We’re thrilled that this week Kendall-Jackson received a 2011 Green Power Leadership Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for voluntary efforts to address climate change through renewable energy purchases, leadership, overall strategy, and impact on the green power market.

Our energy strategy is to strive for energy independence and have fewer green house gasses being emitted from electricity production. We’re using a three step approach: conserve, optimize and generate.

• First, we conserve energy by eliminating wasteful behavior. It’s all about changing our processes to save energy.
• Next is optimizing our equipment. That’s making it work as efficiently as possible when we can, or replacing the really old, inefficient stuff.
• The last step is generating renewable energy – either on-site at our facilities or buying it from off-site.

So far our conservation and optimization efforts have reduced 30% of our electricity usage in the first two years of our program; we also began buying renewable wind energy in 2009. In 2011 we bought renewable energy certificates equal to 130% of our annual usage—including buying it on behalf of our 1,000 employees’ home usage – a first for any company.

When you add up the energy savings and renewable energy totals we’re conserving an amount equal to over 6,200 homes annual usage or green house gas emissions from over 3 million gallons of gasoline – that’s equal to 27,000 tons of CO2.

We’re now #32 in the U.S. among all organizations buying at least 100% renewable energy and were one of just 19 organizations who received an EPA Green Power Leadership Award in 2011.