Taking its sustainable credentials to the next level, Cloudbass installed a solar panel array on the roof of its base in March this year. The OB company intends to use its solar power to charge up the three new Volvo FH Electric tractor units that it has recently acquired to service a Sky Sports contract.
With over 400 solar panels on the roof of its industrial unit home, Cloudbass is set to not only run its business on free power, but will soon also be able to provide power back to the grid.
Says Steve Knee, managing director at Cloudbass: “We’ve got the opportunity, we’ve got the solar panels on our base and they are generating significant electricity at the moment, so we can charge these [e-HGV units] up from the sun, which is really exciting.”
He continues: “It’s not an insignificant cost to do 417 solar panels on our roof, but we will be charging up our new e-HGV’s from the sun, which is free fuel. That solar array does generate a significant amount of electricity that will charge up these tractor units quite healthily, and so we are not buying diesel. Diesel is not cheap!
“There are other savings as well,” he continues. “The difference in cost of an electric tractor unit compared to a diesel tractor unit is about a hundred pounds more a week for the electric unit. But moreover there are tax benefits as well, because the way that you can treat the lease or purchase of an electric tractor unit doesn’t count towards your capital allowances for tax breaks, so you can basically claim a hundred percent of the cost back against your corporation tax, whereas you can’t do that with a diesel tractor unit.
Powered by the sun
Knee says during some particularly hot days in June, the solar units generated 1.3 megawatt hours a day. “Obviously through the winter you’ll get a lot less, but in June on a clear day, 1.3 megawatt hours is amazing. I looked up the average household usage, which is about seven or eight kilowatt hours a day, so we’re generating enough electricity on our roof to power 170 houses, which is quite significant.”
Despite the initial outlay on the solar panels, the company is saving thousands of pounds on power and it intends to make the most of it. Knee comments: “We were spending hundreds of pounds a day on electricity. We’ve got a smart metre in the centre of the building, which not only shows all the incoming electricity from various sources, but it shows the cost of buying from the grid at any one time.
“Before we had the solar panels installed, by 11 o’clock in the morning we’d be up to a hundred-plus pounds of electricity used. Now it’s like eight quid by lunchtime. By the time we get into the day, we’re not buying any electricity at all.”
Transformers in disguise
Cloudbass is taking the next step of putting its own company transformer into its industrial unit to get a direct connection to the national grid, “so we can completely control our own in and out,” according to Knee. “We’ll get a tariff set up and we can actually sell that electricity back to the grid when we’re not using it,” he adds.
Cloudbass runs its own power systems division which means that with the addition of the new e-HGV units as well as the solar panel array at its base, it has a complete power package.
Knee comments: “Because we’re uniquely placed in power, we are the first OB company really to do our own power at scale. The reason companies traditionally have done separate power [onsite with generators for redundancy] is because they don’t want the liability. Whereas we wanted to take on the control of power, so we have our own power systems division and run our own generators”
He concludes: “It means that when we go on the sustainability journey, we can join all these dots together and come out with something really interesting for our clients. So all in all it’s just win, win, win!”
