By the end of 2020 BMW wants to solely use green electricity to run its factories around the globe. (picture alliance/dpa)
German carmaker BMW wants to completely convert its 23 car factories around the world to producing using green electricity. In remarks to the magazine "Automobil-Produktion" published on Monday, the company’s head of production, Milan Nedeljkovic, said: "By the end of this year, we will be exclusively using electricity from renewable energy sources in our factories worldwide, i.e. 100 percent."
BMW plants consume around 5.2 million megawatt hours of electricity per year, a company spokesman said – the equivalent of the energy consumed by 2 million households. Already today, 80 percent of the electricity in the BMW plants comes from renewable energy, the spokesman said. Examples are the wind turbines at its Leipzig plant, solar modules on a space covering 70,000 square meters at its plant in Mexico and the biogas plant at its factory in South Africa, which runs on the dung of 30,000 cattle. With a power consumption of 2.1 megawatt hours per car, BMW is also below the average consumption of European car manufacturers.
"On average, we are using only half as many resources and CO2 for the production of a car today as in 2006," said Nedeljkovic. "For example, we have installed a total of over 300,000 LEDs, saving as much electricity as 40,000 households use.”
BMW has also outsourced car production to contract manufacturers, including Magna-Steyr in the Austrian city of Graz and Nedcar in the Netherlands. BMW did not provide any information about the electricity used in these eight plants.
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