Juan Velazquez
Cesar Gonzalez
Carlos Gonzalez
José Enríquez
EGADE Business School Tecnologico de Monterrey
Consuelo Garcia-de-la-torre
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It is a solar energy research center.
It emerged after Schneider Electric's objective that by 2019 80% of the electricity used be renewable. Once this was defined, many initiatives / competitions were made to promote innovation. It was thought that it should give benefits to the company, the environment and society. In the case of the solar field, the first 2 were achieved by reducing electricity expenditure and at the same time reducing the carbon footprint.
The benefit to society was given by opening the solar field for various investigations and that during its construction about 95% of the materials are made in Mexico and the workforce, both construction and technical are 100% Mexican.
VPs and engineering directors, HR department of the Mty campus, Nuevo Leon government and engineers and designers of the design center.
This project aligns with the mission of creating sustainable solutions as well as the vision of achieving more using less. It also agrees with points 7 and 9 of the SDGs.
It emerged as an idea for an internal competition globally. The contest was to create the best sustainable innovation project, this project could be a solution for the client or the company. Once the idea was had, he escalated with the people who could give the resources to carry it out (engineering VPs at the North American level) and once they were on board he tried to take the proposal to the government, where they were presented the benefits and thus formed an alliance to build the solar field. Once the government joined, Schneider offered its design engineers the power to help with the implementation of the solar field during its installation.
Aligning with the global objectives of Schneider Electric which dictate that we must work to reduce and make more efficient the use of energy and the promotion of innovation. That the design center obtains greater popularity worldwide within the company. For the government it was the fact of promoting innovation in the state since it is considered a new research center and the creation of direct and indirect jobs that this investment brought.
The effects in the short and long term were: In the short term the consumption of electric energy produced by CFE was reduced, this benefit continues in the long term along with the collaboration of SE with various universities to carry out various projects.
The concrete evidences were the reduction in the cost of electric light receipts and the elaboration of theses and projects of students of the UANL, ITESM and UDEM.
The impact on the organization was the 80% reduction of the building's electricity consumption expense.
With this solar research center open the opportunity to create new products related with renewable energy and to provide energy to communities with low resources around the globe.
The impact on society was the creation of a new solar energy research center which can be used by anyone for research purposes (thesis creations, school projects, feasibility analysis), also the reduction of the carbon footprint, the solar field has a power of 270KWP which covers 80% of the energy used by the design center.
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