METRO store in St. Pölten receives German EHI Energy Management Award

Opened in October 2017, the newly constructed store in St. Pölten is a sustainable timber construction that received in spring the 2018 Timber Construction Award in the category of commercial construction. The low-energy building meets all the requirements of a wholesale market and at the same time offers many advantages over conventional buildings over and above its sustainable orientation, for example in the areas of climate protection, energy efficiency and well-being. Thanks to photovoltaics on the roof, the St. Pölten store is even a PlusEnergy wholesale market. The 6,000 m²+ photovoltaic system on the roof has generated more than 1,000 megawatt hours of solar power since the store opening. METRO St. Pölten is thus energy self-sufficient. The solar power surplus is available free of charge to Top Card customers at the parking lot of the wholesale store for their e-vehicles.

Xavier Plotitza, CEO METRO Austria, is delighted with the EHI Energy Management Award: "This award makes our METRO family particularly proud. The jury did not cite individual energy efficiency measures as reasons, but rather the professional integration of the measures into an impressive holistic wholesale store concept. Of course this is a great honor!

Olaf Schulze, Director Energy Management METRO AG, who accepted the award on behalf of METRO AG on the evening of 27 November in Cologne, also proudly comments: "The Zero-Emission Store in St. Pölten is a pilot project with a signal effect for us in many respects. It is designed and constructed in a lifecycle approach and uses natural refrigerants, sunlight for lighting and renewable energy generation as well as rainwater. The success proves the St. Pölten approach right and we have found a matrix that can be applied to existing and new buildings".

The METRO wholesale store in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, has just reached the preliminary stage of BREEAM certification "Outstanding" – an evaluation system for the ecological and socio-cultural sustainability of buildings. This makes the wholesale store an internationally acclaimed showcase project.

METRO Cash & Carry Austria operates 12 wholesale stores on a sales area of 139,000 m² with around 2.100 employees. Large selection is an important aspect for METRO there are about 48,000 articles from the food and non-food sectors in each store. More than 500,000 customers trust the company's product range and services for 48 years. METRO Austria´s headoffice and management is in Vienna-Vösendorf, where in 1971 the first METRO wholesale market in Austria, and the first outside of Germany, was opened.