Thailand’s CP Foods to Solarize 180 Facilities with 65 MW Capacity

Businesses across the world pushing decarbonisation and moving towards net zero commitments. In a key development, Thailand based food conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CP Foods) has said that it 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.

CP Foods is gearing up to reach 100 MW of solar energy in its supply chain by 2025.

Peerapong Krinchai, Executive VP, CP Foods, mentioned 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.

CP Foods has already completed installing solar energy systems in the second phase. In the first phase, solar panels were installed on the rooftops of 27 factories. Also, 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 will have installed solar panels to generate electricity for its operations.

CP Foods said that this initiative will help the firm reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its production by about 44,000 tons of CO2 equivalents.

Peerapong Krinchai said, “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.”

In order to become a food company that uses 100% renewable energy throughout the value chain, the aim of CP Foods is to increase the amount of renewable energy consumption in its value chain to 50% by 2030.

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