By Liam Niemeyer
Kentucky Lantern
Toyota says it plans to purchase half the electricity from a 200-megawatt solar installation being built on a former surface coal mine and brownfield site in Eastern Kentucky.
Toyota said it would use the solar power to offset some of its carbon emissions, and plans to make all its North American operations carbon-neutral by 2035. Its factory complex in Georgetown, Ky., about 110 miles west of the minesite, is is the Japanese company’s largest vehicle manufacturing plant.
The solar installation is being constructed by Savion, a subsidiary of the oil and gas company Shell, with the support of a Kentucky-based renewable energy company founded by former state Auditor Adam Edelen.
“A blockbuster announcement literally years in the making,” Edelen, a Democrat, said on Twitter. “The promise of renewable energy is coming to Appalachian coal country.”
The 2,541-acre project will be built on the former Martiki Mine site in Martin County, which borders West Virginia. Toyota said it expects the installation to be operational in 2024.
The solar development has been in the works for years, with developers previously saying the project could bring hundreds of temporary jobs to the county and state during construction and a few dozen long-term jobs. In a 2021 filing before the state Public Service Commission, the developers also said the project could raise approximately $9 million in local taxes over its lifetime.
David Absher, senior manager of environmental sustainability at Toyota Motor North America, said in a prepared statement that power-purchase agreements such as this one in Martin County can help bring “new opportunities to former coal and energy communities.”
Absher added, “It is important that renewable power is more available to large-scale U.S. energy buyers, and converting brownfields like this offers a path forward for former energy communities to take advantage of the infrastructure they already have with transmission lines while providing clean energy to the grid.”
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/I4Yz7gM Toyota says its biggest plant will use power from 2,500-acre solar installation on old strip-mine site in Eastern Kentucky - Entrepreneur Generations
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