Photo: Cypress Creek Renewables
Yesterday, Starbucks, Cypress Creek Renewables, and U.S. Bank announced that they are teaming up on a portfolio of solar farms across Texas. As a part of the deal, two solar farms developed, built and now operated by Cypress Creek, one of the nation’s leading solar companies, are providing enough energy for the equivalent of 360 Starbucks stores in Lone Star State, including stores in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano and Arlington. This new initiative is keeping in line with Starbucks announcement last fall to launch “Starbucks Greener Stores,” a commitment to building and operating 10,000 “greener” Starbucks stores by the year 2025.
As Nation’s Restaurant News explained, “This is not the first major investment Starbucks has made in solar energy. In May 2017, Starbucks announced that 149,000 solar panels would be powering 600 stores in North Carolina, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The North Carolina project represented a new phase for Starbucks’ green energy investments, while this latest partnership in Texas is another chapter in the company’s reinvigorated commitment.”
We also liked how Ben Serrurier (Manager of Market Development at Cypress Creek) put this new commitment into perspective:
So Texas has like 1,000 Starbucks locations, so now about every third one will be powered by Cypress Creek Renewables solar projects. https://t.co/6bYqb5pChv
— Ben Serrurier (@benserrurier) April 15, 2019
Why This Matters: It’s important that Starbucks is investing in the generation of new solar projects and hopefully the success of this project will move the company toward making a commitment to go 100% renewable energy. The company also estimated that the solar energy powering these Texas stores will reduce carbon emissions by an estimated 101,000 tons per year, or the equivalent of planting nearly 2.5 million trees. Hopefully, Starbucks communicates to its customers that their stores are being powered by clean, renewable energy in an effort to normalize solar power in a part of the country where the oil and gas industry is still king.
April 16, 2019 » CSR, renewable energy, renewables, Solar, Starbucks
