The cement firm Holcim is already building its solar plant and carrying out studies for the development of a wind farm in El Salvador.
Holcim is building a photovoltaic park in partnership with the company AES in Metapán, El Salvador, where it recently inaugurated the Maya Plant. With this park it will generate 21% of its energy consumption based on renewables.
“We are going to have 17 MWp (megawatts peak) of clean energy that is equivalent to 21% of the total required in the cement production process,” says the CEO of Holcim El Salvador, Rodrigo Gallardo. The solar plant will be made up of 39,200 panels, arranged in a 14.3-hectare space within the El Ronco plant, and will begin operating in 2023.
Meanwhile, the cement company has made an investment of 3 million dollars (mdd) to incorporate a system that allows the use of thermal energy from waste through co-processing, an initiative carried out together with Geocycle, with an eye on the economy. circular.
The world’s heavy industry (cement, lime, clay, gypsum) produces 6,000 million tons of CO2 annually, more than a sixth of the total emissions associated with energy, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
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Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, recently said that meeting the ambition of net-zero emissions by the middle of this century will not be possible without “radical reductions in emissions from heavy industry.”
The Holcim cement company has long deployed a sustainability strategy in this regard. Gallardo mentions that they are currently working on the possibility of recovering the heat generated by the cement kiln and re-injecting it into the production process as a source of energy through turbines. In addition, they carry out feasibility studies for the construction of a wind farm to diversify their energy matrix.
With a presence in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, some of Holcim’s goals are to accelerate the use of low and neutral carbon products; recycle 100 million tons of waste and by-products to obtain energy and raw materials; double waste-derived fuels, and operate its first Net Zero cement production plant.
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At the Maya Plant, the second in El Salvador, sustainability and technology converge “to allow low water and energy consumption, as well as process monitoring and remote operation, from the El Ronco plant,” he says. Gallant.
Source: Forbes Central America
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