The Environmental Protection Agency Green Power Partnership works with companies, governments and a growing number of universities and colleges, to encourage the purchase of electricity generated from qualified renewable energy facilities. EPA releases regular updates of its Top Partner Rankings to highlight the progress in the annual purchases of green power.
The latest leading company is Intel Corp, which buys 1.4 TWh a year to meet 51% of its electricity demand. It buys biogas, biomass, geothermal, small-hydro, solar and wind energy from Sterling Planet and PNM, as well as some on-site generation.
Second on the list is Kohl's Department Stores (1.3 TWh) and Whole Foods Market (817 GWh) in third spot, followed by the city of Houston (438 GWh), Dell (431 GWh), Johnson & Johnson (416 GWh), Cisco Systems (400 GWh), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (400 GWh), US Air Force (339 GWh) and the city of Dallas (333 GWh) in the top 10 places.
Renewable energy helps environment and industry
The purchase of green power helps to reduce the environmental impacts of electricity generation and support the development of new renewable generation capacity in the USA, explains the EPA Partnership. Purchase amounts reflect US operations only and are sourced from US-based green power resources.
Organizations can meet EPA purchase requirements using any combination of Renewable Energy Certificates (REC), on-site generation or utility green power products.
The balance of the top 50 purchasers are:
- HSBC North America
- US Environmental Protection Agency
- Wal-Mart Stores (California and Texas facilities)
- Starbucks
- BNY Mellon
- City of Chicago
- Kimberly-Clark
- University of Pennsylvania
- US Department of Energy
- DuPont
- Wells Fargo
- Montgomery County Clean Energy Buyers Group
- Deutsche Bank
- Bloomberg
- Staples
- Motorola
- The World Bank Group
- Lowe's
- Mohawk Fine Papers
- US Department of Veterans Affairs
- State of Connecticut
- Hilton Worldwide
- BD
- Dannon Company
- Lockheed Martin
- WhiteWave Foods
- Safeway
- State of Wisconsin
- Sprint Nextel
- Carnegie Mellon University
- ING
- Pennsylvania State University
- Sony DADC
- US General Services Administration
- Herman Miller
- Advanced Micro Devices
- Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission
- City of San Diego
- Citi
- Oregon State University