Walgreen going green

A rendering shows a Walgreen Co. store in Evanston, Ill., that will have solar panels on the roof, wind turbines and a geothermal energy system.

CAMBURAS & THEODORE VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES

By BRUCE JAPSEN

The New York Times
CHICAGO - As the Walgreen Co. expands its sales items to fresh salads, Redbox DVD rentals and digital photo scanners, among other products, its consumption of power keeps inching up.
While the company cannot significantly reduce its electricity use in all stores immediately, it is building an experimental "net-zero energy store" just north of Chicago that it hopes will produce more energy than it consumes.
"We're just like most American homes where we have become more reliant on servers, computers and monitors," said Menno Enters, Walgreen director of energy and sustainability. "We need to reduce our electricity consumption."
Alternative energy equipment at the store under construction in Evanston, Ill., includes more than 800 solar panels on the roof, two 35-foot wind turbines and a geothermal energy system dug hundreds of feet beneath the store's foundation.
Walgreen building planners and engineers estimate the net-zero store will use about 200,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity over a year's time, while generating about 256,000 kilowatt-hours during the same period.
"There are a lot of other retailers that consume less energy per square foot -- when you think of a clothing store -- but Walgreen does sell it all, so it makes a net-zero store much more challenging to pull off," Enters said. "If Walgreen can do this, a lot of other retailers can."
The bigger plan is to reduce energy use by 20 percent by 2020 across all of the company's more than 8,000 stores.
That goal is also the target of the Department of Energy's "Better Buildings Challenge" initiative, which President Obama established in 2011 to encourage energy conservation across the country and to which Walgreen has signed on.
The effort is not without its challenges, or additional costs.
The cost of building the new store will be about twice that of a typical new store, though Walgreen executives would not disclose financial details. Over time, however, executives expect to recoup the extra costs from reductions in the store's energy use, tax credits and rebates from utility companies.
A spokeswoman for the Energy Department said the agency was unaware of any completed net-zero projects among more than 110 public and private commercial, industrial and governmental energy conservation projects that are part of the government program to reduce consumption.
Though the department does not offer incentives or pay for any upgrades among the projects, a spokeswoman said "often local utilities or others do offer incentives."
In Walgreen's case, the company said the Evanston store would ultimately generate more electricity than it needed, so the surplus could be sold to the local utility, so-called "getting your meter spinning backward" or "selling it back to the grid."
Other incentives are offered to companies willing to invest in alternative energy. Walgreen said it expected to receive rebates for lighting and mechanical systems under a separate program.
In terms of federal incentives, Walgreen plans to apply for energy tax credits for the geothermal investment, up to 10 percent of its expenditures, and for the wind investment, up to 30 percent.
Walgreen has no plans to build all of its new stores into the net-zero variety, but the company is not ruling out more such stores. It is also using the net-zero store as a laboratory to test successful energy reduction strategies that could be incorporated into new or older stores.
"A lot of the stuff we are doing in Evanston we have done in other places, but not all in one store," said Jamie Meyers, Walgreen manager of sustainability. "The opportunity is combining them together to see what the result would be. Then, we want to see if there are synergies and put them in new stores."
Walgreen is incorporating several conservation and energy producing strategies in existing stores, including LED lighting, energy-efficient building materials and carbon dioxide refrigerant for heating, cooling and refrigeration.
The new store, on the site of an old store that had been razed is being built by recycling more than 85 percent of the demolished store's material like bricks, concrete and metal.
Plans call for the new Walgreen store, just six blocks west of blustery Lake Michigan, to capture the area's infamous gusts with eight-foot-diameter wind turbines that will stand about as tall as the store. There will be 850 solar panels covering practically the entire slightly pitched roof to create solar energy. Walgreen has drilled eight 550-foot holes for pipes to create a geothermal energy system that will use the constant temperature of earth to heat and cool the building.
Walgreen plans to seek the United States Green Building Council's LEED Platinum status, the council's highest designation. Company executives say they have been fielding requests for tours from college engineering professors across the country, as well as Japanese tour groups, once the building is complete.
"This could become a tourist attraction," Enters said.