Dairy firm FrieslandCampina has announced that it will install more than 416,000 solar panels, covering a total area of 670,000 on the roofs of its members' dairy farms in the Netherlands.
The announcement follows the granting of a €200 million SDE+ Subsidy to the group, by Henk Kamp, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs.
Once installed, the panels will generate more than 20% of the electricity for the Dutch facilities of the dairy company, equivalent to 33,000 households.
GroenLeven Heerenveen will install the panels on the company's behalf.
Important Step
'This subsidy allocation is an important step in the FrieslandCampina Solar programme, aimed at accelerating the installation of solar panels at dairy farms,' the company said in a statement.
'The ambition of FrieslandCampina is to generate sufficient green electricity at the farm yards to fully cover the use of electricity within the chain and thus contributing to achieve climate neutral growth in 2020. Therefore FrieslandCampina stimulates the production of green electricity by offering dairy farmers a 10 euro bonus for each ton reduction of CO2 emission.'
A total of 1,600 FrieslandCampina dairy farms already have solar panels.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Sign-up for a subscription to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
