CEMEX Croatia awarded contracts for three solar power plant projects

CEMEX Croatia has been awarded EUR5m (US$5.5m) in contracts for the construction of three solar power plants, co-funded by The Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund and the EU Modernisation Fund. The project will see solar energy production facilities built at Juraj cement plant in Kaštel Sućurac, Kajo cement plant in Solin and the Podsused facility in Zagreb. Approximately EUR3m of the funding will be supplied by the EU.

The goal of this project is to equip the roofs of these facilities with solar power plants, which will have a combined installed capacity of 6.34MW. EUR3m of the funding will be earmarked for the installation of photovoltaic systems (with an installed capacity of 3.79MW) at the Juraj plant. The Kajo plant will be rigged with a EUR1.7m solar array, with an installed capacity of 2.14MW. A total of 60 per cent of the funding for these two projects will be attained from the EU Modernization Fund. At the Podsused facility, photovoltaic systems with an installed capacity of 0.4MW will be built. Half of this project (roughly EUR318,000) will also be co-financed by the EU.

CEMEX Croatia’s project and quality assurance manager, Marijan Zekić, said, “The savings that these measures will bring to us in terms of energy consumption will increase the efficiency of our production and reduce emissions from our operations”.

The new funds invested by CEMEX in renewable energy production bring the company a step closer to the goal of increasing the use of lower-carbon energy in production. This objective is part of the company’s ‘Future in Action’ programme, whose goal is to bring CEMEX to net-zero CO₂ emissions by 2050. All of the objectives within this programme aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including a 47 per cent reduction in CO₂ emissions/t of cement material and a 35 per cent reduction in the carbon content of concrete globally by 2030. Additionally, the company has set the goal of ensuring that 65 per cent of its electricity usage comes from lower-carbon energy. Alen Voloder, CEO of CEMEX Croatia, states, “an important goal of ours is the development of lower-carbon, and ultimately carbon-neutral cement, concrete, aggregates and admixtures, thus rounding off our approach to creating the future of construction with less CO₂ emissions throughout the value chain”.