A pacific northwest restaurant chain is going 100% wind-power for all their restaurants' electricity. Is it some swank elitist restaurant? No, it's fast food--Burgerville.
Already known to Portlanders as a joint where all the ingredients come from within the state (including Tillamook cheese, yum!) and where you can get veggie burgers that don't suck, the small chain has a strong following. And now there's even more reason for it, as the folks who run it and the Noodlin' chain have committed to buying nothing but wind power. As GreenBiz wrote, "The adoption of wind power for the company's Burgerville restaurants represents the largest national implementation of renewable wind power within a quick-service restaurant chain... By utilizing wind power, The Holland, Inc. and its restaurants will avoid adding 17.4 million pounds of CO2 to the region annually. Eliminating this volume of the harmful greenhouse gas is the equivalent of taking approximately 1,700 cars off the road"
How about solar powered restaurants see the Habana (http://www.habanaoutpost.com/) Outpost in New York City.
Heck if I were a chain id build big arse windmills near the highway and put my brand all over it.. I mean realy the blades on the bigger windmills are huge and they can be seen for miles...
Guess I'll have to try their vegetarian burger if I'm ever in the Pacific Northwest.
We wrote an article at Sustainable Industries Journal about this - check it out!
I've always been disappointed in Burgerville's actual burgers. The meat is kind of dry and uninspiring.
I'll give the vegetarian burger a try next time.
It's important to realize that they're not buying direct from a wind farm. They're buying tokens from a big utility (still owned by some vestige of Enron) who is buying tokens from the power producer. The claim is that more tokens (basically a higher charge per unit) mean more of the total power will be generated the good ways. You decide whether to believe them. I'm a residential customer of the same utility....