ٹِک ٹِک پر وائرل سوشل میڈیا چیلنج سے متاثر کاروں کی چوری کے ردِ عمل میں Hyundai اور Kia اپنی لاکھوں کاروں کے لیے مفت سافٹ ویئر اپ ڈیٹس پیش کر رہے ہیں۔
سوشل میڈیا پلیٹ فارم پر نام نہاد \”Kia چیلنج\” ملک بھر میں سیکڑوں کاروں کی چوری کا باعث بنی ہے، جن میں کم از کم 14 حادثات اور آٹھ ہلاکتیں شامل ہیں، نیشنل ہائی وے ٹریفک سیفٹی ایڈمنسٹریشن کے مطابق. \”کیا بوائز\” کے نام سے مشہور چور USB کیبل کی طرح آسان ٹولز کا استعمال کرتے ہوئے گاڑیوں کے سیکیورٹی سسٹم کو نظرانداز کرنے کے بارے میں ہدایاتی ویڈیوز پوسٹ کریں گے۔
مبینہ طور پر چوری کو روکنا آسان ہے کیونکہ بہت سی 2015-2019 Hyundai اور Kia گاڑیوں میں الیکٹرانک اموبائلائزرز کی کمی ہے جو چوروں کو آسانی سے اندر جانے اور اگنیشن کو نظرانداز کرنے سے روکتی ہے۔ خصوصیت یہ ہے۔ تقریباً تمام گاڑیوں پر معیاری سامان دوسرے مینوفیکچررز کی طرف سے بنایا اسی مدت سے.
سوشل میڈیا پلیٹ فارم پر نام نہاد \”کیا چیلنج\” ملک بھر میں سینکڑوں کاروں کی چوری کا باعث بن چکا ہے
Hyundai اور اس کی ذیلی کمپنی Kia الارم کی آواز کی لمبائی 30 سیکنڈ سے ایک منٹ تک بڑھانے کے لیے \”چوری کے الارم سافٹ ویئر منطق\” کو اپ ڈیٹ کرنے کی پیشکش کر رہی ہے۔ گاڑیوں کو بھی اپ ڈیٹ کیا جائے گا تاکہ گاڑی کو آن کرنے کے لیے اگنیشن سوئچ میں کلید کی ضرورت ہو۔
سافٹ ویئر اپ گریڈ معیاری \”ٹرن کی ٹو سٹارٹ\” اگنیشن سسٹم سے لیس ہنڈائی گاڑیوں پر گاڑیوں کے کنٹرول کے کچھ ماڈیولز کو تبدیل کرتا ہے۔ نتیجتاً، کلیدی fob کے ساتھ دروازوں کو لاک کرنے سے فیکٹری کا الارم بج جائے گا اور ایک \”اگنیشن کِل\” فیچر فعال ہو جائے گا تاکہ گاڑیاں چوری کے مقبول موڈ کے تابع ہونے پر شروع نہیں کی جا سکیں گی۔ صارفین کو \”اگنیشن کِل\” فیچر کو غیر فعال کرنے کے لیے اپنی گاڑیوں کو غیر مقفل کرنے کے لیے کلیدی ایف او بی کا استعمال کرنا چاہیے۔
ہنڈائی کے مطابق، سافٹ ویئر اپ ڈیٹ کیا کرے گا یہاں ہے:
سافٹ ویئر اپ گریڈ معیاری \”ٹرن کی ٹو سٹارٹ\” اگنیشن سسٹم سے لیس ہنڈائی گاڑیوں پر گاڑیوں کے کنٹرول کے کچھ ماڈیولز کو تبدیل کرتا ہے۔ نتیجتاً، کلیدی fob کے ساتھ دروازوں کو لاک کرنے سے فیکٹری کا الارم بج جائے گا اور ایک \”اگنیشن کِل\” فیچر فعال ہو جائے گا تاکہ گاڑیاں چوری کے مقبول موڈ کے تابع ہونے پر شروع نہیں کی جا سکیں گی۔ صارفین کو \”اگنیشن کِل\” فیچر کو غیر فعال کرنے کے لیے اپنی گاڑیوں کو غیر مقفل کرنے کے لیے کلیدی ایف او بی کا استعمال کرنا چاہیے۔
ہنڈائی اور کِیا کی کتنی گاڑیاں چوری ہوئی ہیں اس کا ملک بھر میں کوئی حساب کتاب نہیں کیا گیا ہے، لیکن انفرادی شہروں کے اعدادوشمار سے کچھ اندازہ ہوتا ہے کہ یہ رجحان کتنا وائرل ہو گیا ہے۔ مثال کے طور پر ملواکی میں، پولیس کی رپورٹ ہے کہ 2020 میں 469 Kias اور 426 Hyundais چوری ہوئیں۔ اگلے سال ان کی تعداد بڑھ کر 3,557 Kias اور 3,406 Hyundais ہو گئی، این پی آر کے مطابق.
تقریباً 3.8 ملین Hyundais اور 4.5 ملین Kias مفت سافٹ ویئر اپ ڈیٹ کے اہل ہیں
تقریباً 3.8 ملین Hyundais اور 4.5 ملین Kias ہیں۔ سافٹ ویئر اپ ڈیٹ کے لیے اہل مفت، کل 8.3 ملین کاروں کے لیے۔ گاڑیوں کے مالکان کو ہدایت کی جاتی ہے کہ وہ اپنی کاریں مقامی ڈیلرشپ پر لے جائیں، جہاں تکنیکی ماہرین ایک گھنٹے سے بھی کم وقت میں اپ گریڈ انسٹال کریں گے۔ اپ گریڈ شدہ گاڑیوں کو ونڈو ڈیکل بھی ملے گا جو اس بات کی نشاندہی کرے گا کہ وہ اینٹی تھیفٹ ٹیکنالوجی سے لیس ہیں۔
اس ہفتے سے، 2017-2020 Elantra، 2015-2019 Sonata، اور 2020-2021 Venue گاڑیوں کے مالکان اپ ڈیٹ کے اہل ہیں۔ اضافی ماڈلز بشمول Kona، Palisade، اور Santa Fe گاڑیاں، جون 2023 سے سروس کی جائیں گی۔ صارفین اپنی گاڑی کا VIN نمبر درج کر سکتے ہیں۔ یہ ویب سائٹ یہ معلوم کرنے کے لیے کہ وہ کب اپ گریڈ کے لیے اہل ہیں۔ Kia اس ماہ کے آخر میں اپنا مرحلہ وار طریقہ کار شروع کرے گی۔
اس سے پہلے، Hyundai مالکان سے کم از کم $170 وصول کر رہی تھی۔ مسئلہ کو حل کرنے کے لئے سیکورٹی کٹس. تنصیب اور مزدوری کے ساتھ، وہ اخراجات $500 تک بڑھ سکتے ہیں۔ Hyundai اور Kia کچھ مالکان کو چوری روکنے کے لیے وہیل لاک بھی پیش کر رہے تھے۔ این ٹی ایس اے کا کہنا ہے کہ کمپنیوں نے نومبر 2022 سے اب تک 26,000 وہیل لاک دیے ہیں۔
کاروباری رہنما نقدی کی کمی کا شکار حکومت سے کراچی کی اہم بندرگاہ پر پھنسے ہوئے مینوفیکچرنگ میٹریل کو ملک میں داخل کرنے کی اجازت دینے کا مطالبہ کر رہے ہیں، انتباہ کر رہے ہیں کہ درآمدات پر پابندی ہٹانے میں ناکامی سے لاکھوں افراد بے روزگار ہو جائیں گے۔
امریکی ڈالر کے انتہائی کم ذخائر کا سامنا کرتے ہوئے، حکومت نے تمام ضروری خوراک اور ادویات کی درآمدات پر پابندی عائد کر دی ہے جب تک کہ بین الاقوامی مالیاتی فنڈ (IMF) کے ساتھ لائف لائن بیل آؤٹ پر اتفاق نہیں ہو جاتا۔
اسٹیل، ٹیکسٹائل اور فارماسیوٹیکل جیسی صنعتیں بمشکل کام کر رہی ہیں، جس کی وجہ سے ہزاروں کارخانے بند ہو رہے ہیں اور بے روزگاری میں اضافہ ہو رہا ہے۔
اسٹیل انڈسٹری نے اسکریپ میٹل کی کمی کی وجہ سے سپلائی چین کے شدید مسائل سے خبردار کیا ہے، جو پگھل کر اسٹیل کی سلاخوں میں تبدیل ہو جاتی ہے۔ پچھلے چند ہفتوں میں، سلاخیں ریکارڈ قیمتوں پر پہنچ گئی ہیں۔
لارج اسکیل اسٹیل پروڈیوسرز ایسوسی ایشن کے سربراہ واجد بخاری نے کہا، \”ہم تعمیراتی صنعت کو براہ راست مواد فراہم کرتے ہیں جو تقریباً 45 نیچے کی دھارے کی صنعتوں سے منسلک ہے۔\”
\”یہ سارا چکر جام ہونے والا ہے۔\”
انہوں نے کہا کہ اسٹاک ختم ہونے کے بعد چھوٹی فیکٹریاں پہلے ہی بند ہو چکی ہیں، جب کہ کچھ بڑے پلانٹس بند ہونے میں کچھ دن باقی ہیں۔
تقریباً 150 ملین ڈالر ماہانہ کے درآمدی بل کے ساتھ، اسٹیل انڈسٹری کا کہنا ہے کہ اس کے کام براہ راست اور بالواسطہ طور پر کئی ملین ملازمتوں کو متاثر کرتے ہیں۔
اسٹیٹ بینک آف پاکستان (ایس بی پی) کے تازہ ترین اعداد و شمار کے مطابق زرمبادلہ کے ذخائر صرف 2.9 بلین ڈالر تک گر گئے ہیں جو کہ تین ہفتوں سے بھی کم درآمدات کے لیے کافی ہے۔
\”اس صورتحال سے خدشہ پیدا ہوتا ہے کہ تعمیراتی صنعت بہت جلد بند ہو جائے گی، جس سے ہزاروں مزدور بے روزگار ہو جائیں گے،\” کنسٹرکٹرز ایسوسی ایشن آف پاکستان نے سٹیل اور مشینری کو درآمدی پابندی سے مستثنیٰ قرار دینے کے مطالبات کی بازگشت کرتے ہوئے کہا۔
برسوں کی مالی بدانتظامی اور سیاسی عدم استحکام نے ملک کی معیشت کو نقصان پہنچایا ہے – توانائی کے عالمی بحران اور تباہ کن سیلابوں کی وجہ سے جس نے ملک کا ایک تہائی حصہ ڈوب دیا ہے۔
خام مال کی کمی کے ساتھ ساتھ بڑھتی ہوئی مہنگائی، ایندھن کی بڑھتی قیمتوں اور روپے کی گرتی ہوئی قیمت نے مینوفیکچرنگ صنعتوں کو نقصان پہنچایا ہے۔
IMF کا ایک وفد جمعے کو پاکستان سے روانہ ہوا جب ایک رکے ہوئے قرضہ پروگرام کو بحال کرنے کے لیے فوری مذاکرات بغیر کسی معاہدے کے ختم ہو گئے، جس سے کاروباری رہنماؤں کے لیے غیر یقینی کی صورتحال برقرار رہی۔
ٹیکسٹائل اور ملبوسات کی صنعت پاکستان کی تقریباً 60 فیصد برآمدات کے لیے ذمہ دار ہے اور اس میں دنیا بھر کے بڑے برانڈز کے لیے تولیے، انڈرویئر اور لینن جیسی اشیا کی پروسیسنگ کے لیے تقریباً 35 ملین افراد کام کرتے ہیں۔
آل پاکستان ٹیکسٹائل ایسوسی ایشن کے سیکرٹری جنرل شاہد ستار نے کہا کہ ٹیکسٹائل کی صنعت کو ترجیح دی جانی چاہیے۔
انہوں نے کہا کہ ہم ملک کی برآمدات کی بنیاد ہیں۔ اے ایف پی.
\”اگر آپ کے پاس برآمدات نہیں ہیں تو آپ اپنے زرمبادلہ کے ذخائر کیسے بڑھائیں گے؟ پھر اس کے نتیجے میں، معیشت کیسے بحال ہو گی؟\”
گزشتہ موسم گرما میں سیلاب سے کپاس کی گھریلو فصلوں کو تباہ کرنے کے بعد، یہ شعبہ کافی مقدار میں خام کپڑا درآمد کر رہا ہے۔
فیکٹری مالکان نے پچھلے مہینے وزیر خزانہ سے بیک لاگ کو ختم کرنے کے لیے \”براہ راست مداخلت\” کی اپیل کی تھی، جس سے رنگ، بٹن اور زپ بھی متاثر ہوتے ہیں۔
ستار نے کہا، \”پاکستان میں ٹیکسٹائل کی صنعت کم و بیش رک چکی ہے۔ ہمارے پاس اپنی ملیں چلانے کے لیے خام مال نہیں ہے۔\”
تقریباً 30 فیصد ٹیکسٹائل ملوں نے کام مکمل طور پر بند کر دیا ہے جبکہ باقی 40 فیصد سے بھی کم صلاحیت پر کام کر رہی ہیں۔
پاکستان فارماسیوٹیکل مینوفیکچررز ایسوسی ایشن کے سربراہ توقیر الحق نے کہا کہ اہم اجزاء کی کمی کی وجہ سے 40 ادویات کی فیکٹریاں بند ہونے کے دہانے پر ہیں۔
ماہر اقتصادیات قیصر بنگالی نے کہا کہ سپلائی چین کا بحران \”مہنگائی کو بڑھا رہا ہے اور حکومت کی آمدنی کو بھی متاثر کر رہا ہے\”۔
یہ بے روزگاری میں بھی اضافہ کر رہا ہے اور غربت کو ہوا دے رہا ہے، پاکستان میں تعمیراتی اور فیکٹریوں کے کارکنوں کا ایک بڑا حصہ روزانہ ادا کرتا ہے۔
بنگالی اے ایف پی کو بتایا۔
پاکستان انسٹی ٹیوٹ آف ڈویلپمنٹ اکنامکس کے ماہر اقتصادیات ناصر اقبال نے کہا کہ درآمدی پابندیاں جیسے کہ اس وقت لاگو ہے \”کبھی بھی پائیدار حل نہیں ہو سکتا\”۔
زیر دباؤ وزیر خزانہ اسحاق ڈار نے گزشتہ ہفتے کہا تھا کہ کاروباری اداروں کو \”آئی ایم ایف سے پیسہ آنے دینا چاہیے\” اس سے پہلے کہ درآمدات کے لیے لیٹر آف کریڈٹ دوبارہ شروع ہو جائیں، جس سے لاگجام ختم ہو جائے۔
بیل آؤٹ کی شرائط کو پورا کرنے سے، جیسا کہ پیٹرول اور توانائی کی قیمتوں میں اضافے سے بھی مہنگائی میں اضافہ متوقع ہے، لیکن اس سے دوست ممالک کی جانب سے مزید مالی مدد کی راہ ہموار ہونی چاہیے۔
پشاور کے پرانے شاہراہ ریشم میں، شیشے سے لے کر ربڑ اور کیمیکل تک ہر چیز تیار کرنے والی فیکٹریاں، زیادہ تر پڑوسی افغان مارکیٹ کے لیے، گزشتہ کئی مہینوں میں یکے بعد دیگرے بند ہو رہی ہیں۔
انڈسٹریلسٹ ایسوسی ایشن پشاور کے صدر ملک عمران اسحاق نے کہا، \”تقریباً 600 بند ہو چکے ہیں، جبکہ بہت سے آدھی گنجائش سے کام کر رہے ہیں،\” جو 2500 فیکٹریوں کی نمائندگی کرتی ہے۔
As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.
The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.
At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)
As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.
Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.
Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.
The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.
“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”
Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.
Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.
CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?
Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.
The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.
“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.
It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.
Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.
“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”
According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.
Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.
Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.
Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.
Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar
Walmart — 842,700
Target — 259,900
Home Depot — 256,600
Kroger — 192,500
Costco — 87,500
Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”
“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”
Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.
Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.
“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.
CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.
Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.
“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”
Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.
“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.
“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”
For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.
Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.
The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.
In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.
“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”
Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”
Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.
Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.
“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”
As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.
The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.
At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)
As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.
Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.
Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.
The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.
“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”
Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.
Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.
CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?
Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.
The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.
“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.
It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.
Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.
“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”
According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.
Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.
Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.
Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.
Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar
Walmart — 842,700
Target — 259,900
Home Depot — 256,600
Kroger — 192,500
Costco — 87,500
Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”
“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”
Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.
Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.
“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.
CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.
Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.
“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”
Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.
“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.
“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”
For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.
Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.
The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.
In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.
“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”
Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”
Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.
Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.
“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”
As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.
The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.
At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)
As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.
Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.
Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.
The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.
“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”
Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.
Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.
CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?
Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.
The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.
“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.
It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.
Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.
“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”
According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.
Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.
Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.
Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.
Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar
Walmart — 842,700
Target — 259,900
Home Depot — 256,600
Kroger — 192,500
Costco — 87,500
Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”
“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”
Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.
Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.
“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.
CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.
Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.
“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”
Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.
“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.
“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”
For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.
Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.
The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.
In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.
“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”
Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”
Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.
Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.
“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”
As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.
The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.
At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)
As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.
Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.
Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.
The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.
“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”
Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.
Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.
CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?
Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.
The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.
“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.
It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.
Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.
“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”
According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.
Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.
Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.
Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.
Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar
Walmart — 842,700
Target — 259,900
Home Depot — 256,600
Kroger — 192,500
Costco — 87,500
Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”
“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”
Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.
Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.
“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.
CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.
Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.
“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”
Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.
“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.
“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”
For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.
Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.
The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.
In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.
“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”
Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”
Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.
Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.
“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”
As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.
The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.
At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)
As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.
Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.
Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.
The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.
“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”
Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.
Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.
CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?
Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.
The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.
“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.
It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.
Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.
“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”
According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.
Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.
Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.
Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.
Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar
Walmart — 842,700
Target — 259,900
Home Depot — 256,600
Kroger — 192,500
Costco — 87,500
Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”
“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”
Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.
Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.
“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.
CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.
Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.
“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”
Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.
“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.
“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”
For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.
Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.
The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.
In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.
“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”
Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”
Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.
Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.
“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”
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