This reduction is in line with the company's three Climate Change Agreements (CCA), with a target for completion by end-September 2010.
According to Martin Palmer, TDG's Shared User division director and recently appointed director of the Food Storage & Distribution Federation, commented: "Cold stores have a heavy demand for energy, but we will achieve the challenging targets set in our CCAs by making considerable investment in plant and equipment to reduce our energy use."
Some of the recent investments include a new £1+ million refrigeration plant at Aberdeen and a range of energy saving measures at Avonmouth, such as separate pedestrian doors, roller-shutter doors for the main bays and the installation of liquid pressure amplification to reduce power consumption.
TDG has also introduced a web-based automatic monitoring system to check cold store temperatures every five minutes. Providing early warning of potential problems such as refrigerant leakage, this system also enables TDG to remotely operate the refrigeration plant and other electrical systems such as lighting.
Ten cold stores are now linked to a central server, which enables remote monitoring of energy usage, and more cold stores will be added to this system later this year.
