Sam’s Club in California Installs 17 Micro Turbines

Posted on April 30, 2010
Filed Under Green Business, News, Wind |

sams-club-turbines-small1 No, those aren’t giant pinwheels: A Sam’s Club in Palmdale, California, has added 17 micro wind turbines to the tops of light poles in its parking lot, parent company Walmart announced yesterday. The turbines will provide an estimated 76,000 kWh of clean, renewable energy for the facility each year.

In a press release, the company says it chose the Palmdale store for the installation — the first of its kind in the United States — because of the area’s “great wind resources.” The turbines were supplied by DeerPath Energy, a renewable energy company based in Massachusetts that specializes in “scalable small wind.”

The release notes that the turbines will generate enough energy “to power more than six average American homes for a year.” Impressive . . . although that’s only 3-5% of what the store needs to run, according to triplepundit’s Kathryn Siranosian. Kind of staggering, when you really think about it — but the project fits into Sam’s Club’s larger sustainability goals, which include working towards eventual use of 100% renewable energy.

A similar project is taking shape at a Sam’s Club store in Worcester, Massachusetts.

More photos of the wind turbines in action:

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