New York Times:
The words are stenciled on the front of the Apple Store, a glass box sandwiched between a nondescript Thai restaurant and a CVS pharmacy in downtown Palo Alto: “This store runs on 100 percent renewable energy.”
If Apple’s plans play out, it will be able to make that claim not only for its operations throughout California but also beyond, as the company aims to meet its growing needs for electricity with green sources like solar, wind and hydroelectric power.
And:
The motives may be economic as much as they are environmental. As a wholesaler, Apple could reduce the cost of its electricity load, which reached 831 million kilowatt-hours in the last fiscal year — enough to power about 76,000 homes for a year. But like a growing number of corporations, Apple is intent on reducing carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production — one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
If Apple can run all its operations, all of them, on 100 percent renewable energy, that would set the bar for all other companies. If one of the largest companies in the world can do this, you should do all you can to reach this level as well.
my understanding is this only works because most customers get their power from the same source grid which includes dirty coal, but some customers pretend to derive theirs entirely from the dirty parts so other customers can pretend to derive theirs entirely from the clean parts.
I want more but it doesn’t seem viable or deal at this point.
Except manufacturing.
For now.
Apple didn’t build the grid, but it is generating power that’s a lot cleaner than it would be otherwise, no?
Not that it isn’t a laudable goal but “If one of the largest companies in the world can do this, you should do all you can to reach this level as well” is like an article I saw long ago on Oprah’s weight loss. It included a remark like “If she can do it, you can too.” Well, she had nearly unlimited resources and she’d hired one of the world’s finest chefs as her personal chef. So no, the “if Apple can do it” line doesn’t work here. At all.
Perhaps Dave was addressing CEOs of other Fortune 100 companies.