Buying Power on Credit

The source of Whole Foods Market’s electricity is, with apologies to Bob Dylan, blowin’ in the wind. The Austin, Texas-based grocer was the first Fortune 500 company to buy wind-generated power to cover 100 percent of its purchased electricity use across all U.S. operations. Highlighting wind power and its benefits has become standard operating procedure at this grocery chain.

The first national certified organic grocer, Whole Foods has more than 270 stores in the United States, Canada and the U.K. Under the direction of Green Mission task force leader and senior global vice president Michael Besancon, Whole Foods has made green power purchasing a company-wide practice.

You won’t find windmills atop your local Whole Foods Market; it is not physically possible to deliver electrons from a wind farm directly to an end user. Instead, Boulder, Colo.-based Renewable Choice Energy buys wind-energy certificates, sometimes called green tickets, from wind producers.

When a wind farm produces electricity, renewable energy credits are issued to track the exact amount of power created. The producers guarantee that they will deliver the wind electricity to the power grid on Whole Foods’ behalf.

The credits, in effect, shift the amount of conventional electricity generation required away from fuels like natural gas, coal and oil. Green-e, an independent certification program, is responsible for verifying that no two certificates are for the same megawatt-hour of electricity.

Historic purchase
Whole Foods Market made its first purchase of renewable energy credits — and the largest purchase of energy credits ever made in the United States — from wind farms in January 2006. The purchase allowed the grocer to offset 100 percent of the electricity used in all of its stores and other facilities in the United States and Canada, thereby preventing more than 700 million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution from entering the environment in 2006.

According to the company, that represents the equivalent of removing more than 60,000 cars from the road or planting more than 90,000 acres of trees.

Whole Foods’ green energy policies place it on the EPA’s National Top 25 and Top 10 Retail lists, and the grocer was the EPA’s Green Power Partner of the Year in 2006 and 2007.

POP green power
In 2007, the company increased its purchase to more than 509 million kilowatt-hours of wind-based renewable energy certificates to fuel its continuing new store growth. This purchase was among the largest in the EPA’s Green Power Partnership, a voluntary program that supports the organizational purchase of green power by offering advice, technical support, tools and resources.

Whole Foods reached out to its customers in 2006 by offering Wind Power Cards — wind energy credits that can be purchased at the checkout counter. The Wind Power Card is a first-of-its kind retail product that makes point-of-purchase green power sales easy for the retailer and customers.

Wind Power cards enable consumers to buy certified wind energy credits equivalent to a household’s average monthly electricity consumption: 750-kilowatt hours for a family, 250-kilowatt hours for an individual. The cards, activated on purchase, double as refrigerator magnets.