POLOmarket plans more than 50% of its stores with photovoltaics

By the end of the first quarter of 2024, every second store of Poland's largest supermarket chain will be equipped with a photovoltaic installation that will meet as much as 30 percent of each outlet's annual energy needs. Investments in RES are one of the pillars of POLOmarket's long-term ESG activities of the company.

"At the end of September this year, nearly 40 percent of our stores were already using green energy from the sun. Each such installation generates an average of 50 megawatt hours per year, which is nearly 1/3 of the total annual demand of a single facility. All of our photovoltaic installations combined are already generating 5.5 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy per year, and in the next six months we will reach more than 7.6 GWh," declares Anita Tołysz, Member of the Board of POLOmarket Network, Director of Review and Compliance.

POLOmarket is systematically modernizing its older outlets by equipping them with RES installations whenever the roof structure allows; at the same time, all new facilities are designed to allow the installation of solar panels.

POLOmarket's pro-environmental activities translate into a measurable benefit for the environment - publicly available data shows that as much as 144 tons of coal are needed to generate 1 GWh. This means that already in 2024, thanks to photovoltaics, Poland's largest supermarket chain will generate energy on its own, for which traditional generation would require as much as 1,100 tons of coal. What's more, thanks to POLOmarket's RES investments, more than 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide will not enter the atmosphere.

It is worth adding that investments in photovoltaics are just one of many measures aimed at reducing the negative impact on the environment. For some time now, POLOmarket has been reducing the amount of paper and plastic consumed by the chain through digital transformation. Among other things, the chain has abandoned the printing of paper lottery scratch cards in favor of virtual scratch cards available on the "POLOmarket - my favorite" app, and has reduced the number of plastic POLOkarta loyalty cards, replacing them with cards available on the aforementioned app.

In addition, POLOmarket was one of the first Polish retail chains to abandon the delivery of paper advertising newspapers to mailboxes, which translated into significant paper savings. At the same time, the stores installed state-of-the-art equipment for recovering waste paper. Both of these measures combined reduce paper consumption and translate into preventing the cutting down of nearly 100,000 trees a year, equivalent to the area of a forest equal to 50 football fields.