Volvo Cars Chengdu Assembly Plant Now Powered by 100 percent Renewable Electricity

The Volvo Cars manufacturing plant in Chengdu, the company’s largest in China, is now powered by 100 percent renewable electricity, taking the company’s global renewable electricity mix in its manufacturing network to 80 percent.

The 100 percent renewable electricity mix in Chengdu is the result of a newly signed supply contract and will reduce the plant’s CO2 emissions by over 11,000 tonnes per year.

It is the latest concrete step towards Volvo Cars’ ambition to have climate neutral manufacturing by 2025, part of a wider climate plan that aims to reduce the overall carbon footprint per car by 40 percent between 2018 and 2025. By 2040, Volvo Cars aims to be a climate neutral company.

The new electricity contract is also in line with broader ambitions in China to reduce carbon emissions from industry and reduce the carbon footprint resulting from energy generation.

Until recently, the Chengdu plant already sourced 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. The new contract addresses the last 30 percent.

Under the new contract, around 65 percent of the electricity supply comes from hydropower, while the remainder comes from solar power, wind power and other renewable sources.

“Our ambition is to reduce our carbon footprint through concrete, tangible actions,” said Javier Varela, head of industrial operations and quality. “Securing a fully renewable electricity supply for our largest plant in China is a significant milestone and underlines our commitment to taking concrete, meaningful action.”

Volvo Cars is constantly working to reduce the carbon footprint of its manufacturing network and has reached a number of milestones in recent years. All its European plants have had a climate neutral electricity supply since 2008, while the engine plant in Skövde, Sweden was the first in the company’s network to become completely climate neutral in 2018.

At the Ghent plant in Belgium, Volvo Cars installed 15,000 solar panels in 2018, the first large­-scale introduction of solar energy in its global manufacturing network.

These and other measures are part of the climate plan Volvo Cars launched late last year, one of the most ambitious in the automotive industry. The centrepiece of the plan is Volvo Cars’ ambition to generate 50 percent of global sales from fully electric cars by 2025, with the rest hybrids.

Yet the plan goes beyond addressing tailpipe emissions through all-­out electrification and also seeks to tackle carbon emissions in the company’s wider operations, its supply chain and through recycling and reuse of materials.

Photos: Volvo Cars