Green Pioneer: Wal-Mart (really)

Yes, I know their labor practices are truly awful and their business model makes them the poster-child for all that is evil and exploitive about globalization, but I have to give some credit to Wal-Mart for their green strategy. (And yes, I have seen the terrifying documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.)

The retailer has two experimental stores, one in McKinney, Texas, and one in Aurora, Colo., that are just packed with alternative energy technology. They clearly put a lot of effort into making these buildings environmentally friendly, from the ground up.

To name just a few of the green projects: The parking lot is paved with a porous material, so rainstorm runoff won’t mix with oil and wash pollutants into the sewers. The roof is covered with solar cells, and there’s a wind turbine in the parking lot. The floors have pipes built into them that carry hot water, which helps heat the store. Used cooking oil from the deli is dumped into a furnace, which also helps heat the building. Even the smallest details have been thought through, from low-energy light bulbs to new designs on the freezer cases to hold in cold. I was impressed.

But I wasn’t totally convinced. Let’s get real; Wal-Mart is not exactly known for being touchy-feely, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire purpose of this project is nothing more than making the company look good.

But it’s also possible that they are on the right track. Wal-Mart is famous for paying scrupulous attention to its costs. That’s how it’s managed to become the behemoth it is, by trying to shave even fractions of a cent off of anything and everything. And, unlike many U.S. companies, they think long-term; Wal-Mart will spend millions now to save a few pennies tomorrow, as long as they can keep saving those pennies for years to come.

And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that we need when it comes to alternative energy.

The ding factor on green power has always been the cost. Yes, the systems are expensive, and yes, almost all the costs must be paid upfront, which scares off a lot of people.

But the benefits – lower energy costs, less consumption – start from day-one. Green power has to be seen as a long-term play, with long-term benefits.

So I dropped Wal-Mart a note to find out more about their energy strategy.

A spokeswoman wrote back, with some details, though not a lot (I’ve covered Wal-Mart before; it’s a very tough company to deal with, and being forthcoming with the press is not very high on their list of priorities). She wouldn’t say how much the company had spent on the projects, but she did say that the stores were definitely spending less on energy costs, about 8 percent less at the Colorado store compared to standard sites in the same area, and that the savings were expected to be even higher in the winter.

She said that the company sees these stores as labs, to see which alternative energy ideas offered the most savings, in terms of both power and cost, and that Wal-Mart eventually hopes to use that information to develop a new prototype store by 2010 that will be 25 to 30 percent more efficient, and produce 30 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, than standard stores.

In other words, the company does indeed seem to be planning for a green future, a model that other companies might do well to emulate. Now that’s the kind of everyday savings that I can really get behind.