Renewables

The Co-operative Group is among the world’s leading businesses when it comes to taking up the challenge of tackling global climate change. We are doing this in three ways: firstly reducing our energy consumption; secondly through a renewable energy procurement strategy; and finally developing a pipeline of renewable generation projects throughout the UK.

The Group has over 4,000 outlets powered by renewable energy procured from our energy suppliers and we are on track to achieve a 25% reduction in the amount of energy used across our family of businesses by 2012.  We have 58 Megawatts of wind energy development built or consented which will enable us to generate 15% of our electricity usage from our own projects, on our own land and a further 32 Megawatts awaiting planning determination. To put this into context, once completed, these projects would generate the equivalent amount of electricity to power over 50,000 average homes [1].

We have built the UK’s largest photovoltaic project at our head office complex in Manchester and going forward, we have a programme to develop further wind as well as micro hydro, biomass and anaerobic digestion projects on both our own and on third party owned land.

Our approach to all development, with which we are involved, is close working with the local communities which has been a large part of our success to date. We have put in place innovative community funding and education programmes where the Co-operative has a long-term and active involvement. Our environmental education programme, “Energy Works” centred on our wind farm in Cambridgeshire, provides dedicated curriculum teaching on energy and is proving extremely popular with the many schools involved.

[1] Figure based on BWEA calculations.BWEA (2006) http://www.bwea.com/edu/calcs.html