Faurecia, company of the Group Forvia, has chosen EDP to develop self-consumption solar installations on over 60 sites of the automotive components multinational in Europe, Asia and the United States. This partnership represents a decisive step in EDP group's goal to reach 2 GW in distributed solar by 2025.
EDP has just signed a global partnership to install up to 100 MWp of solar energy at Faurecia's sites in Europe, Asia, and North America. By the end of 2023, more than 60 self-consumption solar parks will be installed at the multinational's industrial units in Portugal, Spain, Italy, the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand. This is the largest distributed solar energy project secured to this date by EDP group and the first to be installed with the same partner in several continents simultaneously.
Faurecia, a major player in the global automotive industry, will now consume renewable energy produced on its own sites, significantly reducing its dependence on the energy grid. This partnership is also an important step in Faurecia's objectives to progressively reduce the carbon emissions of its industrial operations (scope 1 and 2).
The partnership is based on an as-a-service model, with EDP investing, operating and maintaining panels under long-term contracts adjusted to the local specificities of each Faurecia market. It is expected that these more-than-60 projects may have up to 200,000 solar panels, and that they will allow the company to avoid more than 60,000 tons of CO2 over the next decade.
In Europe and Brazil, EDP has been reaching record values for distributed solar contracted capacity and has already installed around 300 MWp on companies’ sites and families' houses through EDP Comercial. EDP has been growing in this segment in several European markets, through organic growth and acquisitions as happened recently in Poland; through Soon Energy; or in Italy, with the purchase of Enertel. In the United States and Asia Pacific, EDP recently entered the distributed solar market through EDP Renewables, with the acquisitions of the North American company C2 Omega and the Asian company Sunseap, respectively. This partnership is an important step in the consolidation of this segment in these markets.
“This partnership shows EDP's ability to respond to multinational customers who wish to choose distributed solar solutions across countries and to support the energy transition at a global scale. By installing up to 100 MWp of distributed solar contracted capacity, EDP is one step closer to reaching a 10 times growth by 2025”, said Miguel Stilwell d'Andrade, CEO of EDP group.
“Producing renewable energy on our sites is a central commitment to meet our 2025 objective to become CO2 neutral for our in-house emissions. Leveraging strategic collaboration with global and leading partners allows us to speed up and improve our energy resilience in a more sustainable way. Also, it reflects our corporate responsibility to have a positive impact on society and meet the needs of future generations,” said Patrick Koller, Faurecia CEO.
Distributed solar energy is one of EDP's strategic areas for this decade, with the aim of installing more than 2 GW in homes and businesses by 2025, thus contributing to increase the renewable energy production and allowing more people cleaner energy sources. In 2021, EDP registered an impressive growth in the number of clients with solar solutions.
