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Walgreens To Build First Self-Powered Retail Store
MojoKid writes "We hear about green deployment practices all the time, but it's often surrounding facilities such as data centers rather than retail stores. However, Walgreens is determined to go as green as possible, and to that end, the company announced plans for the first net zero energy retail store. The store is slated to be built at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Keeney Street in Evanston, Illinois, where an existing Walgreens is currently being demolished. The technologies Walgreens is plotting to implement in this new super-green store will include solar panels and wind turbines to generate power; geothermal technology for heat; and efficient energy consumption with LED lighting, daylight harvesting, and 'ultra-high-efficiency' refrigeration."
...is it powered by the tears of employees?
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
I confess that I'm not really familiar with the technology, but this one gives me pause. They are building a Walgreens on a street corner that will use geothermal energy for heat? Can someone with a bit of knowledge share some insight on exactly how they plan to do that in a corner store?
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
that never has anything I want so I end up going to the CVS across the street. Never understood how places like kmart and walgreens stay in business, espectally wallgreens, which is a drug store, with less medical supplies in it than the grocery store.
There have been plenty of net-zero retail stores over the last few millenia, and I'm sure that someone has some net-positive stores out there now. The net-negative trend is fairly recent.
Those 20 or so cars pictured in TFA use up those 256,000KWh of saved energy per year. Hmmm...
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Daylight harvesting is a nasty misnomer - it really just means turning the artificial light down when natural light makes the space acceptably-bright. This is why Walmart stores built in the past two decades have skylights.
The 2012 IECC requires daylight harvesting or separate switching for daylight zones; complying with new codes is hardly a newsworthy achievement.
LED lighting for commercial spaces just recently reached a point where lumen output, specifically illuminance at the target work plane, can equal that of fluorescent for the same power input.
With a cost roughly double that of fluorescent fixtures, LED fixtures' lamp life allows the owner to spend less on maintenance labor, with a payback on the order of 2-10 years. A company as big as Walgreens would be foolish to use anything other than LED unless they expect to go broke before reaching their ROI.
I like what these guys are doing, but the PR spin is a bit much.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
'The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 B.T.U.'s of body heat. We are, as an energy source, easily renewable and completely recyclable.'
What could possibly go wrong?
go cat's
Engineering estimates suggest that the location will produce 256,000 kilowatts per year while using just 200,000.
Shouldn't that be kilowatt hours? Even if it was kwhrs the numbers are suspect. 200,000/ 365 days per year / 18 hours (12 hours open 12 hours closed using half power) = 30 Kw used in any given hour the store is open. That is equivalent to 300 100 watt incandescent bulbs. I would think a building would require much more than that.
I just hope their local utility discounts the electricity they have to buy to pay for the infrastructure to distribute power to and from the store and the generation capacity needed to cover if the store goes off line for some reason. Most utilities do this but possibly not to the level required.
If one has a net zero cost for a power bill they better be putting in significantly more power that they are getting out.
I'll bet if I had all the resources that NYSE:WAG has I could build a net-zero energy store too. Build a store that is standalone profitable AND net-zero energy and I'll take notice.
Just in case they will have the 100kW generator in the back...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
maybe the taxpayers are paying for this?
Walgreens To Build First Self-Powered Retail Store
Notice there is no mention of electricity storage in the article. On a dark calm night the store will be drawing power from the grid and will not be self powered. Net zero power is not self power. To be self power they would have to be off the grid.
In a shocking development, the NBC has learned that Walgreens is installing a "cushioning" carpet which is not just any simple cushiony carpet. It has tubes buried in it, and as the shoppers walk on it they squeeze these tubes and the air gets compressed and it turns a turbine that produces electricity. Mr Rube Goldberg, VP Energy Harvesting Division of Walgreens has conceded that the whole idea was his personal invention.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How does the stuff get into the shop?
Out of curiosity, I pondered about the quality of service in terms of grid power at that location. So I did a little bit of Google-fu...
Evanston does make it to the first page on the list of Chicago suburbs with a lot of power outages. (And that's being sorted by total outages.) So maybe it says something about how well ComEd is doing in Evanston? (Or at least that particular neighborhood where that Walgreens is located.)
Considering that many expensive drugs have to be refrigerated, cash registers go down, etc. I could imagine there would be problems if they had to close up a busy high-volume store during prime hours on a random basis every other week because of unreliable power. In which case there would be much more incentive to go off-grid than "being green".
One step at a time please. The story about a self-powered supply chain may come later.
This is proof positive that marketing has reached new pinnacles of preying on idiots.
A "green" store - filled with plastic products, synthetic cosmetics, crap from china, etc. will bring in idiots who so desperately need to feel good about themselves they will actually think they are doing the planet a favor by buying whatever. Really, have you seem most of the crap for sale in drugstore? How can any of this junk be considered good for the environment in any way?
The guys in the boardroom, marking up the same old crap 100% by slapping a "green" label on the box, are laughing their asses off while going home to their Scrooge McDuck money piles.
Pathetic beyond pathetic.
Murphy was an optimist
I'd be a bit more impressed if they weren't tearing down an existing Walgreens to do it, as reuse would probably saved a good deal of energy itself and they're building new locations in the Chicago area anyway (none with this kind of net zero energy use, but some with better exterior design or the reuse of beautiful buildings). Moving the store up to the street to encourage customers arriving by foot or bike or transit would be nice too; parking lots and drive throughs aren't exactly what I'd call green.
I'll be curious at the cost-per-foot for the construction and their solution for handling the geothermal pumps. I had a hard time designing a geothermal that my solar could drive.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
I mean, Wind Turbine Syndrome can make their customers ill while they shop, creating even more business. Of course, health insurance rates might rise. /sarcasm
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
How do they plan to run the air conditioning during a hot summer day? On a windless + cloudy day, 30kW won't come out of thin air.
Honestly, I've shopped at Wal-Mart for many years now, because I've always lived conveniently close to one, and it was open late at night when I had time to shop for things.
To a large extent, I think the chain is currently a victim of the "I'm too cool to set foot in there!" attitude. Web sites like "People of Wal-Mart" do their best to poke fun at the type of shoppers found there, while conveniently ignoring the fact that all those people don't just vanish into thin air as soon as they're done with their Wal-Mart shopping trips. I could do a "People of..." site for any of my local movie theaters, or the baseball stadium, or you name it, and find just as many overweight characters with poor taste in clothing or weird hairstyles.
One of the other reasons many people are down on Wal-Mart and their "business practices" is their well known hard-bargaining tactics with the companies they purchase inventory from. Essentially, they offer to buy a massive quantity of a product for what's a fair (even tempting) price per unit when they first want to carry something. In many cases, the manufacturer is ill-equipped to produce that large a quantity, but the owner(s) see dollar-signs and don't want to miss their chance to "hit it big" with a Wal-Mart deal. So they take out a big business loan to put more factories online, hire more employees to assemble the product, etc. and make the first year deal with Wal-Mart. Problem is, Wal-Mart comes back annually, demanding a little bit lower price for the product than they paid the year before. Before long, the company can't even break even selling at the top price Wal-Mart will pay, so they have to cancel their deal -- and now they're left with excess capacity and loans not paid off yet. It often makes them go under, soon afterwards.
IMO though, this really isn't Wal-Mart's problem. They're just being shrewd buyers. Businesses should be aware, by now, of this pitfall when dealing with Wal-Mart and take it into consideration before signing any deals with them. Heck -- if your product is really THAT good? You should be able to sell it elsewhere like Amazon and put the hurt on Wal-Mart because they can't get ahold of it from you to compete.
A lot of the other complaints I hear about unfair labor practices sound to me like issues with individual stores and store managers. Yes, a lot of it is unethical and plain wrong -- but it happens everywhere with big box retailers. It's not like a lot of that really has anything specific to do with Wal-Mart corporate. Bad management is all over the place, and especially prevalent in retail (or food service) - where you don't need lots of education to rise up the ranks to "manager".
I used to live in the midwest where we rarely saw a CVS but had Walgreens on practically every corner, so I'm very familiar with them. Now I live in Maryland where it's all about CVS (with a random Rite-Aid store here or there), and Walgreens is practically non-existant.
I was never that fond of Walgreens, especially when they made the HUGE mistake of trying to play hardball with Anthem insurance and refused to accept their policies for prescriptions. I watched their stores look like they were on the set of old West ghost-towns right after that happened. They did eventually come around on that ... but their prices were still always too high unless you used a coupon, and customer service was spotty at best.
But man --- I really can't say CVS is any better. I tried to use their fancy iOS app a few weeks ago to refill a prescription, and later that day, got a phone call from the local store. They were all confused because they received a partial fax page from corporate asking them to fill a prescription for me, but it was cut off so they didn't actually know what I needed. Seriously?? They offer a smartphone app to easily do a refill and all it does on the back end is FAX the thing over??
And CVS prices are WAY high, as in complete robbery, if you don't use their membership card. Even then, you only rarely get an actual "good buy" on something with it. And meanwhile, they get to track your buying habits and probably resell your info too.
The big chunk of retail energy footprint is transport. It would be nice to see something done there too.
No utility bills or lower utility costs means less tax revenue - we need to replace that revenue! Maybe a per year per solar cell tax or a per turbine revolution tax?
I live right around the corner from this place. Seriously, I go to the Chinese take out place over there all the time and used to go to the Video Adventure that just closed down.
How did I not know they were doing this?
Walgreens is not Walmart They are two distinct companies not related in any way. But SIMPLE FACTS never got in the way of a slashdotters agrument!
OK, call me cynical. How much energy will forging the steel, making the glass, and making the cement for the concrete burn? How much energy will transporting all these new materials to site, and transporting away the demolition rubble, burn? For how many additional years could you have run the old store for the environmental cost of building the new one?
Car analogy, since we like car analogies round here. Your new Prius may be wonderfully energy efficient, but creating it burned so much energy that keeping your twenty-five year old V8 on the road for three years longer is better for the environment.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Bleh.
Except for the amount of products that are recalled because they contain lead paint or heavy metals, because quality control suffers when you're just trying to do things on the cheap.
You know, things like stuff your children would play with or put in their mouths.
We were making inroads into product safety, but apparently that made things too expensive. Now we'll just source it out to China where it's cheap and full of dangerous chemicals. Don't worry though, after a bunch of kids get sick it'll be recalled!
How much energy went into creating the solar panels that this store will use? Solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they will ever produce in their lifetime. In other words, if you had a desert island filled with solar panel factories producing solar panels, each year you would produce less solar panels until finally you have none left.
THE MORE SOLAR PANELS WE MAKE THE LESS FOSSIL FUELS WE HAVE. STOP MAKING AND USING THEM FOR STUPID APPLICATIONS. Solar panels are only useful for very specific scenarios when other methods of power generation is impossible. The only thing I can really think of is spacecraft...
Words I never thought I'd think lol
They never have enough employees working in the pharmacy. Any tears from them are long dried up after telling people their prescriptions are not really ready despite what the automated system told them.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling