Sustainable development and environmental awareness are very important to Amphenol both globally and locally. Our company has an ISO14001 certificate, considering this, we are constantly working to minimize the negative effects on the environment during our operations. One of the main points of our quality policy is to constantly monitor and reduce our carbon footprint.
To represent these global and local strategies, we installed solar panels and a household-sized small power plant, as we have already written about earlier in the year.
Now that the system is working for almost half a year, we examined whether it brings the pre-calculated returns.
Our system produced 23,65 MWh energy during five months. If it is going to work as before, by the end of 2023, 25% of the energy consumption of our factory in Cserkút will be covered by renewable sources.
Amphenol’s global goal is to make 50% of the total energy consumption of the company’s locations come from renewable sources by the end of 2030. We have already completed half of this goal, so we are on the right track, but in order to double our energy production from renewable sources, we are planning to install another solar panel system this year.
We already see what the use of solar panels means in terms of energy efficiency and cost reduction, but let’s look at the development from the point of view of protecting the environment.
Solar panels do not require water to operate and all materials in the solar panel can be recycled. During their use, we do not produce, nor are we the cause of, the production of greenhouse gases. The system works completely passively, there are no emissions, i.e., air load.
To talk about numbers, what does protecting the environment mean in relation to our solar park operating at our site in Cserkút? In Hungary, the consumption of 1 kWh of electricity results in approximately 0.375 kg of CO2 emissions, so when our solar park operates at full capacity, approximately 32.5 kg of CO2 less is emitted into the air per hour than if we used traditional, non-renewable energy. If we project this over a year, we pollute the air with almost 80 tons (79.4 T) less CO2, thanks to our development. (When calculating the annual estimated data, we took into account the number of hours of sunshine registered by the observation station in Pécs.)