We’re excited to announce that we’ve installed solar panels on the roof of our Carlow headquarters in our quest to reduce our carbon footprint and play our part in making Ireland carbon-neutral.
This autumn, we installed 110 x 545w panels, covering almost half of our roof. All that glorious Irish sun that used to hit our roof as waste heat is now powering our office operations instead.
We will generate the equivalent power used by 12 typical Irish households in a year. It will power most of Blacknight’s office electricity needs – lights, kettles, coffee machines, computers, phones, etc. It will also charge the electric cars driven by several Blacknight staff (meaning their cars are literally powered by nuclear fusion from the sun).
Power generation will vary throughout the year, as the amount of sunlight Ireland receives varies (as we all know in winter with our short days). The peak output we’ve seen so far was around 45kW. As it’s winter, the highest peak on a clear day is around 23kW or thereabouts. We estimate the new panels will generate around 55-60k kWh on average a year, most of which will be from March to September.
Blacknight is committed to reducing our overall carbon footprint, and this is just the latest effort to do so. We’re signatories to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, a European-focused organisation seeking to reduce the overall carbon footprints of data centres and their back offices. The goal is to play our part in helping Europe by carbon neutral by 2050.
When we renovated our offices during its COVID closure, we installed state-of-the-art energy-efficient LED lighting that works with motion sensors, so that if there is no one in the room, the lights are off. We also installed a super-efficient heating, ventilation, and cooling system that keeps the office comfortable year-round.
Here’s a gallery of pictures of the new install:
