There is a gem of an article on Mother Jones about sustainable farming and sustainability, in general (via the Vine). There are a lot of good points in this article, but four that stuck with me are:
1. Buying power
It’s not that we lack enthusiasm—activist foodies represent one of the most potent market forces on the planet. Unfortunately, a lot of that conscientious buying power is directed toward conceptions of sustainable food that may be out of date.
2. Practical Sustainability
We can’t wait for the perfect solution to emerge; we need to start transforming the food system today—most probably with hybrid models, like Fleming’s or Liebman’s, that take the best of both alternative and mainstream technologies and acknowledge not only the complexity of true sustainability but the practical reality that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.
3. Wal-Mart can play a role
The nation’s grocery chains have about 32,500 acres of potential “farmland”; a single Wal-Mart supercenter sits under more than four acres of rooftop—enough, according to Agoada, to produce 5.7 tons of wheat a year.
4. The need for subsidies
The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we’re going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model.
I was catching up on my reading this week and noticed a post by Brad Plumer on the Vine, TNR’s Environment and Energy blog, that led with news of an energy roundtable in Las Vegas, NV put on by “a bunch of Democratic politicians, Obama administration officials and energy bigwigs.” That bunch also included Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, which makes sense since Wal-Mart has such a big commercial footprint and generally receives accolades for implementing energy-efficient initiatives. The Vine post gives a great summary of some of the challenges presented by rolling out the smart grid: generation, storage, transmission, as well as simply getting funding into useful hands.
The juxtaposition of Wal-Mart and the smart grid made an old idea bubble back up for me: what if every Wal-Mart across the country provided free electric vehicle charging stations in their parking lots for their customers? Think of the enormous storage capacity this would provide to the smart grid. The stores themselves are fairly ubiquitous and Wal-Mart seems to know how to roll-out nationwide programs in its stores. This would be a step in the right direction for providing storage capacity to the grid and widespread grid access for electric vehicles, but would have some limitations.
- Dynamic capacity – the storage capacity provided would be constantly changing as cars plug into and unplug from the grid. Also, there would be no capacity provided at night, when there is the greatest potential to bank energy due to decreased demand.
- Not ubiquitous enough – the ranges I see quoted most often for electric vehicles are 100-200 miles on a full battery. In many areas, it would be enough to get from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, but in many areas it wouldn’t.
- Not enough capacity – this would only provide a tiny fraction of the capacity of other mass storage methods, but could act as more of a local reservoir and would be quicker and easier to deploy.
Despite its problems, providing charging stations at Wal-Marts could ease the transition to the smart grid. Consider 3 Prong Power, who make a conversion system that allows a Prius to run on batteries alone for 10 miles at speeds under 25 mph. If a driver could get to Wal-Mart on batteries only and recharge while shopping on an existing car with a fuel backup, this might help people get used to the idea of extended or multiple trips on battery alone. It also might encourage the environmentally-friendly shopper to choose Wal-Mart over another store…
And while we’re daydreaming, what if you could go to Wal-Mart and buy or rent an electric vehicle? What if we didn’t have to rely on and incentivize through our normal sales channels? What if an eVehicle maker outside of the Big 3 partnered with America’s largest retail chain to provide us with access to the electric vehicle fleet? This supposes that someone is able to get the cost way, way down below what we currently pay for a car, I’m sure for Wal-Mart to feel comfortable with it, but even if you didn’t buy your own there, what if you could rent an electric car for the day like
zipcar to try one out and see if you like it? (I hear zipcar has their business model patented so this may not work either…). The alternatives to our current situation seem endless, and I’m sure they are being explored….
