Solar, Wind Power Roll at Dow Jones, Menasha, Spruce and Prudential

by | Nov 15, 2010

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Several business headquarters including those at Dow Jones, Menasha and Spruce Environmental Technologies, as well as office building complexes are adding renewable energy to their electricity mix.

As an example, Dow Jones & Company is installing solar panels at its corporate office in South Brunswick, N.J. The installation is part of a project to construct a solar-power system that at 4.1 megawatts will be one of the largest solar installations at a single commercial site in the U.S, according to the company.

The solar installation will consist of more than 13,000 solar panels covering nearly 230,000 square feet of parking space on Dow Jones’s Bernard Kilgore campus. The system is expected to produce the equivalent of 5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which is enough energy to power the servers and computers that support the global operations of Dow Jones.

The system, which was announced in April, is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2011.

Also in New Jersey, Prudential Financial has installed solar panels on two buildings at its office complex in Roseland. The company also has installed solar panels in its Scottsdale, Arizona office building. Together, the panels will produce an estimated 2.3 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually and reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions by 3.2 million pounds a year.

The 2,678 panels installed in the Roseland buildings will generate approximately 4 percent of the power use in that office campus, with a peak power output of 500 kilowatt hours.

In Wisconsin, the Menasha Corp. plans to install five wind turbines at its headquarters and factory in Neenah, which is touted as the largest wind installation at a business in northeastern Wisconsin, reports JSOnline.

The five 20-kilowatt turbines will be purchased from Renewegy. At 115 tall, the wind turbines are one-fourth the height of new utility-scale turbines that were erected recently in Brown County, according to the article.

The turbines will generate enough power to provide for the basic office needs at the company’s corporate headquarters and its subsidiary, Menasha Packaging, reports JSOnline.

The company’s other sustainability efforts include upgrades for corrugators, high efficiency lighting and heat capture from the corrugators to heat other parts of its building.

Spruce Environmental Technologies recently completed the installation of a solar array to provide electricity for its Ward Hill, Massachusetts, headquarters building. The 78.8-kilowatt (kW) array was installed by Nexamp, and will supply one-third of the building’s electricity needs. It also is expected to offset approximately 137,150 pounds of carbon dioxide annually.

When Spruce is not using the solar energy generated by the system, such as during holidays or weekend, the unused power will be available to the National Grid.

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