Whole Foods makes wind-power history

Move stems from activism of chain's Colorado employees

Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 11, 2006 at midnight

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As Boulder goes, so goes Whole Foods.

The Whole Foods store in Boulder started buying wind power two years ago.

Soon all the Whole Foods stores in Colorado, New Mexico and Kansas were part of the program.

On Tuesday, the organic and natural food supermarket chain announced that last month it purchased the largest number of wind-energy credits in the history of the United States and Canada.

The total: 458,000 megawatt- hours' worth of credits, enough to power 44,000 homes and more than the second- and third-largest corporate purchasers combined (John-son & Johnson and DuPont; Starbucks is now fourth).

That's enough wind power to offset 100 percent of the electricity Whole Foods uses in all of its 170-plus stores in North America, bake houses, distribution centers, regional offices and national headquarters.

Or, to put it another way: The purchase - in terms of the environmental benefit in displacing conventional fuels - is equivalent to taking 60,000 cars off the road or planting 90,000 acres of trees.

Whole Foods executives say the move was the result of the environmental activism of its Colorado employees.

"The Denver/Boulder area has been a pioneer in our company when it comes to wind power," said Scott Simons, Whole Foods spokesman in the Rocky Mountain and Southwest region. "This is a testament that the best ideas come from our team members."

There is another local angle. Whole Foods chose Boulder-based Renewable Choice Energy as its exclusive supplier. Renewable Choice also was tapped when Whole Foods in Boulder went to wind power.

"So this really grew out of Colorado into a national initiative," said Quayle Hodek, chief executive of Renewable Choice Energy. "This is a huge deal for us and a huge deal for them."

Whole Foods isn't going to suddenly sprout wind turbines on top of its stores.

Rather, Renewable Choice Energy buys wind-energy certificates, also called green tickets, from producers in Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Those producers in turn guarantee that they will deliver the wind electricity onto the power grid on Whole Foods' behalf.

Green-e, the nation's leading independent certification program, verifies that no two certificates represent the same megawatt-hour of electricity.

As renewable-energy credits are purchased, they in effect displace the amount of conventional electricity generation required from fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

"Conventional electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the United States, and wind power is a clean and renewable alternative," Kurt Johnson, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Green Power Partnership director, said in a statement. "Whole Foods Market's commitment to wind power is providing an outstanding example of environmental leadership."

Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

"It's a bit higher than conventional energy," Hodek said of wind power in general.

Hodek said residential customers in Colorado pay about a 25 percent premium, but he said a large commercial company can negotiate "significant" discounts.

Said Simons of Whole Foods: "We do it because it's the right thing to do."

Going to wind power

• How it works: Renewable Choice Energy of Boulder buys wind-energy certificates from producers in Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Those producers guarantee they will deliver the electricity generated from wind power onto the power grid on Whole Foods' behalf.

• Green-e, the nation's leading independent certification program, verifies that no two certificates represent the same megawatt-hour of energy. Renewable-energy credits displace the amount of conventional electricity generation required from fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

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