Dan Murphy’s has completed installation of solar panels to 13 of its stores with plans to have 25 stores powered by solar energy by July 2020.
The most recent store installation took place at Pakenham in Melbourne’s south east and the 99.76kW solar system will generate enough green energy to offset almost all the electricity used by the store. Other stores that have been converted to solar have been in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia.
Sixteen BWS stores have also had solar panels installed as a part of the wider Endeavour Group’s move towards greener energy practices.
Tyson Holbery, National Renewal Operations Manager, Dan Murphy’s told National Liquor News that there are around 50 sites that have been identified as potential candidates for conversion and that the solar panels are just one part of the business’ ongoing green energy objectives.
“Because we don’t own on the sites, we’ve had to go through a process of getting approval from landlords, so we’ve got quite a large list of around 50 sites that we’ve identified as candidates. And then we go through a process of contacting landlords and seeking all the necessary approval,” he says.
“We’re doing a few projects around sustainability, one of the others is that we are installing Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting in most of our stores. We’ve just completed an audit of where we have LED versus non-LED lighting, and we’ve got about 70 stores where we’re improving the sort of lighting efficiency.
“The other thing that we’ve done is we’ve been working on improving our energy management systems which essentially are controllers that sit in the store and they can help monitor things like the temperature settings. So, we can remotely dial in and control things like if the store’s air conditioning is running the wrong temperature. We can remotely dial in and adjust it to keep it comfortable for our team and customers but ensure that it’s not overworking the systems.
“We can remotely control things like air conditioning, refrigeration, lighting and make sure that when the team leaves at the end of the shift that all the lights will turn off and we’re not wasting unnecessary energy.”
“Our intention is to have 25 [Dan Murphy’s] stores complete by the end of this financial year, which will be 10 per cent of our fleet. But it’s our intention to continue the rollout as well, so we hope to keep moving more towards renewable energy in our business. And hopefully within a couple of years we’ve got a much larger percentage of our fleet running on renewable energy.”
