Jaguar Land Rover has completed the installation of the largest rooftop solar panel array in the U.K.
Located at the company’s Engine Manufacturing Centre at i54 South Staffordshire, the new facility consists of 21,000 photovoltaic panels, with a capacity of 5.8MW. The company has plans to increase this to over 6.3MW by the end of the year.
The facility is expected to generate more than 30 percent of the Engine Manufacturing Centre’s energy requirements, equivalent to the energy needed to power more than 1,600 homes. The photovoltaic panels will reduce the plant’s CO2 footprint by over 2,400 tons per year.
Trevor Leeks, the Engine Manufacturing Centre’s Operations director, said, “Our world-class facility showcases the latest sustainable technologies and innovations. The completion of the UK’s largest rooftop solar panel installation here at the Engine Manufacturing Centre is just one example of this.”
The Engine Manufacturing Centre is the first new plant that Jaguar Land Rover has built from the ground up. The site represents an investment of more than £500 million and will create almost 1400 new jobs by the time the plant reaches full capacity. It will manufacture the first family of advanced technology engines, Ingenium, to be entirely designed and built in-house by Jaguar Land Rover for exclusive use in the company’s future vehicles.
The facility has been recently awarded BREEAM’s ‘Excellent’ rating for the design stage of the assessment for sustainable buildings. It uses cutting-edge heating and lighting systems designed to minimize energy demand through the use of insulated cladding, to maximize daylight through the roof design and to harness natural ventilation through the use of automatic louvers.
Extensive energy monitoring facilities in the plant continually analyze the amount of energy being used and identify opportunities to reduce that energy consumption, for both electricity and natural gas.
Outside of the building, Jaguar Land Rover plans to create an ecological corridor across the bottom of its site. The corridor will be designed to encourage the natural movement of species from one side of the site to the other.
Jaguar Land Rover also won Business in the Community’s ‘Responsible Business of the Year 2013’ for placing environmental innovation at the heart of its business strategy, embedding sustainability at every stage of the product development process and all levels of the business.
Over the past five years, Jaguar Land Rover has reduced fleet CO2 emissions by 23 percent and operating CO2emissions by 21 percent. Waste to landfill has fallen by 75 percent and water consumption by 17 percent.
The company’s environmental innovation roadmap to 2020 aims to use less resources and create zero waste culture as well as reducing its dependency on fossil fuels. It has set a target of 30 percent reduction in CO2 emission and water use by 2020.