My team is responsible for managing McKesson's facilities. With hundreds of locations around the world, we try to stay abreast of innovations that have the potential to help us reduce costs and reduce our environmental footprint.
For several years, we've monitored energy-generating technology, ranging from fuel cells to wind turbines, but it seemed like there was a lot of opportunity with solar, given the number of states that provided rebates and incentives. With solar technology improving rapidly and the wide variety of incentives available to companies, we needed to better understand how McKesson could potentially apply solar technology to our facilities, especially our distribution centers, which typically cover larger pieces of real estate.
Senior Director, Facilities Operations
McKesson Real Estate
San Francisco, CA
Clayton Crawford
Toward the end of Fiscal Year 2009, we engaged a solar expert to conduct a thorough analysis of our largest facilities in states that offer solar incentives and states where solar incentives are in discussion. For our buildings in states that already offered solar incentives and rebates, the return on investment wasn't great enough for us to consider solar energy. For buildings in states where solar rebates may be introduced, we have identified a few promising locations. If these states do introduce the incentives we expect, we will be ready to take advantage of the opportunity.
We want to reduce our energy usage, especially as energy prices continue to escalate. We know that we should explore alternative energy solutions for our buildings where it makes sense. Unfortunately, these solutions still require a heavy investment. As a publicly-traded company, we have to make sure that the payback has both a financial and environmental return in order to do right by our shareholders. We'll continue to closely monitor alternative energy technologies. Hopefully we'll be in a position to jump on the opportunity when it's appropriate for McKesson.
