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Ford plans to equip its entire production base with renewable energy by 2035

By Sebastien Bell

January 17, 2023 at 8:40 p.m

By Sebastien Bell

Ford announced today that it has added 2.8 megawatts of solar panels at its plant in Valencia, Spain. The new panels will help power the station and produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 1,400 average homes.

The automaker plans to add more panels in the near future, the latest step in Ford’s mission to make the manufacturing facility responsible for cars like the Kuga and the Transit Connect cleaner. In fact, in the coming months it will add another 2.2 megawatts of panels to the plant’s non-productive areas, enough to power another 1,100 homes.

By 2024, Ford hopes to install a total of 10 megawatts of solar panels at the plant. To do this, it will look for all the unused land in the Spanish facility and install panels on roofs and elsewhere.

Read: Ford Uses 2,159-Panel Solar Array to Power EV Chargers at Research and Engineering Center

While the solar panels help Ford reduce its dependence on the national grid, its Valencia plant, along with all of Ford’s European plants, will run entirely on renewable energy from January 1, 2021.

“Now more than ever, we all recognize the need to use renewable energy sources,” said Stuart Southgate, Ford’s Director of Sustainable, Environmental and Safety Engineering Europe. “As we move towards an all-electric future at Ford and carbon neutrality in our manufacturing, investments in innovations like this new solar power plant in Valencia are creating new self-sustaining renewable energy, which is an important contribution to our ongoing ambition to help. building a better world.”

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Meanwhile, in the US, Ford is working with companies like DTE Energy for green electricity and hopes to power all of its plants in Michigan with renewable energy by 2025. Globally, the automaker plans to use only renewable energy to power its entire production base by 2035.

Li Hejun, the founder of Chinese solar energy giant Hanergy Thin Film Power Group, was taken away by police in northeast China’s Liaoning Province on December 17, according to Caixin, a major Chinese financial news portal.

Caixin said on January 11 that Li had been detained by police to “assist investigators” and had not been seen at the time of the report.

According to China’s state-run financial portal Securities Times, Li’s arrest may be related to a loan from Jinzhou Bank, a city commercial bank in Liaoning province, to Hanergy Group.

The loan balance was 9.461 billion yuan (about $1.396 billion), and the net credit risk was 2.77 billion yuan (about $408.8 million) in 2015. Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2015.

A former Hanergy employee claimed that Li and the company still owe him and 190 other employees about 3 million yuan ($443,000) in wages and compensation. An employee told the Chinese-language publication The Epoch Times on January 11 that Li and his family were arrested by Jinzhou police at Jinzhou Airport. The employee wished to remain anonymous for security reasons.

Multiple calls made by the Epoch Times to the Jinzhou Police Bureau on January 11 were not answered.

The Epoch Times could not verify the authenticity of the claim.

Rise to riches

According to Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of Hurun Report, a leading Chinese wealth research firm, Li was China’s richest man in the first half of 2015, with a fortune of about $26 billion.

According to Hanergy’s official website, Li was born in 1967 in the small city of Heyuan in southern China’s Guangdong province and started his business empire in 1989 with 50,000 yuan ($7,380) borrowed from his teacher.

Reports from multiple Chinese media portals said Li made his first pot of gold by investing in hydropower plants, including the Jin’anqiao Hydropower Plant on the Jinsha River in southwest China’s Yunnan Province – the largest privately-backed hydropower plant in China. The hydropower plant became Li’s cash cow once it was up and running, on top of several other smaller plants in various parts of China.

Water flows through the gate of the Shuikou Hydroelectric Power Station in southeast China’s Fujian province on June 13, 2022. (AP via Lin Shanchuan/Xinhua)

With strong cash flow, Lee expanded into the solar market in 2009 and grew quickly — perhaps too quickly. It then had to look for different capital channels to grow, such as a $1.396 billion bank loan under the name of “beneficial interest transfer plans” issued by Jinzhou Bank.

In 2012, Li acquired Solibro, a thin-film solar energy company, from Germany’s QCells and US-based Miasole, and in 2013, Global Solar Energy, Inc., a leading Tucson-based copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) solar energy company. bought it. Arizona. In 2014, Lee acquired Alta Devices Inc., a California-based thin-film solar cell maker.

A wonderful autumn

Lee met Waterloo in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) began investigating Hanergy Thin Film Power Group, a Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of Hanergy Group Holdings, in 2015 for market manipulation. Hanergy’s shares fell nearly 50 percent on May 20, 2015, after which the company ceased trading. Lee lost $19 billion in one day due to falling stock prices.

Four years later, in 2019, Hanergy was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Li was disqualified by a Hong Kong court in 2017 from running any corporation in Hong Kong for an eight-year period over an undisclosed loan to Hanergy Holding, an unlisted parent company in China, which amounted to a “clear conflict of interest”. This was reported by the Financial Times in London.

Since 2019, Hanergy has reportedly been dealing with wage arrears and loan defaults, including to Jinzhou Bank.

Li’s experience is similar to that of Xu Jiayin, the founder of China’s real estate giant Evergrande, whose humble beginnings and rapid expansion, thanks to the support of local governments, led to the breaking of the capital chain and the collapse of a business empire.

In 2022, more than 80 domestically listed Chinese companies were investigated by China’s stock market watchdog for violations of information disclosure, short trading, insider trading and market manipulation, according to China Economy, a state-run economy website.

By the time of publication, no formal charges had been filed against Li by Jinzhou police.

The Epoch Times reached out to Hanergy for comment by email on Jan. 11, but letters sent to Hanergy were declined.

Li Jing, Gu Xiaohua and Reuters contributed to this report.

Sophia Lam joined The Epoch Times in 2021 and covers China-related topics.

Jan. 15—MANKATO — People with money and solar-spangled property have long been able to go solar by installing photovoltaic panels on their property.

Beginning in 2013, the Minnesota Legislature expanded the opportunity for home and business owners who are intimidated by the prospect of owning and maintaining solar panels, or whose properties are too shady for solar. The 10-year-old law encouraged the creation of dozens of subscriber-funded centralized “community solar gardens.”

But these solar subscriptions, often contracts lasting years, were the most attractive to property owners waiting to stay. Mostly left out were low-income households and renters — a group targeted by Twin Cities-based Cooperative Energy Futures in partnership with the city of Mankato.

A 1.2-megawatt solar array is slated to be built this year near the intersection of Blue Earth County Road 69 and Highway 169/60 southwest of town, offering subscriptions to apartment dwellers, mobile home park residents and low-glare folks. credit scores.

“We expect construction to begin this spring,” said Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, general manager of Cooperative Energy Futures. “In partnership with the City of Mankato, we are primarily focusing on renters and low-income households in Mankato and expect approximately 180 families to participate.”

Community solar garden subscribers generally pay a monthly subscription fee to the community solar garden developer. In return, they own a share of the solar array that can equal 120% of the homeowner’s electricity consumption. As the subscriber’s share of the array generates electricity, the juice is fed into Xcel Energy’s power grid. Xcel then credits the subscriber for power generation, replacing a portion of the subscriber’s regular Xcel electricity bill.

During the long summer days when solar arrays are at their most productive, subscribers often find that a portion of the solar array draws more electricity than the subscriber’s home consumes. In this case, the subscriber’s entire monthly Xcel bill is written off and solar credits are banked to offset a portion of the monthly bill during the winter months when the solar arrays are less productive.

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Subscriptions have become popular because the value of the loans paid by Xcel over the year exceeds the value of the subscription fees paid to the community solar farm developer. So, in addition to supporting a green energy source, there is also a financial benefit.

Cooperative Energy Futures’ new Mankato solar garden will be modeled after its completion near Janesville in 2020.

“We don’t have the exact demographics of the subscribers, but with a total of 131 subscribers, this project has a lot of renters, residents of manufactured housing parks and other low-income individuals,” DenHerder-Thomas said. Waseca County solar garden. “Our subscribers save about 10% on their electricity bills on the grid, and these savings will increase over time. We also cooperatively distribute the profits to members and expect them to grow over time.”

He said most of the subscribers in that project are in Waseca and Rice counties, with several dozen in Mankato.

Both the solar garden and a future garden that will have more subscribers in Mankato and elsewhere in Blue Earth County were developed in partnership with the city. In fact, Mankato’s civic center complex serves as a back-up subscriber for the energy produced in the CEF solar gardens. So, if renters and other low-income customers move out of the area or default, Mankato is ready to take their place and receive power bill discounts from Xcel.

This guarantee by the City of Mankato is important to lenders that CEF will rely on to finance the construction of the solar array.

“We need an institutional back-up subscriber to create stability from a large customer where additional energy can be released if residents move or default,” DenHerder-Thomas said. “In effect, it allows us to convince financiers that even if low-income and rental households move or leave the project, we will have room to allocate excess energy.”

The result is a community solar garden that can offer subscriptions to entire households without the income thresholds or high credit scores often required in the industry, he said. And it serves the cooperative’s goals, even if it creates a more complex subscription model.

“… As a member-owned business, our mission and primary purpose is to serve residents, particularly low-income households, renters and people of color who are unable to develop clean energy themselves,” he said.

In a memo to the board, CEF will work with Mankato’s affordable housing staff to reach out to potential subscribers, noting that subscriptions will be free of any upfront cost and will be portable if a tenant moves within the district or to a neighboring home. County served by Xcel.

“It’s an exciting opportunity for people in our community to connect with solar energy in a way that’s been out of reach until now,” said City Manager Susan Arntz.

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Guidance: State legislatures can unlock ongoing revenue streams to make these small-scale solar projects truly sustainable.

The federal government has seen a number of bipartisan victories to promote our country’s sustainable future, most recently with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA is a landmark piece of legislation to combat climate change. Together with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, this gives our country a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to modernize our electricity grid, create a distributed energy future, and put money in the pockets of everyone who wants to participate.

There are two types of solar programs that play a critical role in achieving these goals. One is feed-in programs, where solar energy is sent to the grid and purchased by utilities. Then there’s community solar, which allows any customer to sign up to power their homes and buildings with renewable energy and lower their monthly utility bills without installing an on-site solar project.

These small-scale programs allow solar projects to be capitalized not only with investment tax credits administered by the IRS, but also with loans from financial institutions willing to lend against stable cash flow from utilities. The country must use multiple forms of debt, equity and subsidies to build a sustainable Distributed Energy Resources (DERS) industry for decades to come. As it stands, about half the country is left behind by state legislatures that have not directed Civil Service Commissions to open these programs.

Currently, 22 states — from South Carolina to Maine, California to Minnesota — have policies on the books that encourage the creation of feed-in or community solar projects. Rhode Island, in particular, has created a model worth exploring and replicating in the United States

My company in West Warwick, Fairstead, completed the installation of solar panels on the rooftops of Echo Valley, a 100-unit affordable housing complex, and entered Rhode Island’s Community Remote Distributed Generation (CRDG) program. It was the first affordable housing development in the state to participate.

Although this project was completed before the IRA, equity returns provided by our partner National Grid allowed us to finance this project through tax credits and the private debt market.

Residents participating in the program save 8-12% on their bills. This means the community saves money on utilities, freeing them up to spend on other needs like food, education and transportation. It also addresses a longstanding problem in America where solar projects and renewable energy benefits disproportionately favor wealthy communities.

The reason we can make this a reality is because Rhode Island requires utilities to pay for the clean energy we produce. This creates a sustainable model that incentivizes the creation of solar energy that can be supported by the private and financial sectors.

An IRA is the first step to start building solar projects. It offers a 30% tax credit for all solar installations, which is a great way to get people moving and cover the initial cost of installation. But this is a one-time loan.

Technologies evolve, costs increase, systems fail. If you develop your program, but years later the solar project needs significant maintenance and there’s no way to pay for it, the systems can be degraded or abandoned.

The real opportunity to use IRAs for solar generation exists in the model created by Rhode Island: Creating long-term statewide contracts for providers to sell electricity at fair prices, allowing banks to lend against it. This creates a steady stream of income to maintain the solar installations that will undoubtedly be sparked by the IRA.

This can also benefit individual homeowners. In many states, homeowners benefit from solar energy only to cover their personal energy use. But if a homeowner has the chance to generate passive income from additional solar power generation, many will take advantage of that opportunity. This will usher in a new era of solar projects.

This will require turning our one-way energy system – power plants to consumers – into a two-way street. Yes, infrastructure upgrades need to be planned accordingly, but it’s worth it. We cannot miss the opportunity to use the IRA to create a self-sustaining industry for clean energy. We can all have a stake in energy production, not just consumption.

Civil Service Commissions that have not yet established these programs and the legislatures that oversee them must recognize the benefits of these programs to create a thriving solar energy market and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Given the urgency of the climate need and the magnitude of the challenge before us, this is an opportunity we simply cannot afford to miss.

Tyler McIntyre is the Managing Partner of Design and Construction at Fairstead, a national developer of affordable housing with a presence in 28 states.