General Motors pledges 100% renewable power for its facilities by 2050

Last week, GM announced a plan to move its 350 facilities in 59 countries to renewable energy by 2050.

The auto company has been one of the more pioneering players among the world’s top automakers when it comes to reducing fossil fuel consumption. GM is responsible for the Volt and the upcoming all-electric Bolt, which will have more than 238 miles of range and will cost somewhere around $30,000 to $35,000 after federal and state incentives have been applied. Those two factors make the Bolt the only car in production from a major manufacturer that could rival the also-upcoming and all-electric Tesla Model 3. (And GM does have a history of building electric vehicles, too—its 1995 EV1 was the first high-volume production electric vehicle in the US.)

Beyond electric cars (since GM also makes a lot of gas-guzzlers as well), the company previously pledged that 125 megawatts of the total energy its facilities consume yearly would come from renewable resources by 2020. GM said last week that it was ahead of schedule on this promise and would exceed the goal later this year when a 30MW solar array at the Jinqiao Cadillac assembly plant in Shanghai came online.

GM said it also has “22 facilities with solar arrays, three sites using landfill gas, and four that will soon benefit from wind.”

According to GM's press release in 2015, the company "required 9 terawatt hours of electricity to build its vehicles and power its offices, technical centers, and warehouses around the world."

GM's pledge to go 100 percent renewable by 2050 makes it one of several dozen large companies that have made a similar pledge, from Walmart, to Unilever, to Apple.

Moving to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 will take a considerable investment in resources, but GM also noted that it would be able to solve the problem of intermittency (the fact that the sun can't generate electricity at night and wind can't generate electricity when the wind isn't blowing) by using batteries produced for the Volt. The company is already doing this at its Milford Proving Ground Data Center. Battery storage is considered key to adopting solar and wind power, and companies like Daimler and Nissan are already outlining plans to repurpose their electric vehicle batteries rather than recycle them.