Solar farm in Belgium to come online in 2024 for Ineos’s PVC site
With European plastics sector facing a competitiveness gap with the US and China, driven by higher energy costs, less access to raw material and a challenging regulatory landscape, measures are needed to safeguard the competitiveness and avoid Europe becoming dependent on imports from abroad. Support schemes that provide access to renewable energy are critical to a sustainable future.
As such, chemical firm Ineos Inovyn and its partners PerPetum Energy & Green4Power are installing photovoltaic panels for a new solar farm, equivalent to the size of 56 football pitches. Work is progressing rapidly, and the installation will be online in July 2024, when it will supply power exclusively to the Jemeppe production site, which employs over 540 people and is one of Europe’s biggest PVC facilities.
The Jemeppe project will provide 60MW of renewable electricity and reduce emissions by 14,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, helping diversify energy sources. This is part of Ineos’s strategic decarbonisation roadmap to reduce CO2 emission across sites by more than 30% by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050, enabling Ineos Inovyn to provide customers with low carbon products that support the transition to a Net Zero economy, it adds.
Philippe Taranti, Ineos Inovyn Director at the Jemeppe site said, “I am proud of the industry leadership we are showing. Ineos products play a vital role across modern life and this new solar farm gives us competitive access to local renewable energy.”
PerPetum Energy is responsible for the project build, commissioning and maintenance on behalf of Green4Power, which finances and owns the solar farm.
Under a power purchase agreement Ineos Inovyn will acquire all green electricity produced from Jemeppe-sur-Sambre over the next 15 years.
Luc Leenknegt, CEO and founder of PerPetum Energy said, “We are proud to contribute to INEOS Inovyn’s environmental objectives. This project is totally in line with PerPetum Energy’s mission: to help industrial companies and large consumers to reduce the carbon footprint of their consumption as much as possible, by offering them an optimised mix of multi-technology solutions such as photovoltaics, wind power and energy storage.”
