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Blowing in the Wind: GM's Arlington Assembly Is Going Green

It feels like there's a race between manufacturers for who's greener. Or, at least, who looks to be the greenest. General Motors plans to power its Arlington, Texas production facilities via wind turbines.
General Motors Wind Turbine 1 photo
Photo: General Motors
The renewable energy setup will produce 115 million kilowatt hours per year. That's enough to build 125,000 trucks, more than half of the Arlington Assembly's annual capacity. GM won't own the turbines themselves. They won't even be on GM's property. Instead, an agreement was signed with EDP Renewables North America, who is building a wind farm in Edinburgh, Texas.

15 turbines, standing at 261 feet (or 80 meters) tall, will help GM save about $ 2.8 billion per year in electricity bills. Not to mention avoiding more than a million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, over the course of the 14-year contract. Wind power will start being used at Arlington Assembly in the fourth quarter of 2016.

The Texas plant has reduced its energy intensity by 10% in the past five years, this being the second time it has met the Environmental Protection Agency's energy challenge. The next measure for reducing power consumption is to build a new paint shop that will be two times more energy-efficient than the current system.

More than 1,200 vehicles are built every day in Arlington, including the Chevy Suburban and Tahoe, the GMC Yukon and Yukon XL, and the Cadillac Escalade and Escalade ESV.

GM has committed to using 125 MW of renewable energy by 2020. It's scheduled to exceed this, because wind turbine setups will come online at three GM Mexico facilities in the first quarter of 2016. General Motors has saved almost $80 million since it started to rely on and invest in renewable energy.

The company is also investing in its Bowling Green, Kentucky facilities. $44 million will be put towards increasing the capacity of the Performance Build Center, providing 36 new jobs in the process. The expansion, which will start in January 2016, was possible thanks to the success of the Chevrolet Corvette Z06.

The Bowling Green Performance Build Center is the place where Chevy customers can take part in the Build Your Own Engine program. Instructed and supervised by a technician, anyone who pays an extra $5,000 can assemble their car's 650 hp engine. That's right: GM "lets" you pay five grand to work for them. Genius.
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