Rays the roof in Birmingham
Ikea's Birmingham branch has announced a major new initiative that has seen the home furnishings company install and operate one of the region’s largest solar panel projects, turning sunshine into electricity and providing up to 5% of the store’s electricity needs.
Following a £278,600 investment, IKEA Birmingham is fitting 2,600 photovoltaic panels to the rooftop of its store in Wednesbury, generating around 112,600 kWh of electricity per year, enough to power 34 local homes. This calculation is based on homes using the Ofgem average annual amounts of electricity (3,300kWh).
Built to operate effectively for 25 years, it is anticipated that this initiative will reduce the Birmingham store’s total CO2 consumption by over 1,148 tonnes over this time period. The solar panels will be fully operational by December 2011.
In total, the company is investing close to £4 million in fitting over 39,000 solar panels to the rooftops of ten Ikea stores; Cardiff, Edmonton, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Southampton, Warrington, Birmingham, and Wembley. This will provide on average 5% of each store’s electricity needs, or almost enough energy to power around half of one of the company’s 18 UK based stores with solar energy alone.
Ikea UK aims for all installation work to be complete by March 2012. In total, 31,000m2 of roof space will be covered by solar panels, which will generate around 1,600,000 kWh per year; enough to power 492 homes. Built to operate effectively for 25 years, it is anticipated that the solar panels will reduce Ikea UK’s CO2 consumption on average by 662 tonnes per year during this first 25 years of the installations’ operation. Ikea currently buys its electricity from Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE). In their ‘Fuel Mix’ calculation for April 2009 to March 2010, SSE produced 455g CO2/kWh generated.
Delphine Wolfe, Head of Consultancy for the National Energy Foundation comments: “We are very excited with Ikea’s new solar PV system. It is one of the largest solar roofs in Birmingham and there’s no doubt that it will inspire the whole community, businesses and householders alike, about the benefits of solar PV hence promoting this technology locally.”
The solar panel initiative follows news that installing energy efficient measures has helped the home furnishings company reduce energy consumption by 19%4. Since 2005 it has opened six new stores with only a 10% increase in combined energy use.
These efforts form part of the company’s global ‘Ikea Goes Renewable’ project’ which aims for all Ikea operations across the world to use 100% renewable energy in the long-term.
Commenting on the initiative, Marsha Buckley, Ikea Birmingham’s Store Manager said: “Taking care of people and the environment is integral to how we do business, so we are continually working to significantly reduce our carbon footprint from all parts of our operations, while helping to reduce CO2 emissions in society. We believe that our solar panel initiative marks a major milestone in our ambition to source 100% renewable energy.”
Ikea UK has also invested in a 12.3 MW wind farm in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in North Scotland. The wind farm consists of seven turbines, each generating 1.75MW, producing a combined 24,700,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. This is equivalent to the electricity consumption of five Ikea stores, or 30% of the company’s total electricity consumption in the UK.
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