Volkswagen Upgrades Use of Green Electricity

Gail Alcabaza • January 24, 2020 • 0 • 117

Volkswagen is taking their goals seriously, as the brand is making good progress towards their CO2 neutral production objective by 2050.

The company is directing its concentration on natural gas for its own power generation and is switching its power plants in Wolfsburg from coal to gas.

“We want to significantly increase the amount of green energy bought in at our plants this year from 70 to 90 per cent,” shares Andreas Tostmann, Volkswagen Brand Board of Management Member for Production and Logistics.

Excluding China, 16 of Volkswagen’s plants around the world have already switched to 70 percent green electricity from renewable sources. Now, the company aims to raise those figures up to 90 percent. The brand is also systematically switching its in-house power generating plants to gas.

Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg factory is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world in terms of area, which clocks in a just a little under 6.5 million square meters. Considered the worldwide headquarters of the Volkswagen group, the plant produces an average of 3,500 cars per day.

By 2022, the Volkswagen group aims to switch the supply of power for the production operation in Wolfsburg to highly efficient combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plants. They are run in co-generation mode: the CO2 emissions from generating electricity and heat will go down as a result by 60 per cent or around 1.5 million tons a year. Those numbers are equivalent to the emissions of around 870,000 fuel powered cars.

The first of the components required for this shift were delivered last weekend. With these power plants Volkswagen is making a long-term contribution to the stability of the national grid and power system in Germany.

More and more automakers are taking big steps toward a more sustainable future. In the Philippines, it is quite uncommon to see hybrid vehicles in the streets. Among a sea of Toyota Vioses and Hyundai Accents, seeing a Toyota Prius would be equivalent to seeing a white whale. But as automakers slowly but surely shift their lineups to be more eco-friendly, we can expect to see more hybrids and electric vehicles in the near future.