LEXINGTON, KY–Anheuser-Busch is running a Super Bowl commercial claiming that Budweiser is “now brewed with wind power for a better tomorrow.” Budweiser beer cans now say “brewed with 100% renewable electricity from wind power.”
According to Tyler White, President of the Kentucky Coal Association, “Actually, Budweiser is brewed with mostly fossil fuels.”
Two-thirds of the energy used to brew Budweiser is industrial heat (not electricity), which Anheuser-Busch admits comes from “a mixture of energy sources including natural gas.”
Only one-third is electricity–and even most of that doesn’t come from wind. Because wind is an erratic energy source, no electric grid on Earth uses it as a primary fuel.
But according to White, “Anheuser-Busch and other publicity-seeking companies want to pretend they are 100% wind. So they pay power companies to give them credit for the wind power others use–and give others the blame for all the coal, natural gas, and nuclear power that Anheuser-Busch uses. This unjust scam is called ‘renewable electricity credits.’ Anheuser-Busch buys credits from a wind project near Billing, Oklahoma–even though no Budweiser beer is brewed in Oklahoma.”
When companies like Anheuser-Busch, Facebook, Apple, and Google lie about their energy usage by claiming to use 100% wind or solar, they encourage dangerous policies to prohibit the use of reliable power sources like coal, gas, and nuclear.
“Anheuser-Busch should pull its Super Bowl commercial,” says White, “and apologize to all Americans—including the workers of the coal, natural gas, and nuclear industries—for its ‘100% wind powered’ lie.”
