Cannabis retailers hit roadblocks
Process has been competitive and siting businesses a challenge, license holders say
WHITE PLAINS — Bronx resident Jesus Fontanez was 18 years old when he began taking care of his younger brother after their mother’s passing. It was the late 1990s and Fontanez was living on his own. While he had a job and was attending college, he could barely pay his bills. So he began selling marijuana.
For many teenagers in his neighborhood, selling cannabis was a way to make a quick buck; but for Fontanez, it was a way to survive. He said selling cannabis helped him during that time.
“Not everybody’s trying to be the Pablo Escobar of cannabis — they’re just trying to make ends meet,” he said.
Fontanez’s high school friend Eyasser Noboa also sold cannabis from a young age. He was arrested three times. On one occasion, he recalls being arrested outside his building in Manhattan because another man nearby was found to be in possession of cannabis.
“I was doing nothing and (the police) said, ‘Well, he bought it and you’re the only one we see so we’re going to send you (to the police station).’ As simple as that,” Noboa said.
He was fined $150, but he decided not to challenge the arrest since he “probably would’ve spent more money on a lawyer trying to fight it.”
In their 20s, Fontanez and Noboa said they left drug dealing behind, found stable jobs and started families. Now, they run their own businesses in the Bronx: Noboa has an online retail business; Fontanez is the proprietor of a birthday-party venue for children.
But another opportunity arose for the two friends following New York’s legalization of recreational marijuana in April 2021: opening their own cannabis shop. The more they talked, the more they agreed it was the right time to embark on this business endeavor.
Courtesy of Eyasser Noboa
energy in Europe, another factor highlighting the advantages of renewables, said Parth Vaishnav, assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Sustainability and Environment.
“Sunlight isn’t going to get more expensive,” he said. “To some extent, electrification actually acts to insulate us from price shocks, and one of the reasons why Europe has really accelerated this transition towards electrification is because they are exposed to a price shock because of their exposure to Russian (natural) gas. They’ve decided that they don’t want to play that game anymore.”
Looking at the full picture of greenhouse gas emissions at automakers, their direct emissions from their operations are relatively small. At Stellantis in 2022, more than 99 percent of emissions were indirect, coming from parts and material purchasing, vehicle maintenance and end-to-life care and use of the vehicles sold, which alone accounted for almost 88 percent of emissions, according to the company’s CSR. At GM, it was 75 percent, according to that company’s sustainability report.
Still, to encourage decarbonization by customers and suppliers, the effort has to start at home. Stellantis this year received an Innovation Energy Efficiency Award from DTE and the Engineering Society of Detroit. Over nearly two years at nine sites in Michigan, it has reduced its consumption of 15 million kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of almost 949 million charged smartphones. That prevented the release of 7,800 tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of 296,000 incandescent lightbulbs being switched to LEDs. It also saved the company $1 million in energy costs.
“Capital goes to a lot of different things in the company,” said Kevin Dunbar, Stellantis’ director of North America facilities and general services. “Being
able to make an impact by behavioral reductions like this is a real win.”
Much of these reductions are accomplished doing something as simple as shutting off lights and equipment when a manufacturing plant isn’t in production or reducing a facility’s temperature. The automaker has implemented an eight-step “Excellent Plant Shutdown” procedure to ensure these savings are being implemented based on best practices from its operations around the world, Dunbar said. These types of steps mostly aren’t capital intensive, but behavioral.
A major contributor, he said, is the automaker’s participation in DTE’s Strategic Energy Management program. It’s one of many programs DTE has that takes a “holistic and systematic” approach to energy reductions, Nguyen said.
In the SEM program, a company like Stellantis works with DTE to develop an energy action plan that identifies places where energy reductions can be made such as lighting scheduling, compressed air system improvements, conveyer shutdowns and more.
Once those changes have been implemented and the reductions have been verified, the customer receives a credit on its bill from DTE. The program alone for Stellanits has resulted in savings of more than 33 million kilowatt hours since 2020, according to DTE, which also has platforms that offer equipment rebates, fixing air leaks and updating existing equipment.
Stellantis is seeking to reduce energy consumption at each of its sites in North America by 20% year-over-year, Dunbar said. That will help provide confidence in the reliability of the move to renewables.
“The sizing that we looked at for this program,” Dunbar said about Stellantis’ solar installations with DTE, “is quite large, so that gives us a little bit of flexibility in terms of the solar power that will be generated. A big piece of this as well is the reduction of energy consumption, so when we sized this, we had in mind projections into the future for the reduction of energy efficiency. Between those two items, the sizing and the efficiency reduction, I think we will be more than covered there.”
GM’s Milford Proving Grounds saved about 4.4 million kilowatt hours from the SEM program since 2020, according to DTE. Since energy reduction efforts began, the company has cut more than 500 million kilowatt hours of energy in Michigan alone since 2019, according to GM. The automaker also has enrolled in rebate programs for more energy efficient equipment with Consumers Energy, said Monica Walker, GM’s renewables and energy strategy manager.
“Similar to at home when you do your air conditioning,” said Rob Threlkeld, director of global energy strategy, “the next model that you typically replace is much more efficient than the one that you had previously.”
GM spends about $20 million annually on energy efficiency, one of four “pillars” to meet its carbon neutrality target. The others are renewable energy, addressing intermittency, and leveraging policy and scale. GM has 855 megawatts capacity of solar, wind and landfill gas to power its operations in Michigan.
Increasingly, GM has emphasized the fourth pillar to advocate for utilities offering green tariffs for companies to buy renewable energy and advocate for energy investments, Threlkeld said. This work is particularly important in places like
South Korea, because its utilities are state-owned.
“How do we directly source renewables in a country where it’s a little more challenging?” Threlkeld said. “We’re leveraging our policy skill side of the equation with a lot of our other large companies that have set renewable energy targets to form solutions that we can actually source in those countries.”
At Ford, work has been underway for more than a decade on energy efficiency to the point where most of the “low-hanging fruit,” said George Andraos, sustainable energy and innovation director at Ford’s real-estate arm, is gone. That includes efforts like installing all LED lights.
Since 2017, Ford has invested $24 million in facility upgrades, contributing to a reduction in direct emissions and those created by the energy it uses by 35.4 percent worldwide, according to the automaker.
The next major step is carbon neutrality, and Ford’s renewables commitment with DTE is a big part of that. The project is estimated to avoid releasing 661,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year.
“We have a roadmap to get us there,” Andraos said about Ford’s 2035 goal for carbon-neutral electricity worldwide by 2035. “When I look at where we are in percentages, we are well on our way to achieving those objectives.”
All three automakers say they expect to be able to source decarbonized electricity for their operations without carbon offsets. What currently doesn’t have a full replacement, however, is natural gas, which is used to heat buildings and in the paint shops of assembly plants. “When you switch something from using natural gas to using electricity,” UM’s Vaishnav said, “you can cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately in many cases, because when you burn something, it’s not particularly efficient. Both for now and for the future, a shift to electrification is a step in the right direction to get us to net zero.”
Andraos said the next decade
or so will be important for how the development of carbon capture technology and alternatives goes. Ford is designing its new BlueOval City electric-vehicle assembly plant in Tennessee with that in mind by centralizing the natural gas system that will be more conducive to being replaced with hydrogen or whatever alternatives come to the forefront. As for existing plants, the process to retrofit for something new is challenging and costly, he added.
“This is a problem,” Andraos said, “everyone in the world is dealing with.”
Policy changes at the state of Michigan also could help encourage alternatives to natural gas, DTE’s Nguyen said. Because utilities are highly regulated, companies like DTE are limited to offering programs that incentivize energy reductions instead of greenhouse gas emissions overall.
“We have to go in and replace something with like equipment, just more efficient,” Nguyen said. “Whereas in the future, we could leverage exhausting from one process or in the building and literally transport that heat into another part of the building or use instead of exhausting into the atmosphere and vice versa with cooling.”
Changes like the one described could represent an increase in electricity use, but because it could offer a reduction in natural gas consumption, it could decrease emissions overall.
DTE and Consumers Energy themselves have announced plans to switch to cleaner electricity sourcing overall. Consumers Energy will end its use of coal-fired generation by 2025, and DTE will do so by 2032. They both pan to achieve net-zero on greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
“When you layer on greenhouse gas reduction, or you layer on carbon reduction, and you’re essentially getting credit or benefit or recognition for those reductions,” Nguyen said, “it opens up opportunities for our department and customers.”