Engie to decarbonize 22 Airbus industrial sites in Europe

"This is an exclusive contract that gives us responsibility for identifying solutions for these 22 sites to both reduce energy consumption and significantly lower CO2 emissions," explains Frank Lacroix, Deputy Managing Director of Engie's Local Energy Infrastructures unit.

"The commitments we're making are to reduce CO85 emissions by 2% and energy consumption by 20% across the entire group" at the industrial sites concerned compared to 2015, he adds. "We have five years to identify solutions, build them, start them up, and put them into operation."

The amount of this framework contract is not public, but according to Frank Lacroix, "over the duration of the entire investment, we are talking about hundreds of millions of euros."

The contract, won by Engie following a competitive tender launched in the fall of 2023, covers ten Airbus sites in Germany, eight in France, and four in Spain. The two groups already collaborate on this type of project in France, in Toulouse and Nantes, but this is the first time their partnership has extended to Germany and Spain, two of Airbus' founding countries.

The contract, signed at the Paris Air Show, is part of Airbus's decarbonization strategy, which, like the rest of the aeronautics industry, has committed to carbon neutrality by 2050.

"We are delighted to be making progress in our site decarbonization efforts with Engie," said Julie Kitcher, Airbus' Director of Sustainable Development. "It will help us significantly reduce energy consumption and industrial emissions at our European sites by 2030."

Actor in decarbonization

For Engie, this is a major milestone in its goal of becoming a leading player in the decarbonization of industry in Europe. It is targeting 250 industrial sites in operation by 2030, compared to 160 today, "thanks to the deployment of local energy infrastructure powered by renewable energy" (biomass boilers, photovoltaic installations, waste recovery, and waste heat capture).

Engie counts other major groups among the 160 industrial sites it manages today, including Danone, Safran and Sanofi.

The energy company has embarked on a strategy to refocus its Local Energy Infrastructures unit. It intends to consolidate its position as a leader in the energy transition of cities, buildings, and industries, on a local scale, in five European countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland—while maintaining its presence in its strategic markets in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines) and continuing to develop Tabreed in Dubai for cooling networks in the Middle East.

The objectives of this unit are to become the industrial leader in the local energy transition by 2030.

"This is truly a contract that confirms the relevance of our concentration strategy with extremely simple and clear offers," Mr. Lacroix asserts. Especially since the decarbonization of industrial sites does not conflict with manufacturers' quest for competitiveness, he believes.

"Our mission is to combine decarbonization and the competitiveness of industrial sites," he says.

"Engaging in the energy transition doesn't mean backsliding on competitiveness. In the current geopolitical context, it means moving forward on energy independence, on the ability to plan for the long term while remaining uncorrelated with fluctuations in fossil fuel prices. It also means fulfilling the promises (that manufacturers) have all made regarding their decarbonization trajectory."