LUBRICANTS COMPANY HARNESSES THE SUN TO DRIVE DOWN ENERGY COSTS

The sun is literally shining on Britain’s leading family-owned, independent oil blenders and marketers, Morris Lubricants, to help drive down its energy bill and improve its carbon footprint at the same time.

More than 200 tonnes of CO2 have been saved in energy production since the company installed its first solar photovoltaic system on south-facing warehouse roofs at Castle Foregate, Shrewsbury 18 months ago.

To put the saving into perspective, it’s the equivalent of boiling enough water to make 11,488,236 cups of tea, travelling from Manchester to London and back 1,510 times, powering a 60 watt light bulb for 672 years, flying from London to New York and back 100 times and filling 7.2 million party balloons.

The first phase of the solar panels had the capacity of producing 80kWh of electricity, the second phase added a combined capacity of 200 kWh and the most recent phase, which went live last December, added 117.9kWh to the system

Last year, the system performed much better than expected as it generated 239,876kWh of electricity against a forecast of 210,975kWh. This year’s forecast is 304,694kWh, which equates to £33,097 saved by the company in energy consumption.

According to Government figures, the solar panel system at Morris Lubricants is producing enough electricity to supply 72 households for a year.

“The additional system installed in December should mean we generate enough electricity of completely cover our electricity usage at weekends when we are just ticking over, so long as the sun shines, of course!” said Andrew Goddard, the company’s managing director. “We came close to achieving this target a couple of times last year, but never quite made it.

“The next step is to get monitoring software up and running so that we can identify where we can make energy savings in the works.

“Morris Lubricants is a very environmentally aware company that is focused on reducing its carbon footprint and energy bills. We are hoping that the solar panels will produce at least 20 per cent of the electricity that we require.

“The system should help to stabilise our energy bill as electricity costs are predicted to rise considerably over the next few years. Because the panels will be generating seven days a week, we will be feeding any excess electricity into the National Grid.”

The company has also implemented a zero waste initiative, introducing recycling solutions wherever possible to stop waste going to landfill