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Walmart Goes Solar In California
tekgoblin writes "Walmart today has announced that it plans to install solar panels on more than 75 percent of its stores in the state. From the article: 'When completed, Walmart’s solar commitment in California is expected to generate up to 70 million kilowatt hours of clean, renewable energy per year, which is equal to powering more than 5,400 homes. It will also avoid producing more than 21,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is equal to 4,100 cars off the road and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric needs.'"
Wal-Mart not supporting the local power generating economy? "Wal-Mart is stealing power from the sun! The old stores used to use power from the nuclear plant! What about the nuclear plant employes out of jobs?"
Some news that will help get solar taken seriously. I understand its not the end-all of our energy problems (not even close), but its nice to see it get to a price point where the largest of corporations begin to utilize it. I'm not sure if the state granted any subsidies, but I'd have to say if they are going to subsidize something, at least this can't cause radiation evacuations, black lung, acid rain, and the like.
Ok, I'm not going to come with the cliched "citation needed", but dude... do you have any evidence to back up any of this?
What's the bet that Walmart is importing these panels from China?
Here's another way that Walmart could reduce its carbon footprint: Walmart could go away, and take its practice of burning energy to import wasteful landfill-destined crap from countries with lax environmental standards with it.
So the question ultimately is how much money are they expecting to save doing this. Given WalMart's general reputation, I'm sure they're not doing this to be a glowing example of corporate citizenship and any 'green' side-effects are entirely coincidental.
and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric needs.
The remainder of the store, as usual is powered by crushing up the hopes and dreams of it's employees and competitors.
Solar power to run the lighting inside? How about just using the light directly via skylights?
Didn't you see? his friend from China told him so.
Say what you will about Walmart; but they deal hard. I wonder how much they are paying per watt for this installation.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Now give people 40 hours shifts, and better pay and working conditions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They might actually become the real competition and/or supplier for power companies, consumers and/or businesses, depending on how much money can be made. This is what capitalism is truly about.
Dude, it was vetted by a friend of his.. a FRIEND.What more do you need~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
An inconvenient truth was just on tv here and watched it again after all these years. Coming on /. and reading this news feel good. I've heard bad things about Walmart but this makes them earn a great deal of my respect.
OP is correct. You only have to read recent news.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-solar-20110920,0,2015603.story
http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/32974
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China
A citation would be nice, I guess.
It's a well known fact that by outsourcing manufacturing to China, one effectively subcontracts borderline slave labor and gets around environmental regulations. This has been reported so many times that you've got to be sticking your head in the sand to be unaware of it.
While it is true that skepticism correlates with intelligence, demanding citations for borderline obvious[*] and well reported facts only makes you look uninformed. I think the burden of proof falls on you for this one.
[*] There clearly is a catch as to why Chinese-made products are so much cheaper than American ones, despite having to cross the Pacific and being manufactured by a less educated and workforce in poor living conditions.
How does any of that prove that Wal-Mart is going to get their solar equipment from China?
So this is implying that each big box uses the same electricity as up to 27,000 homes? Shocking.
In California, electrical rates are insanely high. Even with the relatively low efficiency of solar and the high associated costs, when subsidies are taken into account it may simply be the cheapest path forward.
None of this addresses why California's electrical rates are so high to begin with, of course.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/chinas-solar-technology-pollutes-local-ecology-61860.html
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g4lPhvjROoqGH-eR2NB2er_R6vDA?docId=CNG.5cc676d2b02da276cd06b20df22fe7f6.261
PV panels can store energy in batteries. Skylights cannot. But perhaps a mix of the two approaches might be best.
Is this cost effective for WalMart, or are they getting some special deal or kickback?
On the positive side, as large scale deployment of solar panel increase, I'd expect the cost of the panel to fall.
Sure it's the cheapest path forward for Walmart, they'll collect a bunch of subsidies paid for by us CA utility customers and taxpayers.
You know, if they just put in some windows (hey light tubes too!), they could save a whole lot more money on lighting too.
It always amazes me walking into these huge stores in the middle of the day, and they have hundreds of lights on to make it as bright inside as it already is outside. How hard is this to figure out?
:T:R:A:N:S:
Solyndra probably could've used some of that business, except that with the way Wally World works, they probably would insist Solyndra to relocate their factory to China...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Unionize and and watch Wally World close down stores.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I hope the solar cells are made in the USA but at the very least a large number of people will be employed doing the installs on these bid stores. Good for Wall Mart .
I thought for a moment that the bankrupt Solyndra supplied the solar products to Walmart at a huge loss. So in a roundabout way, maybe the taxpayers funded the Walmart solar effort.
I just Know this is going to spawn some kind of Zombie film story, where the characters all end up at a Walmart because the power stays on. Or perhaps the Walmarts become the centers of resistance, with strange consequences for the future reshaping of society.
They will at least have partial power now when California goes dark.
They could be talking about skylights. If Walmart doesn't want to sacrifice the solar panel real estate on the roof they could route the outside light inside using mirrors.
According to my calculations, this works out to about 8 Mwatts of generating capacity, approximately .045% of the total generating capacity in California...
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
if you know anything bought walmart stores they are horrid over-sized stores that eat power. they need like 3 dedicated transformers to them i know this being are store blew one of them and most of the store was still running dispite being power starved lights and stuff where funky thow. trust me thers nothing green bought a walmart.and where probably under pressure from the states to do it, walmart does nothing without legal threats.
Solar panels on 75% of its stores will produce 20-30% (let's average at 25%) of those stores' electricity needs.This is 70m kWh, equal to the power for 5,400 homes and polution equal to 21,700 metric tons of CO2/4100 cars.
So, they currently produce 4x that across those 75% of their stores plus a third again of that total for their other 25%. So 5 1/3x that figure. Or over 100,000 metric tons of CO2, the equivalent of almost 22,000 cars and draw the power of almost 30,000 homes - over a third of a billion kilowatt hours and about 10% of the total energy a 500 megawatt coal power station can produce.
Even after the savings, they'll be producing 80,000 metric tons of CO2, 15,000 car equivalents and drawing the power of 25,000 homes - over 300,000,000 kilowatt hours.
And all of this excludes the CO2 their truck fleets produce.
It's a nice start but there's a long, long way to go.
I wonder what the return would have been if they had installed skylights instead. Surely skylight provide more usable light then converting solar energy into usable AC. Sure, one could say that skylights don't allow you to store power, or return power to the grid and get something like a Feed in Terrif (Ontario, Canada). Even compared to solar on a overcast or rainy day, I would assume they would still be more efficient. Maybe I shouldn't assume.
In my current job I manage development at an environmental software provider. We have a couple dozen chemical and petrochemical customers who are using our software to calculate and report there GHG emissions to the EPA. We are actually in the middle of the first year of reporting for 2010 this month. The plants who are reporting make chemicals that are used directly or indirectly be each of us everyday including ethylene, glycols, nylon precursors...the list goes on. To the point, a single ethylene cracker I just ran calculations for has about 750,000 metric tons CO2 emissions per year . At one particular plant there are 8 of these crackers operating year round. This one plant represents less than 2% of the worldwide capacity of ethylene. I will not even go into the refinery calculations and the emissions generated by the products they make (which we all consume).
Simply put, the stated 21,700 tons of CO2 saved by this solar project is trivial. It is great if Wal-Mart can save money or be more efficient with this project, but to even try selling it as any sort of significant environmental project is ludicrous. I would venture to guess that Wal-Mart could make a much larger impact, from an environmental standpoint, by looking at their suppliers and demanding responsible operation at the manufacturing level.
To see the daily power generation for California's CAISO, including the contributions by wind and solar, here is the URL:
http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx
For 2011-09-21, peak power was about 38,000MW, peak wind contribution was about 1100MW, peak solar contribution was about 450MW
Perhaps as more Walmart's, Ikea's, and residental grid-tied PV is added, the solar contributions will rise to what wind adds now.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Do not be distracted by the politics. This is just good business. With tax rebates, rooftop solar systems in California can pay for themselves and provide a decent profit rather quickly. Many Walmarts already have solar installed. Take a look with google maps at this Walmart: 2770 Carson St, Lakewood, CA.
Cue the WalMart Hate Brigade in 3... 2... 1...
I really wish our culture had more interesting bogeymen.
So they'd get everything they sell from China, but their solar panels from the US?
In the Western world? Get serious.
California has high electrical costs because it uses low-carbon sources (natural gas) that cost more than coal. Additionally, the prices for electricity were locked in at a time when Enron and other companies were artificially manipulating the price of it. Far from there being no protection, these manipulations were neither legal nor moral.
The electric company that maintains the infrastructure (PG&E for most of California) doesn't generate or sell electricity, so they don't get to decide the cost of it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Solar power for Walmart seems like good plan.
Grid-tie solar systems aren't going to be counted in those numbers (PG&E only meters the net, they don't collect statistics on how large a chunk the solar takes out of it). Only solar power plants were counted in those statistics.
Still, grid-tie systems probably do not reduce total system demand by a whole lot. From my read we have ~252MW of residential solar installed and ~356MW non-residential, which comes to around ~600MW. It's unclear whether the non-residential is just counting commercial retain installations or whether it is also counting solar power stations but I think it's just commercial retail (the number would be too low if it counted both). And, of course, that's just peak generation.
http://californiasolarstatistics.ca.gov/reports/agency_stats/
The wind numbers are quite impressive. There are some excellent wind corridors in CA.
-Matt
Re the Torvalds quote in your signature: I think that is literally the first time I've heard anything from him that I agree with whole-heartedly.
Thank you for a genuinely new experience!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
70 million kWh
Or they could just use the SI and say 70 GWh, instead of 70 thousand thousand thousand Wh.
Left as is Wal-Mart would pay its own electric bills. But this way our Out Of Cash Federal Gov can go deeper in debt to the Chinese and have our Grandchildren pay some of Wal-Marts electric bills, (plus massive amounts of compounded interest). Yep, that's Government working like it should... And since the yiungest can't vote, through on taxation without representation as well.
Uh, that's pretty much all accepted dogma. What he's missing is that emissions are out of control here in the USA. I personally know someone who used to be paid to climb stacks to check for emissions... power plants, factories, refineries. Everything he checked was out of compliance. My landlord is also some kind of geological and ecological surveyor that works on government contracts, etc. His statement was that we can find stacks out of compliance literally as fast as we can pay people to climb them. Our EPA has no teeth — it cannot simply walk up to a plant and shut down production.
On the other hand, the advantage of solar panels is that they stop polluting once they're made. So given that SOMETHING is going to be made by burning all that coal, solar panels should be one of our favorite things to make. A crystalline panel lasts a typical 20 years and maybe twice that if you're lucky, and pays back the energy cost of its production in seven years. If you build a new coal plant, that takes a whole bunch of energy, and now it pollutes throughout its lifetime.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Noticeably missing from the article was the source of those solar panels. I seems like Walmart has been on a crusade to crush American manufacturing so I would hazard a guess they will be made in China.
Makes all those Ma and Pa general stores look like *sshats now.
"When completed, Walmart’s solar commitment in California is expected to generate up to 70 million kilowatt hours of clean, renewable energy per year, which is equal to powering more than 5,400 homes. It will also avoid producing more than 21,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is equal to 4,100 cars off the road and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric needs." So, does that mean that a Walmart uses as much energy as 27,000 homes? That, even after the solar panels are installed, there are still 86,800 metric tons of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere from each and every Walmart? Please, enlighten, if that's not the case, but it seems to me the greener choice would be to shut them down all together.
Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit.
The general consensus, as I read the current climate, is that Solar energy is not "economical". Walmart is the very epitome of "economical" with their dollars. So, what's wrong here? Walmart is doing something other than "generating clean cheap power" (i.e. it's a marketing stunt) or, Walmart see's it as economical (outside the realm of good marketing dollars)? If the later is true, does this mark the beginning of a new era in power generation (I doubt it).
Besides energy savings, one should factor in the decreased CO2 production.
Any energy savings is a plus, it's the decrease in CO2 emissions that are the real long term benefit.
Why do so many of the workers have 10, 15, and 20 year stickers on their badge. The job might not suit you, but to have that many people with that kind of seniority, they must be doing some things right.
No, because they don't get everything they sell from China. Hyperbole doesn't strengthen your point.
Wal-Mart could be 100% green, and it still will be just as aggrivating to be constantly asked if we want to get their damn rewards mastercard. -_-
IT Professional.
There is already little room left for China to further slash sulfur emissions, said the ministry source. By the end of 2009, about 71 percent of coal-fired power plants had been equipped with sulfur scrubbers, compared to 12 percent back in 2005. "The next step is to take a closer look at whether these facilities are actually put into use," he said.
Read article and you will see a number of inconsistencies. SO2 goes down, but NOx goes up? Nope. Likewise, SO2 goes down, but more and more damage is occurring? Nope.
When my friends did the study, they agreed to not publish. So, not published. The problem is that the numbers that they came up with absolutely do NOT match what is claimed by the ministry. However, the Chinese ministry KNOWS that (which is why they forbid the publishing; they wanted the correct numbers and technology, but that was figured out at the end of the trip when all of their packed gear disappeared, though not personal luggage; the gear is used for monitoring much our national and state land). The issue is that turning this stuff on would actually drop their SO2 and NOx a great deal, BUT, it costs something like 10-20% efficiency. China is more than 80% coal based for electricity. Imagine if we lost 8-16% of our electricity. Anywhere in the west, it would be TIGHT. In china, they are already tight. It would be catastrophic to their ability to subsidize their energy and dump. So, China will continue to pollute. They absolutely have ZERO intention of turning on emissions control. NONE.
Likewise, they will continue to dump in the oceans. Their attitude is turning to one that other nations are buying their stuff so we can absorb the pollution as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not relevant at all when the blocked projects you mentioned are a fraction of the size.
As for "billions of dollars", well there's nothing polite that can be said about such a deliberate exaggeration.
So those projects were blocked were they?
Why are you playing such a silly little game that requires stupidity and inattention on the part of the people you are lying to? Why do you think this is important enough to lie about anyway?
You provided a list of installations that exist and pretended that they don't because they were stopped and THEN tell ME to have some integrity? Class act. It appears the bit where you were pretending I was talking about killing children comes with a large pile of stinking baggage.
The bit that really gets me is you pretend success of a project after going through community hassles is some kind of weird indication that the community hassles stopped the demonstatively successful project. That indicates astonishing levels of contempt and poor judgement as well as extreme ineptitude in trying to fool people with incredibly fucking obvious lies.
What is really behind this? Is it some kind of class thing where the dreaded US middle class has to be feared in case it rises up in some sort of green commie conspiracy instead of the reality of mostly irrelevant apathy? OK, so that's a cheap shot and I don't have a clue if you are a crazed teabagger of the sort that gets laughed at internationally, but seriously, why do you think the US left has any power at all apart from picking up the crumbs? Why do you think the mostly disenfranchised can change anything important at all in a place with such batshit insane politics and crashing budgets as California? I really am curious as to why a grown adult will insult a perfect stranger that is pointing out something that really isn't contraversial.
In my dictionary "stop" has a specific meaning and is not able to be mutated into whatever is handy for pretending to win an agument against the easily bullied.
As for your other link about unions moving in, didn't you notice I used the phrase "batshit insane politics" to describe various factional bullshit in California? I think that describes the people involved fairly well and don't you dare argue that they are in it for purely environmental reasons instead of trying to squeeze others out - that would be an incredibly stupid lie that would do nothing but make us both laugh. They are political opportunists playing an angle and not the almost powerless smelly hippies you want to blame things on.