Okay, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, “What’s this guy’s obsession with Wal-Mart?”
I’m not obsessed. I just keep finding these weird articles.
Here’s a new one from the Dallas Morning News (registration required).
Wal-Mart bought its own power company in Texas. That means that Wal-Mart actually buys its own power at wholesale, directly on the electricity market, saving itself something like $15 million a year.
It’s kind of like how Wal-Mart wanted to buy a commercial bank so that it could reduce all those credit card transaction fees, except that they actually did it with power. (Bankers are afraid that Wal-Mart might open up retail banks inside their stores, so they are all fighting hard to keep Wal-Mart from doing it and even lobbying for laws to prevent it. It might ruin their $35 bounced check fees to have low price competition, I guess.)
Anyway, here’s the interesting speculation part of the article:
Mr. Hendrix said he would consider selling electricity to consumers or to Wal-Mart’s suppliers, if that’s what customers want. But his main focus is buying power for Wal-Mart itself.
He said he would consider buying a renewable-energy power plant, such as a wind farm, if the company can’t find enough vendors to meet Wal-Mart’s eventual goal of using only renewable power.
And here are the other facts about how much power all the Wal-Mart stores in Texas use:
Wal-Mart’s stores in Texas use 1.6 million megawatt-hours of electricity each year. That accounts for 0.5 percent of the Texas power grid last year. It’s enough juice to power 133,000 homes. And it’s about one-third of the annual output of one of the new coal-fired power plants TXU Corp. has proposed.
My question about those facts would be:
Wal-Mart uses that much Texas power. How much money do they generate in sales tax in Texas each year, as a percentage?
Is it just me, or does Wal-Mart buying a bunch of other companies in vertical markets remind you of Standard Oil?
