At our new Asda store in South Norwich, photovoltaic panels cover significant amounts of the store roof, air source heat pumps provide heating and hot water, and LED lighting has also been incorporated in all areas of the store, both internally and externally. These measures mean that over 18% of the energy used in the store comes from renewable sources. 

In 2013 we opened our new environmental depot in Rochdale. The building includes a variety of low carbon technology such as a combined heat and power plant, rainwater harvesting, solar panels and high efficiency refrigeration. This means 26% lower carbon emissions, 30% less water use and 28% more energy efficient versus previous similar depots.

Our customers have told us that being green is something that they care about, so wherever possible, we want to help them. In 2011, we began installing charging points for electrical cars in our car parks for customers who want a cheaper and greener alternative to fossil fuels. To date, we have over 170 charging points in over 100 stores. Customers can search for their nearest store with a charging point on the Asda store locator. 

Each year we commit a substantial budget to trialling and implementing new technologies in our stores. It's an investment that will see our energy use fall even further.

In the last few years we have invested in: LED lighting; voltage optimisation; systems that help us manage our buildings better; heating and ventilation optimisation, and systems to help us get the best out of our fridges, to name but a few. 

Asda's dedicated Energy Bureau is incredibly sophisticated, providing energy monitoring, management and maintenance.

To do this, it constantly monitors around 10,000 submeters to accurately measure energy use across our 614 stores. This means that when something isn’t working quite as it should, it is identified and investigated immediately.

Our Energy Bureau also helps us to reduce our energy use even further. Where equipment is malfunctioning, it’s fixed. But if we find that it’s inherently inefficient, we work with the Bureau to develop innovative solutions.

Although the Bureau means we can manage nearly 90% of a stores energy consumption remotely, we still really need our store colleagues to play their part to help us reach our targets. 

Our colleagues are vital in helping us to reduce energy use at Asda, with each of our store managers having targets and responsibility for the energy use in their store.

Our Energy Bureau is always there to help, but our store colleagues really make a difference. Simple, common sense measures such as shutting fridge doors, turning off equipment when not in use, like pizza ovens, all add up and really make a difference.  

In 2014, we installed a large-scale solar PV system on the roof of our new Abbey Road superstore in Leicester. The 1,625m² array consists of 984 panels on both the north and south facing areas of the roof to provide maximum coverage and energy generation. The whole system does lots to reduce the overall carbon footprint and operational costs of the store and saves a huge 197,538kWh of energy every year.
 

Here at Asda, we have introduced the Mistral system. It’s a completely different approach to refrigeration. A unit containing coils and fans is installed on the roof and air from this is then ducted to the sales floor cases and cold stores.

The fridges look exactly the same, they just have a higher angled pipe for the distribution ducting to sit behind. Even though they look and perform like a regular fridge, the Mistral system is busy reducing our energy use by up to 15%. Not only that, we use less refrigerant in our system. A real win-win. 

By the very nature of our business, we have lots of fridges in our stores. But we understand the damaging impact that refrigerant gas can have on the environment. That’s why we pledged to reduce our leakage rate from 20% in 2007 to 8% by 2015. Not only did we achieve this early – in 2011, our gas leakage rate was only 7.6%. In 2011, we won 'End User of the Year' Award in the cooling industry awards for implementing an innovative approach to meeting environmental challenges of refrigeration and air conditioning.

Thanks to everything that we've learnt our new stores are now much more efficient. Since 2007 the stores that we've bult have an average leakage rate of only 3.6%! A big improvement.

All of this work reducing leaks and improving systems means that we now use less energy to run our fridges and have a 50% reduction in carbon emissions (vs. a 2005 base).  

Depots are included in our existing building targets and achieved a 20% reduction in carbon emissions by 2009 (vs. a 2005 base line) – a year earlier than the 2010 target! The improvements made range from LED lighting in car parks and freezer chambers to standardised heating levels. We also increased the temperature of our freezer chambers from -25 to -20 °C — this does not affect the goods but has saved 7,000 tonnes of carbon every year.