Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW) completed three solar projects on three shopping centers, bringing several megawatts of solar online. Those sites are Westfield Valley Fair in Silicon Valley and Westfield UTC in San Diego, California, and Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey.
“Our solar panel arrays are a demonstration of URW’s abiding commitment to the communities we serve and to protecting our environment for future generations — while also constituting a clear competitive factor for our own success,” said Paul Kurzawa, U.S. EVP Operations for URW.
Westfield
The Valley Fair project was a system expansion completed in partnership with Pacific Gas and Electric and added approximately 3,800 panels, reaching 2.5 MW of capacity. The UTC project was also an expansion, adding more than 2,800 solar panels installed by San Diego Gas and Electric, bringing the center’s solar power system to 3,513 total panels in all, with a capacity of approximately 1.2 MW. Garden State Plaza’s solar power system — installed in partnership with Public Service Enterprise Group — is now 3,510 panels with a total capacity of over 1.3 MW.
URW now powers seven of its shopping centers with solar energy in the U.S including at Westfield Topanga & The Village in Los Angeles, where the 2018 completion of a 4-MW, 15,000-panel array. URW now has a solar capacity of over 10.6 MW and can generate 16.7 GWh of renewable energy.
In line with its wider carbon-reduction strategy, URW is also focused on providing a suite of other sustainable solutions throughout its U.S. portfolio, including waste management, water conservation, and LED lighting systems. The company’s LED retrofit projects in the U.S., for example, save nearly 40,000 MWh of energy annually.
URW’s global environmental sustainability initiative, “Better Places 2030, https://www.urw.com/csr” commits the company to achieve a 50% reduction of its carbon emissions by the year 2030 globally. The commitment includes direct emissions, indirect emissions generated from construction, tenant energy consumption and other property operations, as well as employee and visitor transportation.
URW was one of four organizations nationwide to receive the “Excellence in Green Power Use Award,” given to EPA Green Power Partners demonstrating leadership in procuring green power from a utility green power product, a power purchase agreement, or a renewable energy certificate product. URW has purchased 124,000 MWh of clean energy in the form of renewable energy certificates to address 50% of emissions from its U.S. assets in 2020.
News item from Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield
“The company’s LED retrofit projects in the U.S., for example, save nearly 40,000 MWh of energy annually.”
Now if you’re using solar PV $35/MWh, it doesn’t seem like much, yet if these LED lights are in areas where after hours power is used and “demand charges” are common one might be in the $200/MWh range, that does make a difference year after year. Little nickel and dime energy tweaks like smart energy control of large buildings, shutting off lights, increasing the temperature from 76 degrees to 80 or 82 degrees in rooms not being used, IR detectors that sense no heat signature or movement, turning off lights, then turning on lights when a body is detected. Having an energy storage system of just a couple of hours can ride through ‘demand charges’ that can add up to 50% of a commercial electric bill each month.