Melco partners Macau SME to develop the city’s largest array of solar panels as part of corporate social responsibility commitment
Casino and hospitality giant Melco Resorts & Entertainment announced today that it has formed a pioneering partnership with a local small and medium enterprise to create Macau’s largest solar array.
In a statement from earlier today, Melco said that the partnership comes as a manifestation of the company’s strategy to support the development of local Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). It went on to point out that environmental sustainability represents a core focus of its corporate social responsibility.
Under the terms of the recently penned partnership, the major integrated resort operator and its local partner Man Io Energy will install 18,000 solar photovoltaic panels that will cover nearly 30,000 square meters of rooftop space at Melco’s City of Dreams and Studio City properties.
Once the system is fully operational, it will have the capacity to annually generate 7.7 million kWh of energy, which is the equivalent to what 1,500 average households consume a year. Today’s statement further reads that the solar panels will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6,000 tonnes each year, or the equivalent to the volume of CO2 that a total of 260,000 trees absorb annually.
Green Vegas
Melco is not the only major gambling and hospitality company to have expressed commitment to solar energy (and renewable energy, as a whole) in recent years. In Las Vegas, some of the big names in the local and global gambling industry have already begun drawing power or are set to soon begin drawing power from solar arrays.
It was last spring when MGM Resorts International unveiled a partnership with Chicago-based renewable energy developer Invenergy to install a 100-megawatt array of solar photovoltaic panels about 25 northeast from the Las Vegas Strip. The off-site system will consist of 336,000 solar panels that will be capable to produce electricity for about 27,000 households. Construction is set to begin this year. The array is expected to go online in 2020. MGM plans to power its Las Vegas casino resorts with the system.
Wynn Resorts began last summer drawing power from a new 160-acre, 20-megawatt solar array, located just outside Fallon, Nevada. The system supplied more than 80% of the daytime electricity consumed at the company’s Wynn Las Vegas and Encore properties during the first weekend after it went online.
Last year, Wynn Resorts also installed 103,000 square feet of solar panels on the rooftop of Wynn Las Vegas. The panels are capable of producing one megawatt of electricity.
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