Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be observing Earth Day on April 22, by cleaning up parks and beaches, planting trees, raising awareness about climate change and environmental degradation, reducing their use of plastics, and generally celebrating the beauties and wonders of this fragile planet of ours. Most of my fellow Nextracker employees as well as our colleagues throughout Flex Energy Solutions will be participating in Earth Day events.
In many ways, every day is Earth Day for Nextracker and the rest of our Flex energy team. Our mission isn’t just to run a profitable business, but to be a good corporate citizen, to be engaged in our communities and to do things in a climate-conscious, environmentally friendly manner.
This sense of purpose is reflected in Flex’s 20 by 2020 sustainable development goals and the recent honor of receiving a 2018 Manufacturing Leadership Award for our outstanding achievement in sustainability leadership by the Frost & Sullivan Manufacturing Leadership Council, in recognition of our 2017 Earth Day Challenge efforts.
On a day-to-day basis, Nextracker’s smart solar tracking and battery storage solutions are helping fuel the renewable energy transformation. Not only are our NX HorizonTM trackers generating and our NX FlowTM storage system storing gigawatt-hours of sun-kissed energy, we’re using intelligent tools like TrueCaptureTM (see video here) which employ machine learning and data analytics to optimize the way these systems work, boosting performance and maximizing the returns on our customers’ investments. Flex’s SmartNexus IoT platform provides a cybersecure bidirectional pipeline to deliver data to and from the trackers through the Internet, adding a critical layer to our intelligent energy solutions.
This smartness has also reduced our own carbon footprint in the way we service and maintain our systems. Cloud-based monitoring and control capabilities gives us eyes into the inner workings and performance of our systems, helps us slash the number of times we have to send field technicians out to a site, and generally allows us to be more predictive than reactive in how we manage our customers’ assets.
What does this mean for our planet? Here are some eye-opening stats.
Nextracker solar trackers have followed the sun day in and day out to help generate enough clean energy to power the equivalent of over 2,281,000 U.S. homes and counting. The amount of climate-harming carbon dioxide emissions that have not been released into the atmosphere because our systems were deployed instead of dirty fossil-fuel-based power plants? More than 15,275,600 tons and counting. The number of trees planted that would sequester all that CO2 due to solar production instead of fossil fuels? More than 6,110,000 and counting. Here’s one more stat that resonates with those of us in the U.S. and other countries where we’re trying to reduce our dependency on our personal automobiles. Say goodbye to all that CO2 that would have been emitted by the equivalent of over 3,137,500 cars that have been “removed” from the road, courtesy of Nextracker’s 12 GW (and counting) of solar trackers harvesting the sun.
Like the rest of the Nextracker and Flex Energy Solutions team, I have a passion for what I do and love coming to work to a job that’s actually making a difference. Being part of something bigger than myself, something that’s making the change through a collective effort to turn the tide against climate change and create the limitless prosperity that comes with the clean energy economic opportunity makes every day Earth Day in my book.
