Tata Steel’s Scunthorpe site has saved £460,000 in less than a year from two renewable generation sites as it seeks to cut cost further with additional energy-saving measures.
A 39MW solar farm near the steelworks had contributed around 8% of the plant’s bought-in requirement between April 2015 – when it was connected – and December through a private wire agreement.
Richard Jackson, Tata’s manager for energy optimisation, said: “The average supply contribution [from Raventhorpe solar farm] since April last year has been 5.34MW, which is around 8% of our bought-in requirement. The figure is slightly below expectations due to a cloudier summer than average but it still reduced our cost by more than £230,000 to December 2015.”
In addition, a longer-running renewable project run by SITA in Crosby is delivering additional energy generated by landfill gas.
“The capacity was doubled to 2MW in May 2015. With further waste going to this landfill the output has regularly been as high as 1.7MW. Overall, the benefit to us of this supply arrangement was also around £230,000 last year,” Jackson added.
The company is continuing to identify more renewable energy projects to not only lower its costs in the way that the solar and landfill gas sites have. Tata Steel is also seeking to fall in line with the growing trend towards a low carbon future following agreements made in Paris at COP21 in December.
“The nations of the world have reached an agreement in Paris to work towards minimising damaging climate change. A large part of this agreement is to reduce the use of fossil fuels and produce more energy using renewable technologies,” Jackson added.
“We’re pursuing the potential for further renewable projects on all our sites in the UK.”
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