FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – An environmentally-friendly bank that creates all its own energy opened in Fort Lauderdale.
"We need to have some social responsibility for the carbon footprint that we have in our community, so we really wanted to do something different," said Mike Walters, a senior vice president/regional manager at PNC Bank.
Walters said the branch is a net-zero building, meaning it produces all its own energy. It uses 211 solar panels that line the property, including the drive-through ATMs.
"Those solar panels are actually producing energy on sunny days and storing energy on the cloudy ones," he said, "and we're using that energy to run this branch."
Water fountains at the branch display count the number of bottles of waste saved and the parking lot surface sends water to the ground instead of regular drainage systems. The carpet was made from recycled materials.
"This branch is 50 percent more energy efficient than we've done before in the branch world and we're learning from what we did in this building and applying it to every single building that we're building from here on after," said Walkers.
He believes the branch can do better than net zero.
"We'll actually be a net-positive branch, so we're very confident that at the end of this year, we're going to produce more energy than we consume," said Walters.