Siemens has revealed that one of its factories is on tack to become carbon neutral by the end of 2022, eight years ahead of its original target.
The Congleton factory, which manufactures more than 1.2m controls and drives each year, has introduced a range of "sustainable solutions" for energy generation and demand with support from Siemens' energy and performance services business, Smart Infrastructure.
These include generating 75kw of renewable energy through a hydro-electric plant at Havannah Weir on the river Dane and using carbon neutral, certified biogas to power its on-site gas engine.
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Siemens said that measures alone saved over £250,000 a year and took the 80% power-independent factory off the grid.
The Congleton site also adopted a building management system which automatically adjusts to drive energy efficiency improvements, while modern windows and LED lighting have reduced the total energy bill by 13% and 30% respectively.
Andrew Peters, managing director of Siemens Digital Industries Congleton, said: "Siemens believes that sustainability is a force for good and can deliver value for all its stakeholders.
"We want to help customers achieve sustainable growth and to transform their industries through decarbonisation. The first step of that is for us to achieve these ambitions in our own operations.
"I am delighted that by leveraging a culture of continuous improvement and sustainability - the vital components to Siemens’ Congleton’s long-term success - we have achieved carbon neutrality, a major milestone in our ambitions to reach net zero emissions by 2030."
The 50-year-old Siemens Congleton factory began improving its sustainability in 1990 when it started manufacturing drives to meet the demands of industry.
Faye Bowser, head of Siemens' Energy & Performance Services GB&I, added: "The climate emergency puts the demand on businesses of all sizes and sectors to really accelerate their efforts for decarbonisation.
"But a challenge is that often decarbonisation isn't their core business. So, at Energy and Performance Services we make it our business to use our skills, our knowledge and our tools to help our customers transition to net zero in a way that contributes to their business priorities.
"Despite us being from the Siemens family, we have approached working with Congleton the same we do with any organisation. It has been fantastic.
"In Andrew Peters you have a leader in a business which has put continuous improvement and sustainability at the heart of their long-term success.
"Our job was to apply those components to their energy system and their energy strategy. What we ended up with is an engineered roadmaps to net zero that considers timelines, finance, digital services, all there to safeguard business continuity, and to have a method to continuously identify more opportunities to reduce carbon on site."
