General Motors to use wind power to build pickups, SUVs
General Motors’ largest gasolineburning vehicles – pickups and fullsize SUVs – will soon be built, ironically, at plants powered by wind, not fuel.
GM wants to power all its global facilities with 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. GM will reach 20 percent of that goal by year-end, the automaker said Monday.
“We do want to be known as a green company; that’s one of the key reasons we’re doing this, as well as for price stability,” Rob Threlkeld, GM’s global manager of renewable energy told the Free Press. “You don’t get the price spikes this way, like you do with fuel, and it reduces the environment footprint of the vehicle you’re driving.”
GM, ranked 76 out of 100 of the largest green power users by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has partnered with CMS Enterprises, the unregulated entity of Consumers Energy, to match electricity needs from the wind farms that entity owns.
GM’s decadeslong approach to sourcing renewable energy has resulted in “millions of dollars in savings” for the automaker, Threlkeld said.
GM’s latest efforts target wind farms in Ohio, Illinois and Texas. Cactus Flats Wind Farm in Texas went into operation Tuesday. The 148-megawatt facility will power GM’s assembly plant in Arlington, Texas. Northwest Ohio Wind Farm went into operation Oct. 1, generating 100 megawatts of power to meet the demand of GM’s manufacturing operations in Ohio and Indiana. In December, Hill Topper Wind Farm in Illinois will come online to generate another 100 megawatts of power for operations in Ohio and Indiana.
“Ohio and Texas are deregulated markets, so you can buy electricity from any resource there,” Threlkeld said. “Wind and solar are the lowest cost resource. We’re buying into long-term contracts that have no fuel components, so we can put price stability in the cost to build these vehicles.”
Threlkeld said a typical assembly plant requires 120 million to 220 million kilowatt hours of energy to operate each year. To put that in perspective, a typical U.S. household uses 10,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year.