Written by / Tu Yanping
Editor/ Zhang Nan
Design / Zhao Haoran
The world's first carbon-neutral company to achieve production and operation, the world's first zero-carbon battery plant, the first climate-neutral manufacturing plant, the first zero-CO plant, the first carbon-neutral production base...
We are increasingly hearing these statements from corporate communications and media coverage. Whether it is the world's first or not, they actually mean the same thing, that is, manufacturing plants are carbon neutral.
The most recent one is the Ningde era. On March 25 this year, CATL announced that SGS, a world-renowned certification body, issued pas2060 carbon neutrality certification certificate to Sichuan Times, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CATL, and catheter Times Yibin Factory became the world's first battery zero-carbon factory.
How much do zero-carbon factories know
Globally, several companies in the automotive industry have announced that they have built zero-carbon plants.
The BMW Group first set a goal of achieving global plants with purchased electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and then achieved global plant carbon neutrality by the end of 2021.
BMW Brilliance's Shenyang plant has achieved 100% renewable electricity power production▼
In September 2020, Mercedes-Benz's "Plant 56" in Sindelfingen, Germany, was officially put into operation. It is a CO2-zero-emission plant that is being promoted as an example to Mercedes-Benz passenger car factories around the world. Mercedes-Benz's plan is to achieve carbon neutrality in all Mercedes-Benz plants worldwide by 2022.
With a circulating heating system from 1 January 2018, Volvo Cars' engine plant in Skövde, Sweden, is the first manufacturing plant in Volvo Cars' global manufacturing system to achieve climate-neutral load. Volvo's longer-term goal is to achieve its corporate vision of zero-load operations in the global climate by 2025.
Audi plans to achieve full carbon neutrality at its production sites by 2025. In 2018, the Brussels plant in Belgium became Audi's first carbon-neutral plant. In 2020, the Győr plant in Hungary became Audi's second carbon-neutral production site. In China, the FAW-Volkswagen Audi Foshan MEB plant has been fully carbon neutral, and the Upcoming Audi FAW BJEV plant will also strictly comply with the requirements of the zero emission plan.
To sum up: BMW has achieved carbon neutrality of global factories in 2021; Mercedes-Benz has put the timeline of global factory carbon neutrality in 2022, audi and Volvo plan to achieve carbon neutrality of global factories by 2025, and some of them have achieved carbon neutrality.
In addition to vehicle companies, there are also many parts companies that achieve factory carbon neutrality, even more active than vehicle companies. For example, Bosch, Panasonic, CATL, Envision, etc. are all practicing carbon neutrality in factories.
Bosch China Headquarters in Shanghai▼
In 2020, Bosch announced that it will become the world's first large-scale industrial company to achieve carbon neutrality in production and operations, achieving carbon neutrality in internal operations at more than 400 Bosch production sites and business locations.
In the same year, Panasonic Energy (Wuxi) Co., Ltd. completely offset about 44,000 tons of CO emissions through process and process innovation, the introduction of advanced energy-saving technology, and the use of LED lighting. The Wuxi plant thus became Panasonic's first zero-CO plant in China.
Although the automotive industry already has many zero-carbon factories, this is not enough for the long-term carbon neutrality goal, and more companies and more factories need to take action.
Two innovations
There are no more than two means for factories to achieve carbon neutrality: one is technological innovation, such as improving production processes, improving energy efficiency, self-built distributed energy resources, etc. to achieve carbon reduction; the other is mechanism innovation, such as through afforestation, direct purchase of green electricity, purchase of green certificates and other ways to offset carbon dioxide emissions.
In March this year, Jochen Goller, president and CEO of BMW Group Greater China, revealed at the 2022 Hundred People Forum: "From the perspective of production, we can currently reduce emissions by 18% through BMW Group's own production, such as our factory in Shenyang. ”
The BMW Group will optimize energy use as a focus on reducing overall CO2 emissions, and the carbon emissions of bicycle production in 2020 have dropped to 1.51 MWh/unit, which is 7.4% lower than in 2019. The BMW Group aims to reduce the carbon footprint of bicycles by 80% in production by 2030 compared to 2019.
Zhu Yunfeng, general manager of Sichuan Times, said: "Zero carbon has become one of the core competitiveness of Sichuan Times. ”
Sichuan Times independently developed CFMS intelligent plant management system to help achieve high-efficiency, energy-saving, green and low-carbon operation of the plant system. In the group equipment with large energy consumption, the advanced system uses the global optimization algorithm to calculate the operating parameters of each sub-equipment when the total energy consumption of the system is the smallest under the current load conditions, so as to realize active optimization control.
Sichuan Times CFMS Smart Plant Management System Monitors Carbon Emissions▼
In terms of green manufacturing, Sichuan Times has built a digital production control management system, and global visual management can greatly reduce process losses. The waste generated during the manufacturing process will all be recycled, and the recovery rate of precious metals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese can reach 99.3%.
Sichuan Times has also comprehensively upgraded the logistics chain and factory transportation, and widely used driverless logistics vehicles, electric forklifts, etc., to achieve zero-carbon operation between supplier factories, raw material warehouses, processing plants, finished product warehouses, and customer factories.
In addition, the Catalpin times Yibin factory is located in Yibin City, Sichuan Province, a unique geographical location, where water resources are abundant, more than 80% of the factory's energy comes from renewable energy hydropower, which can reduce carbon emissions by 400,000 tons per year.
Also thanks to Sichuan's abundant hydropower resources, Volvo Cars' Chengdu plant will use renewable electricity entirely from 2020, including 65% hydropower and 35% wind and photovoltaics, reducing CO emissions from 11,000 tons to zero.
Volvo Cars Taizhou plant solar photovoltaic power generation project▼
On March 28, 2022, Volvo Cars' Taizhou plant also achieved full carbon neutrality. In addition to the direct purchase of green electricity, the Taizhou plant continues to improve the effective use of renewable energy, the utilization rate of clean energy has reached 46%, and the solar photovoltaic power generation project in the factory has more than 20MWp of installed capacity.
Envision Technology Group has built a zero-carbon industrial park in Ordos, where 80% of the energy comes directly from wind power, photovoltaics and energy storage, and the other 20% of the energy is based on the optimization of the intelligent Internet of Things, which will be sold to the grid when the power is produced too much and retrieved from the grid when needed. Through the application of green energy and technical means, the park can achieve a complete zero-carbon energy supply.
We see that factories cannot achieve carbon neutrality without the impetus of technology. Bill Gates once advised people: "Without innovation-driven, humanity cannot achieve the goal of zero emissions." ”。
A starter
Climate zero-load manufacturing plants, zero CO plants, carbon neutral production sites... For the sake of convenience, we may wish to refer to such factories collectively as zero-carbon factories.
There is no strict official definition of a zero-carbon factory, which can be understood as a factory that uses technological innovations such as green energy and mechanisms such as carbon taxes and carbon sinks to make the comprehensive carbon emissions to the external environment zero.
Instead of operating without emitting carbon dioxide, zero-carbon plants ultimately achieve carbon neutrality in greenhouse gas emission accounting through a series of programs.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Business Accounting and Reporting Guidelines, developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), define three scopes for the accounting and reporting of greenhouse gases.
Both Scope 1 and Scope 2 refer to direct greenhouse gas emissions. The former refers to the sources of emissions currently held or controlled by the company, such as combustion emissions from boilers, furnaces, vehicles, etc., and emissions from the production of chemicals produced by process equipment; the latter refers to direct greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, which refers to greenhouse gas emissions from the purchased electricity consumed by the company.
Scope 3 refers to other indirect greenhouse gas emissions, such as the refining and production of purchased raw materials;
As far as the automotive industry is concerned, greenhouse gas emissions caused by the own factories of automobile companies or power battery companies are direct greenhouse gas emissions, which are accounted for in scope 1 and scope 2. To achieve carbon neutrality for the entire enterprise, the carbon neutrality of the factory is the foundation and the goal that is easier to achieve in relative scope 3.
Taking Bosch as an example, in 2020, it achieved "Scope 1+2" carbon neutrality, that is, after achieving carbon neutrality in operations at production sites and business units, it has now begun to challenge "Scope 3" carbon neutrality. Bosch plans to invest almost 1 billion euros in energy conservation and emission reduction by 2030, with the first goal being to reduce emissions by 15% in Scope 3.
At the same time, Bosch still has new targets for "range 1+2" carbon neutrality: to save 1.7 billion kWh of electricity by improving energy efficiency by 2030 and to reduce absolute water consumption in plants in water-scarce areas by 25% by 2025.
It can be seen that factory carbon neutrality is not the end, but an intermediate node.
In addition to zero-carbon factories, related concepts such as zero-carbon buildings and zero-carbon industrial parks have emerged.
Since 2021, Envision Technology Group has successively planned and built three zero-carbon power and energy storage battery production bases in Wuxi, Ordos and Shiyan, built a zero-carbon vehicle industrial park in the local area, and also planned a demonstration of renewable energy projects covering wind, light, water, storage and other fields. Zhang Lei, CEO of Envision Technology Group, called the zero-carbon industrial park "the unit of the new industrial revolution".
Pingshan BYD Industrial Park three-dimensional intelligent green transportation system▼
In August 2021, BYD launched the first "zero-carbon park" project in Pingshan Automobile Headquarters Industrial Park, announcing that it will build the first zero-carbon park headquarters of a Chinese automobile brand. In Pingshan Industrial Park, BYD applies green solutions such as photovoltaics, energy storage, new energy vehicles, cloud rail and yunba to the production and life of the park.
In an interview in March this year, Zhao Bingdi, president of Panasonic Electric (China) Co., Ltd., told Automotive Business Review that Panasonic designed the first zero-carbon building with fuel cells as the main energy supply method in Wuxi with solar power generation systems and energy storage systems.
According to Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February this year, the impacts and risks of climate change are growing, the warming situation will expose the world to multiple climate hazards over the next 20 years, and the window of opportunity for global climate action is closing, "delay means death".
Zero-carbon factories are a new starting point, but far from the end, and it may just be the beginning of the automotive industry's long march towards carbon neutrality.
This article was originally produced by Automotive Business Review
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