Member Profile
The Document Warehouse Leads with Business and Energy Initiatives
Lincoln Brunner
An advanced photovoltaic (PV) system is the jewel of The Document Warehouse’s green initiative. On clear and sunny days—which Namibia has plenty of year round—the PV system can provide the company’s main facility with 100% of its electricity requirements.
Watching a man make tea with a solar kettle in a giant doc- ument storage building may not strike you as revolutionary. However, at The Document Warehouse in Windhoek (pro- nounced VIN-dook), Namibia, the scene represents two major initiatives, both of which are forward thinking for this sparsely populated nation in southwestern Africa.
Since opening in 2006, The Document Warehouse has grown from one to 54 employees working at three loca- tions across Namibia (a country with twice the real estate of California but only 1/18 of the population—2.1 million).
For paper records storage, the main facility has a capac- ity of 374,000 standard archive boxes. Storage is high and dense with only 2,400 m2
(about 25,800 sq ft) of floor space.
No electricity is provided in the warehouse itself except on the staircases and the vertical carousel box-movement system.
The company offers paper document storage and has be- come one of the nation’s leaders in electronic records services: file-based archiving, barcoding documents and files, bulk doc- ument scanning, implementation of electronic document and records management systems, and data hosting. The company also offers training in information and records management.
“It is very new here,” Marilize Cohen said about records management there. Cohen is head of training and consultan- cy for The Document Warehouse. “Here, people tend to cling to their documents. They are very skeptical to give it away, for other people to handle it and control it and store it. So, it’s a very new concept in Namibia.”
Green Initiators
As the company continues to grow and lead in its core competency of records storage and management, it has
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simultaneously begun to blaze a trail in corporate green ener- gy initiatives.
First came the implementation of a companywide renew-
able energy policy, spearheaded by Managing Director Werner van Zijl in 2013, that included replacing all the lights in the main facility in Windhoek with LEDs. The company also up- graded its air conditioners, refrigerators, and data servers; re- placed its desktop computers with laptops; and installed so- lar hot-water heaters and a solar kettle for boiling water for tea and coffee. Those measures cut the company’s energy use by about 50%. That was just the beginning of the green initiative, though.
Because van Zijl has experience with mechanical engineer- ing and photovoltaic (PV) systems, The Document Warehouse was made fully electrically self-sufficient through the installa- tion of 64 solar panels on the main facility’s roof at a cost of $42,000 U.S. (almost $450,000 NAD).
A big incentive for the move to solar was Namibia’s solar- friendly climate. Primarily a desert nation, Namibia has very low cloud coverage and very low annual rainfall—about 14 inches. That results in an average of 9.5 hours of sunshine per day all year long, compared with 9.1 sunlight hours per day in Los Angeles, CA.
The company had a big financial incentive to secure its
own energy future. The Document Warehouse’s main facility had been paying what it considered a fairly steep price for electricity, about $1,500 U.S. per month.
Now, on a clear and sunny day, the 18-KW system provides 100% of the facility’s electrical requirements. On cloudy or rainy days, the facility buys electricity from NamPower, the
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