Top 50 indie The Kay Group believe they have launched the most energy efficient fuel station and convenience store in the UK.
The one-acre, 24-hour Texaco site based on Rossendale Road in Burnley, Lancashire, comprises a 2,500sqft Spar convenience store with 23 metres of refrigeration, eight fuelling positions and a five-unit Jet Wash centre, and is consuming less than 400kw units of electricity a day.
This compares with an almost exact blue print of this site built only three years ago by The Kay Group in Formby, Liverpool, which is currently consuming just less than 900kw units a day.
The energy reduction side of the project was created via a joint effort between The Kay Group, Enviroglow and Sedna Aire UK.
Richard Cox, Kay Group managing director, said: “Enviroglow has already reduced the energy usage in seven of our sites by an average in-excess of 36%, so it was clearly the right partner for this project. What’s more its affiliation with the American refrigeration technologies company Sedna Aire was a perfect fit. So far it is producing results that are in line with its own projections and therefore our expectations.”
All the well known energy reducing technologies such as LED lighting and voltage optimisation are present in the site. However, the site also contains a number of new (to the UK) technologies to reduce the energy consumption and increase overall efficiency.
Enviroglow development director Roger Shenton said: “Food retailers have been crying out for an open deck display unit with the efficiency that they believe doors can offer. The E-volve system offers exactly this, in fact in a live trading environment the E-volve cabinet is more efficient than a fridge with doors. This combined with other Sedna technologies is producing phenomenal results.”
Solar energy has also played a big role in the savings. SolarCool is a US solar thermodynamics air conditioning and refrigeration system, that uses free energy converted from the sun’s UV rays to assist the compressor in heating up the gas in the system, therefore significantly reducing the energy used on inverter and multi-stage systems.
Chris Micallef, technical director, Sedna Aire, said: “The UK benefits from between 1,700 and 1,900 hours of unbroken sunshine every year. At such a small comparative additional cost there are no reasons why any business would not take advantage of this free energy on their cooling and heating systems.
In addition to the electrical saving technologies installed on site, rainwater harvesting for the jet wash centre, automatic temperature control (ATC) and stage two vapour recovery were also part of the overall environmental efficiency project.
Cox added: “As you would expect, there was an additional cost to this installation. However in the whole scheme of things it was minimal, and assuming we continue to track usage at the present values, then the additional investment required will be returned in less than eight months.
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