Award Winners and Co-op Fortnight Update
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Published 4 Jul 2024 in Raising Awareness
Co-op Fortnight continues, so today we're celebrating our win of 'Energy Project of the Year' at The Energy Awards last night & highlighting our partnership with Big Solar Co-op.
Energy Project of the Year winners at The Energy Awards!
Our leading efforts in this space have already been recognised, as last night we picked up the ‘Energy Project of the Year – Retail & Commercial’ award at The Energy Awards, a fantastic achievement that highlights the ongoing impact of our sustainability strategy.
We beat a range of projects to win the awards including Aldi’s Eco Concept Store. This award win is in recognition of our energy efficiency activity, particularly around our automation investment across refrigeration, heating and cooling across over 100 food stores this year working with Lowe Conex. This combined with our other energy efficiency initiatives including refrigeration replacement, LED lighting roll out and ongoing colleague awareness activity has enabled us to reduce energy usage by a further 9% so far this year compared to the previous year.
Congratulations! Colleagues Sam Webb, Circular Economy Manager & Julie Sheldon, Head of Energy Efficiency with the prestigious Energy of the Year Award!
This Co-op Fortnight, we have spoken about the work being done collectively by co-operatives to benefit the communities they operate in. Whether that’s giving expert advice to small businesses, or helping to fund a community kitchen, the breadth of initiatives we have supported should make us all feel proud to be part of our Society. Through our partnerships, we can continually deliver on our trust pillars and focus on our sustainable impacts across all of our businesses.
As an example of co-operation amongst co-operatives, we are working closely with Big Solar Co-op to implement more than 100 solar panels on the roof of our head office in Warwick. Combined with our existing solar panels at Warwick, this move will generate approximately 90,000 kilowatt hours per annum and save roughly £6,000 in energy costs each year. During this week work has commenced to prepare the roof at our Warwick Head Office, with the panels due to be installed imminently. Once completed, around 14% of our Warwick Head Office electricity needs will be provided by solar panels,
The installation of solar panels is not limited to just our head office though, as we will be working with Big Solar to install them across a further 28 food, travel and childcare sites. This partnership will reduce energy costs for our Society, cutting electricity bills by circa £150,000 each year, generating over 1.5m kilowatt hours of electricity per annum. It was Sam Webb, Store Manager of the Your Co-op store in Lydney, who proposed working with the, volunteer-led co-operative to support our efforts to generate more green energy. Big Solar Co-op’s aim is to install 100 megawatts of renewable community solar projects by 2030, and we look forward to helping them with this and deepening our collective commitment to community energy generation.
Sam Webb, Circular Economy Manager, whose idea from the Global Innovation Co-op Summit competition was brought to life. Read more here.
With community energy fortnight also now taking place until July 14th, we will be continuing our work with Younity, our joint venture with Octopus energy, which so far has established partnerships with more than 270 renewable community energy projects across the country.
The partnership with Big Solar Co-op complements our work to increase energy efficiency across our family of businesses, which has seen a reduction in energy usage of 11% in the past year, preventing more than 1,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere.
You can learn more about Big Solar Co-op by visiting Big Solar Co-op – community solar, which includes details on how to volunteer and get involved to support Big Solar Co-op.