Giant retailer Tesco has opened a new store in Manchester which was built using the company’s new low carbon blueprint. A combination of energy efficiency measures, including the use of CO2 refrigeration, reduces the store’s carbon footprint by 70% compared to an equivalent store built in 2006.
One of the world’s leading food retailers is moving steadily forward on its way to make CO
2 refrigeration a standard solution in supermarkets. On 12 January, Tesco opened UK’s most energy-efficient store in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, to boost its green credentials and make green stores the blueprint for the retail industry.
The 52,000 square feet Cheetham store incorporates an impressive list of energy-saving measures and low global warming solutions already available on the market. For the first time, it combines a CO
2 transcritical refrigeration system, in this case supplied by Epta, with a closed doors concept that covers all of the low-temperature and most of the high-temperature applications. To further save energy, the cold rooms feature better insulation, using flip-flap doors.
Being the most energy-efficient of its kind in the UK, the store completely relies on readily available technologies. Among them feature:
- Timber frame: The store is completely built with a wooden frame, thereby substituting metal. This significantly reduces the store’s embodied carbon footprint.
- Natural ventilation: The system can partly run on natural ventilation which provides more energy efficient heating and air conditioning
- Metering system: The system will monitor energy and water usage. In addition, the harvest of rainwater reduces the usage of water by a considerable amount.
- Roof lights allow more natural daylight into the store, saving on electricity.
- Combined heat and power plant: The plant runs on naturally produced fuel from sustainable sources, enabling the store to generate its own electricity and make use of the waste heat.
- Recyclable materials: Tesco is constantly increasing the use of recyclable materials in fixtures and signage and designing equipment for future ease of recycling.
- Minimised construction waste: All unused construction materials are recycled.
The Cheetham Hill store’s carbon footprint is 70% less than an equivalent store built in 2006. The company further estimates that the measures will translate to energy cost saving of about 48% based on 2006 baselines. Besides providing significant economic benefits for Tesco, the store will also be used as a tool to convince public authorities that technologies available today can green the retail industry at large, and that further incentives are needed to promote CO
2 refrigeration and other sustainable technologies. Tesco is thus lobbying government to introduce fast-track planning permissions and cut business rates for these kind of green stores.
“Green stores should be given a fast track not a slow track through the planning system," said Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Tesco's corporate-affairs director.
Tesco to use CO2 in “a majority of stores”
The store has been built using the company’s new low carbon blueprint which will provide a foundation for stores built in the UK in the future. According to Tesco’s carbon blueprint, more than a fifth of Tesco stores carbon footprint comes from the refrigerants used in fridges and freezers. Accordingly, “the majority of the stores Tesco will build this year will have refrigeration systems that are cooled with carbon dioxide, which is thousands of times less damaging to the climate than traditional fridge gases.”
