Clovis Tanganelli is always looking to size sustainable opportunities
When the EnerSys Brazil plant moved to a larger location in 2018, that wasn’t the only upgrade the Brazil team made. Clovis Tanganelli, Sao Paolo’s Plant Manager, decided to seize the opportunity to also search for more sustainable alternatives as a way to power the increased capacity of operations at the newer, larger location. With new legislation in Brazil at the time incentivizing utilization of renewable energies, the team saw this as the right time to make the switch to renewable energy.
The team decided to purchase renewable energy credits from Brazil’s “free market.” This process entails purchasing energy directly from a variety of renewable power sources -- such as wind, hydroelectric, biomass and solar power -- and paying a fee to the distribution company to use their infrastructure.
Clovis noted, “Our long term contracts with renewable energy providers give us ease and reliability since we have stable and decreasing prices over an extend period of time, guaranteeing us sustainable energy long into the future.” He also observed that with increasing gas and oil prices, and the volatility in other areas of Brazil’s energy supply (some of Brazil is powered by hydropower and droughts in the past few years have made energy supply unreliable), relying on the old methods of energy consumption was not sustainable and more expensive in the long run.
With this switch, the Brazil plant is saving money while also providing benefits to the planet. Calculations done by the Brazilin Energy Agency that EnerSys CO2 emissions at our Brazil location were only 16 tons of CO2 equivalent, a 97% reduction when compared to nearly 600 tons of CO2 equivalent we would emit if we were buying electric energy from standard market.
“I’m proud that Brazil is part of EnerSys efforts to make large strides in sustainability,” says Clovis. “EnerSys products are important to the process of decarbonization – while we work on helping decarbonize the world, we can continue to work on decarbonating our processes as well.”