring ways to bring more wind capacity on line at a faster pace, given that most of their stores are not suitable sites for wind farms! It happens that doing this makes them look good, so they are taking advantage of that. It's good for their brand and for their stock.

Lets try a water supply analogy to explain why this should not be thought of as "greenwashing" per se.. Think of the grid system as a river where current flows in from small suppliers, enters major distribution liines and is sold to city dwellers downstream, so to speak. In a true watershed, few water consuming customers would ever know the details of every upstream rivulet, spring, creek or pond that contributes water to the river their drinking water comes from. Nor would they bother to understand the precipitation and evaporation trends over every corner of "their" watershed, Nor the groundwater flow regimes. In short, the origins and eventual uses are only symbolically understood. Same for grid distributed electricity.

Now imagine that a terrible shortage of water comes about. Water prices become unaffordable for the poor as the river dries up and trucks must import it from other watersheds. Crops are dying. Business are closing. Folks moving away. Someone invents a technology that will help business greatly reduce their water consumption, leaving more in the river as a "commons" for downstream users to withdraw from. THe problem is that this conservation technology is new and expensive. Investors and owners are reluctant, not knowing how long the drought will last. So a credit transfer program is devised where business who consume much water but lack the space or or resources to install the new technology can "invest" in installations upstream by other users, which in turn free's up water for the commons, including them. Let's ask ourselves, would that too be greenwashing? And how important is it to our answer that the credit purchasers do or do not seek publicity from their investment?

AWESOME!!!

i want a windfarm in my frontyard~

GO GREEN!

better yet... GO GREENDAY!

:D

she }{