Mitsubishi Electric has this week unveiled a raft of green commitments as part of its seventh environmental plan, vowing to slash the carbon footprint of its products and more than double the use of solar energy at its factories and offices.
The company said the new three-year plan would support its wider Environmental Vision 2021 programme, which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions from product use and production by 30 per cent by 2012 against a 2001 baseline.
Under the new targets, the engineering giant said it would step up efforts to design more energy-efficient products and components, such as power devices, motors, compressors and inverters, in order to reduce carbon emissions from 84 different products by an average of 27 per cent against a 2001 baseline.
It also vowed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride, perfluorocarbon and hydrofluorocarbon by 70 per cent compared to 2006 levels by using replacement gasses with lower global warming potential (GWP) and investing in improvements that will prevent gas leakage during production activities.
In addition, the new plan contains measures to reduce the environmental impact of the company’s operations by more than doubling solar power capacity at factories and offices from 6,400kW to 14,100kW, slashing the amount of waste sent to landfill, and implementing energy management systems to help enhance energy efficiency.
Responding to emailed questions from BusinessGreen, a spokesman for Mitsubishi Electric said the deployment of so-called demand control systems at offices and factories would help to slash the company’s energy use.
“Demand control systems automatically collect energy consumption data at factories and other locations and send them to the head office every 10 seconds, as well as predicting energy demand at these locations,” he explained. “Each location sets energy reduction targets in advance, i.e. the limit to their energy demand, and the system sends out an alert email to those concerned when their energy consumption nears the limit, i.e. when air conditioners are heavily activated on a hot summers day. In these cases, head office instructs this location to reduce energy consumption through a specific procedure.”
He added that this degree of central control allows the company to respond to unexpected peaks in energy demand at one location in order to ensure the organisation’s wider energy and carbon targets are not exceeded.
“When a specific factory exceeds the limit for an unavoidable reason, the head office can instruct the other business sites to reduce further to compensate,” they said, adding that in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster the company was able to use the system to help curb peak-time energy demand, reducing pressure on Japan’s energy grid.
The company refused to divulge the budget to support the new environmental plan, but revealed that a new group of environmental specialists with technical skills in areas such as energy efficiency, waste management and pollution prevention would be appointed to help ensure the new targets are met.
The spokesman confirmed the company would aim to appoint between three and five specialists in each area to help promote best practices across the business.
