Making a difference with small steps

"Our electricity consumption has dropped 44.4% in the past 14 years. This corresponds to total savings of around 90 million kilowatt hours or a good 36.500 metric tons of CO₂," says Reinhold. He explains how this can be achieved: "We started with a mix of small measures, such as LED lighting, dry cooling, modern electric drives and pump systems, or optimization of compressed air consumption. We kept asking ourselves what could be done even better to minimize energy losses." Making use of synergy effects is proving to give a key advantage. For example, cooperation with a farmer in the immediate vicinity. He operates a biogas plant just over a kilometer away and produces more biogas than he can use on site. 

Since 2013, the surplus biogas has been fed to two large combined heat and power plants via a dedicated pipeline. The electricity generated goes directly into the plant's grid, which has since been completely independent of natural gas. The thermal energy obtained is also used in the summer, not for heating purposes, but in the form of converted cooling energy. This is because the process cooling is needed for the manufacturing process. "In combination with an absorption chiller, we manage to optimally and efficiently align the internal circuits," explains Reinhold.

On the way to energy independence

That's not all. "Obviously, we are always striving to increase our efficiency level even more," says Reinhold. The latest cooperation is therefore also intended to help save more energy and to produce even more independently of volatile energy price developments with the help of renewable energies. By 2024, a photovoltaic system will be set up on a five-hectare area of the REHAU site. The electricity generated will be taken directly by the plant. In December, agreements were made to this end with the Feuchtwangen municipal utilities. The letter of intent also includes an additional area of five hectares next to another plant. The plant is to cover just under 20 percent of the energy requirements at the Feuchtwangen site in the future

"Green" sites worldwide 

The photovoltaic plant in Feuchtwangen is one building block in REHAU's numerous global efforts to operate its own sites in a climate-friendly manner. We recently commissioned a solar park for our office buildings in Erlangen/Eltersdorf, Germany. With numerous modernizations in recent years, our plant in Guntramsdorf, Austria, has managed to reduce its ecological footprint more and more. In addition, our plants in Bleanau (United Kingdom), Tortosa (Spain) and Klaipeda (Lithuania), for example, are already fully supplied with green electricity from local photovoltaic or wind power plants. A photovoltaic plant also supplies our three plants in Celaya, Mexico. All these measures are important milestones in REHAU's sustainability strategy to increasingly switch the power supply to environmentally friendly energy sources and to reduce our carbon footprint even further.