South Africa’s Shoprite Group Has Doubled The Amount Of Renewable Energy Used In Its Operations In Just 1 Year!

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The Shoprite Group is South Africa’s largest retailer by market capitalization, sales, profit, and number of employees and customers. Shoprite is accelerating its solar rollout across its sites in South Africa as well as other markets on the continent. Shoprite operates in 10 African countries, and the Group has about 3,000 stores across Africa.

Thanks to this accelerated solar rollout program, the Shoprite Group has almost doubled the amount of renewable energy used in its operations to 103,234 MWh compared with 54,138 MWh last year. It has achieved this by increasing the amount of renewable energy bought from landlords and other suppliers by 91%.

“We have also reduced electricity consumption by 161 million kWh through our LED lamp replacement project, and our network of solar-panel installations now cover the equivalent of more than 26 soccer fields,” says the Shoprite Group’s CSI & Sustainability Manager Sanjeev Raghubir. The retailer’s investment in its LED replacement project, which commenced in 2017, totals R371.1 million to date, including R48.7 million over the past year.

“LED lamps are typically 50% more energy efficient than fluorescent lamps, and we encourage everyone to play their part in reducing their energy consumption to stabilise our national grid,” adds Raghubir.

The LED lamp replacement program forms part of the Group’s strategy to improve energy efficiency as much as possible and then to use renewable energy across its operations, including distribution centers, trucks, and trailers.

Commenting on the recently held COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Raghubir said, “Events like COP28 are absolutely crucial, but we — business, government, civil society, humankind in general — can’t and mustn’t wait for their decisions. This is especially true in the African context: despite contributing the least of any region to global greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, the continent is being affected disproportionately by climate change.”

Raghubir adds that this is why the Shoprite Group invests heavily in reducing its carbon footprint across all aspects of its operations, with energy consumption a key priority. The Group’s solar photovoltaic (PV) facilities now generate enough clean energy to power nearly 4800 homes for a year, and it is the only African company to have earned a place on the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supplier Engagement Leaderboard, for taking action to measure and reduce climate risk within its supply chain in the 2022 financial year. The retailer’s three-pronged approach includes reducing consumption, expanding its installed capacity of renewables, and purchasing electricity in collaboration with independent power producers (IPPs).

“We’ve increased the amount of electricity we’re buying from landlords and other suppliers by 91%. That’s progress by any measure. The next step is wheeling: buying electricity from an IPP through the existing transmission network.”

Raghubir says wheeling would be a massive step forward, but will require greater collaboration between various stakeholders to establish a national wheeling framework. “In the interim, we will continue to improve energy efficiency wherever we can, and to this end the Group has embarked on a refrigeration project. We’ll also continue to install solar wherever its viable, whether on rooftops or carports. At the Shoprite Group we’ve set and are pursuing science-based targets to reduce our carbon emissions throughout our operations — in stores, distribution centres and transportation — with a sense of urgency.”

It is great to see so much progress from one of Africa’s largest retailers. These kinds of businesses operate in large stores with a lot of roof space and large parking lots. When all of these ae fully covered in solar panels, it would help integrate a large share of distributed solar PV into the energy mix. Where consumption is higher than the electricity production from solar from the available space, electricity wheeling in collaboration with independent power producers can also help unlock the bankability of more large renewable projects. This will help grow the share of renewables at a much faster rate. And of course, solar PV projects can be developed and built at a much faster rate than the larger traditional centralized thermal power plants for example, helping to add much-needed new generation capacity as quickly as possible.

Image courtesy of Shoprite