Canary Wharf offices and retail spaces to be powered by Scottish windfarm
Canary Wharf offices and retail spaces to be powered by Scottish windfarm | Energy industry | The Guardian
Offices and retail spaces across the Canary Wharf business district will soon be powered by clean energy generated by a windfarm in Scotland.
Canary Wharf Group, which manages the 60-hectare (150 acres) estate in east London, has struck a deal with one of the world’s biggest providers of renewable energy to meet almost three-quarters of its electricity demand from wind power.
The deal is expected to help some of the UK’s biggest corporate names occupying office space in Canary Wharf – including EY, HSBC and BP – to cut their emissions while reducing their energy costs.
Brookfield, an asset manager chaired by Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, will provide Canary Wharf with green energy. The company, one of the world’s largest investors in renewable power, will do so by growing its renewables portfolio with the development of a new onshore windfarm in Scotland, which is due to begin generating electricity from 2026.
The estate manager has bought renewable electricity for the business district from energy suppliers since 2012 but the deal with Brookfield is the first time it will source its clean electricity directly from a renewable energy project.
The 15-year agreement could be extended to supply all of Canary Wharf’s 18m sq ft of office, retail and leisure spaces with 100% renewable electricity, according to Shobi Khan, the chief executive of Canary Wharf Group.
Khan told the Guardian that the deal took three years to agree but should help to reduce electricity bills by about 50% compared with using power generated by gas power plants. The deal is part of a wider campaign to transform the estate into a sustainability leader, he said.
“The point is to not only do something good for the environment but have it make good business sense, too,” Khan added.
Brookfield has used its global portfolio of about 25,000 megawatts of renewable energy – the equivalent of all the UK’s onshore and offshore windfarms combined – to strike clean energy supply deals with about 700 corporate customers.
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The Canadian asset manager’s real estate investment arm also owns a 50% stake in Canary Wharf, which it acquired in 2014.
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: wind
Decades of government support for the development of wind energy has resulted in lower costs and a rapidly growing share of electricity generated by wind turbines. Wind in 2019 accounted for 7.3 percent of electrical generation, surpassing for the first time hydropower at 7.0 percent.