After eating Toyota’s hybrid dust for years, GM is scraping together a pretty respectable portfolio to prove its commitment to alternate engine technologies and sustainability. The all-electric Chevy Volt is one item in the portfolio (making its maiden car show appearance, so rumors have it, this coming fall), but the real attention-getter is a 12 megawatt solar system to be installed on the roof of their assembly plant in Zaragosa, Spain. My fingers twitched there; it’s hard not type “kilowatt”. A 12 megawatt system is not unimaginable, of course; but it is, frankly, ginormous. The largest installation in the States used to be Google’s 1.3 mw installation in California; just last month, it was ousted by a planned 2.3 mw installation for Atlantic City. Which is still less than one fifth the size of GM’s new darling.
What I find unreal is that all this power, which will be generated by 183,000 square meters of rolled-out panels (Financial Times), will only be enough to supply a quarter of the plant’s power needs. I suppose that’s beside the point, though, which is: Why Spain? Spain has vaulted into a leadership position on solar installations in Europe, due to extremely generous financial incentives. The incentives have been so successful at luring new business that (a): Spain’s solar generation is now almost twenty times what it was at the end of 2005 (from 44mw to 800mw); and (b) the government is probably going to scale them back, and soon. So it’s a good time for GM to be making this move. The company responsible for the installation will be Michigan-based Energy Conversion Devices.
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