Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CP Foods) will increase the installation of solar panels at 180 animal farms, feed mills, and processing plants across Thailand, with a total capacity of 65 MW by 2023. The company is gearing up to reach 100 MW of solar energy in its supply chain by 2025.

Mr. Peerapong Krinchai, Executive Vice President – Corporate Engineering at CP Foods, reveals that the company continually promotes solar energy at its operations in all forms, including solar rooftop, solar farm, and solar floating, in an effort to transition to food production that utilizes renewable energy. This complies with the company’s commitment to increase the proportion of renewable energy consumption in its supply chain and strive toward to a net-zero goal.

So far, CP Foods has already completed installing solar energy systems in their second phase. In the first phase, solar panels were installed on the rooftops of 27 factories. 10 solar farms and 2 floating solar sites were installed in additional operations for the second phase.

The company is currently in the third phase, with plans to install solar rooftop and solar floating systems at an additional 67 operations and to set up solar panels on more than 80 locations in the fourth phase. 

By 2025, approximately 34 operations of aquaculture business from more than180 operations, including shrimp farms, aquafeed mills, and food processing plants across Thailand, will have installed solar panels to generate electricity for its operations.

This initiative will help the company reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its production by about 44,000 tons of CO2 equivalents.

“CP Foods works promote the use of solar energy throughout the value chain to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enable cost optimization. The company had earlier this year announced that it had successfully phased out coal use across all of Thailand's operations in accordance with coal free 2022 campaign. The business substitutes biomass energy for coal.,” Mr. Peerapong said.

He added that solar energy utilized in CP Foods' farms and factories contributes to the company's commitment to renewable energy. At present, 30% of CP Foods' total energy consumption comes from renewable sources. This includes 30% from biogas, 68% from biomass, and 2% from solar energy. These energy sources collectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 600,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which is comparable to planting 64 million trees over an area of 320,000 rai. Upon completion of the company's solar power installation project, solar energy's share is set to rise to 4%.

In addition, CP Foods has announced its commitment to Science Based Target initiatives (SBTi) with the net zero goals by 2050 to limit the global average temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius. /