Heywood, Lancashire, UK: Yearsley Group, the UK’s largest cold storage and distribution provider, has installed solar panels at five more of its cold stores in England.
These installations bring the group’s total use to 8,997 panels across 7 of its 13 depots, generating 1,753,000 kilowatt hours per annum.
The installations cost £3.5m and will help reduce the company’s reliance on the national grid. Yearsley also plans to install other renewable solutions such as wind power at depots.
Solar panels at the Heywood depot
Harry Yearsley, managing director of Yearsley Group, said: “Cold storage by its nature requires a large energy input, so it makes sense to use the large exposed surface area of the warehouses to generate electricity.
“This also helps us to meet our carbon reduction commitments as part of our ISO 14001 environmental accreditation. Sustainability is very important within our business and carbon reduction is vital in both our warehouse and logistics operations.
“We have already implemented new management systems for reducing food miles and updated many of the cold stores with state-of-the-art insulation, but we know we can more and are heavily investing in moving this forward across our entire network of depots.”
