Walgreens To Build First Self-Powered Retail Store 186
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."
Lighting Choices Are Not Extraordinary (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Maybe it says something about the grid? (Score:2, Interesting)
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. [caspio.com] (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".