Using sheep avoids the emissions of a commercial mower, as well as the hail of rocks and debris that could damage the panels and other equipment.
Toyota of West Virginia has found a creative way to keep the vegetation under control around its solar array in Putnam County.
Sheep eat the grass that grows under Toyota’s 2.6 megawatt solar farm next to its engine and transmission factory in Buffalo.
The 20 sheep graze from April to October, under the watchful eye of Pickles the dog.
The company had considered using goats to do the job, but they have destructive tendencies, including eating the wires and jumping on top of the panels.
Using sheep avoids the emissions of a commercial mower, as well as the hail of rocks and debris that could damage the panels and other equipment.
David Rosier, president of Toyota West Virginia, said the sheep belong to a local farmer. During the winter months, they will go back to the farm.
“We’ve been doing it for about two weeks, and we’re seeing great benefits so far,” Rosier said.
The five-acre solar array, the state’s largest, produces about 10 percent of the factory’s power.
Toyota West Virginia is expanding its high school education program in West Virginia where students get hands-on manufacturing experience before graduation.
Toyota West Virginia is expanding its high school education program in West Virginia where students get hands-on manufacturing experience before graduation.
Juniors and seniors in Putnam County can now join the 4T Academy, a work-based learning program at the Buffalo, West Virginia facility.
Students gain real world experience in electrical, pneumatics, hydraulics, precision machining, industrial automation, robotics and more while working alongside and learning from industry professionals. Seniors receive an hourly wage during their final semester in the program.
Toyota West Virginia established the program last year in a partnership with Kanawha County Schools along with The Education Alliance and Purdue University’s Indiana Manufacturing Competitiveness Center.
Twenty-four Putnam County students from five schools will join 12 Kanawha County students from eight schools in the program next year.
Toyota Motor Corp. announced Friday that it will further expand production of electric vehicle parts at plants in West Virginia and Tennessee in a $90 million investment.
The announcement comes three months after the Japanese automaker said it would invest $240 million to add a production line dedicated to hybrid powertrains at its facility in Buffalo, West Virginia. The latest upgrade involves spending $73 million at the plant to annually assemble an estimated 120,000 rear motor stators, a key component in electric motors.
“Toyota is moving quickly toward an electrified future, and West Virginia will play a critical role in that journey,” David Rosier, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia, said in a statement. “Our team embraces this challenge, and it’s clear Toyota has faith in our ability and trusts us to take the company to new heights.”
A year ago Toyota invested $210 million at the Buffalo plant and added 100 new jobs to expand capacity of its four- and six-cylinder engine lines. The plant employs about 2,000 workers.
Toyota also said Friday that it will spend $17 million to increase the production capacity for hybrid transaxle cases and housings at its nearly 400-worker facility in Jackson, Tennessee.
The automaker said it is committed to offering electric vehicles across its lineup of Toyota and Lexus vehicles by 2025.
In October, Toyota said it planned to build a new $1.29 billion factory in the U.S. to manufacture batteries for hybrid and fully electric vehicles.
Automakers across the Ohio Valley are temporarily closing their plants in response to the coronavirus pandemic. That includes the big three U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler — and Toyota.
In a release, GM said it will be suspending manufacturing in North America due to market conditions and to deep clean facilities. The closures are expected to last until about the end of the month. From there production will be re-evaluated on a week-to-week basis.
United Auto Workers President Rory Gamble agreed with the GM decision, saying in the statement that the suspension of work will help protect the health and safety of the union’s members. “This will give us time to review best practices and to prevent the spread of this disease,” Gamble said.
Ford, which operates six manufacturing facilities in the Ohio Valley, is also suspending operation until about the end of the month.
Todd Dunn, president of UAW Local 862 in Kentucky, said Ford is working on a long-term plan for workers to practice social distancing and keep workers safe.
Kentucky is home to GM’s Corvette plant in Bowling Green, which employs about 1,400 people, and a Ford facility in Louisville which employs about 4,000 people assembling the Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair. Dunn said he supports the decision to temporarily shut down.
“They’re going to come in and try to clean as much as possible, deep clean areas,” he said. “Hard part is you can’t get everything.”
Toyota said in a statement that it will temporarily suspend production at all of its plants in North America from March 23rd to the 24th.
Toyota’s facility in Georgetown, Kentucky, is Toyota’s largest vehicle manufacturing plant in the world, and employs more than 8,000 people. The company also has a facility in Putnam County, West Virginia, which employs about 550 people. The manufacturing facility in Georgetown, Kentucky will also cancel Saturday production.
The temporary suspension of production will likely have significant ripple effects well beyond those directly employed, as dozens of regional companies supply parts and services for the automakers.
Automaker Toyota is planning to announce a major investment in solar and other renewable energy in Appalachia and the Southeastern U.S. The plan includes a massive new solar facility on an old surface coal mine property in Kentucky.
Sources close to the deal tell the Ohio Valley Resource that the Kentucky site is part of a much larger plan. Toyota plans to purchase as much as 800,000 megawatt hours per year, or roughly 365 megawatts, of renewable energy, primarily from developers in Appalachia and the South.
“A project of this magnitude is certainly significant,” said Alex Hobson, director of communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association, a leading industry research group. “You’re talking enough energy to power about 50,000 homes.”
Toyota has already undertaken ambitious energy efficiency goals, with a similarly sized solar array installed on its headquarters in Plano, Texas. But once completed, Toyota’s solar mega-project would place the automaker among the largest corporate investors in renewable energy.
The portion of the project scheduled to be built in Pike County, Kentucky, is a 15- to 20-year power purchase agreement. Partners in the development include: coal company RH Group; French renewable energy company EDF Renewables; and Adam Edelen, former state auditor and current candidate for governor in Kentucky’s Democratic party primary.
At 100 megawatts, the site would be largest solar array in Kentucky and, according to one of the project’s developers, would likely be visible from space. The project is expected to cost $130 million, will be built on a 700-acre reclaimed surface mine site and could create between 50 and 100 renewable-energy jobs in a region still reeling from the loss of coal employment.
Toyota declined to confirm the scope of the project. A spokesperson issued a written statement hinting at an upcoming announcement. “We have been working with certain electric power providers on a very innovative initiative.”
Developers say the massive project is a smart business decision that happens to make a larger point: It’s proving that Kentucky’s economic future is in energy production, but perhaps that energy won’t be limited to coal and other fossil fuels.
“It doesn’t matter whether you care about the environment or not, this is pure economics,” said Ryan Johns, vice president of business development at RH Group. In a nod to Toyota’s slogan, Johns added, “If we don’t diversify our thinking, we’re never going to be able to keep moving forward.”
Power Politics
Toyota’s power purchase agreement would be the final missing piece in a plan that had been in the works for several years. The idea began in 2016 as a conversation between Johns and his longtime friend Edelen, now a Democratic candidate for governor.
The pair were brainstorming ways to reuse previously mined land in RH Group’s portfolio, Johns said, when Edelen suggested a renewable energy project. “Well, I’m the coal guy,” Johns said, “So that gave us quite a good laugh.”
Edelen, who served as Kentucky’s state auditor from 2012 to 2016, said the pitch was immediately of interest to solar developers. “We’ve got a coal company that wants to partner with a renewable energy firm to do a renewables project on a mountaintop removal site and hopefully put a bunch of out-of-work miners back to work. The response was amazing,” he said. “And that’s when we knew we had lightning in a bottle.”
The project was in the works long before Edelen decided to run for governor. But in deep red Kentucky, Edelen acknowledges part of the appeal of the project is uniting people across diverse ideologies and backgrounds for a common purpose. The solar project was “just two Kentucky boys trying to help their community,” he said.
Credit Courtesy of the Edelen for Governor campaign
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Courtesy of the Edelen for Governor campaign
Adam Edelen, left, is a Democratic candidate for governor.
The optics of the announcement are certainly a boon to Edelen, a progressive running against more centrist and better-known opponents in the gubernatorial primary.
Johns acknowledged the challenge of building a large-scale solar farm in a Appalachia.“Solar’s not a new concept, but for here, it’s very new,” Johns said. “All the ancillary businesses that go along with a solar farm, those have to be created for here.”
Johns said he hoped to help other coal companies redevelop surface mine lands into solar farms if the Pike County site is a success.
Developers hope to break ground in summer 2019 and be fully operational by 2021.
Driving Solar
Hobson said businesses are pushing for renewable energy programs to meet corporate sustainability goals and to help their bottom lines.
Virtual power purchase agreements are a popular way that corporations have chosen to pursue renewable energy goals. In those agreements, a buyer, in this case Toyota, pays a fixed price to the seller for the energy that’s generated, but the specific units of energy generated at the site do not go to the buyer directly.
PPAs accounted for nearly five gigawatts of solar energy in the United States in 2018. For context, that’s 15.6 million individual solar panels.
Toyota’s partnership with RH Group is the part of the company’s goal of a net-positive carbon impact by 2050. The company’s central Kentucky plant has been implementing renewable-energy and energy-efficiency solutions for years, with LED lights and methane-capture technology systems already in place.
An investment of this size would make Toyota a significant player in what SEIA characterizes as a major push from corporations to embrace renewable energy.
Coal Country Solar
Adding 100 MW of solar energy would more than triple Kentucky’s existing solar energy output, which was less than 50 MW at last industry report. “An additional 100 megawatts in the Bluegrass State could produce enough electricity to power about 12,000 households,” said Hobson.
Restrictive net metering policies in Ohio Valley states have lowered the return on investment for residential and commercial consumers who install solar, and the region’s deep ties to the coal industry have made politicians reluctant to embrace renewable energy.
Still, the economics are clear. Because of cheap natural gas, dozens of coal-fired generators have been retired or switched to natural gas in the Ohio Valley alone. The federally owned utility Tennessee Valley Authority voted in February to close more of its coal-fired power plants in Kentucky and Tennessee despite opposition from elected officials including President Donald Trump and Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin.
Johns said he expected RH Group to continue as a coal-centered business, but he acknowledged that the writing was on the wall. “We would love more than anything for coal to keep being mined,” he said. “But the reality of it is, on the power generation side, our customers are gone. They have switched to natural gas and diversified their portfolio.”
Johns said he hoped that the involvement of a coal company in a massive solar project would defray what he considered outdated rhetoric pitting coal against renewables. “In no way are we turning our backs on the fossil fuel industry. All we’re doing is adding to the growth Kentucky can have.”
The automaker Toyota announced Thursday major new investments in facilities in Kentucky and West Virginia to increase production of hybrid vehicles. Toyota plans to invest about $750 million in facilities in five states with almost half of that going to its plants in Kentucky and West Virginia.
Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, already the largest Toyota facility in the world, will get a $238 million boost.
“It gives me much pleasure to announce that beginning in May, TMMK will begin producing the Lexus ES 300 Hybrid,” said Susan Elkington, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky.
The facility will also increase production of the hybrid RAV4.
At the same time Elkington made her announcement, her colleague in Putnam County, West Virginia, shared news of an expansion there. Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia President Leah Curry said her facility will double production of the transaxles used in hybrid vehicles.
Credit Eric Douglas / WVPB
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WVPB
Toyota West Virginia President Leah Curry announces a $111M expansion.
“And I’m also excited to announce that to meet these production needs we are going to add another 123 jobs,” she said.
The West Virginia facility will expand with a $111 million investment.
The announcements come on the heels of another Toyota investment in the region that reflects a shift to cleaner vehicles and greener operations. Toyota will purchase power from a large solar array to be constructed on a former surface coal mine in eastern Kentucky.
Presidential Opinion
Shortly after Toyota’s announcements President Donald Trump took to Twitter to weigh in.
Congratulations @Toyota! BIG NEWS for U.S. Auto Workers! The USMCA is already fixing the broken NAFTA deal. https://t.co/f9iHprPk5B
“The USMCA is already fixing the broken NAFTA deal,” Trump wrote in his tweet, a reference to the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement. That agreement includes a provision that 75 percent of an auto’s components be manufactured in one of the three countries in order to avoid tariffs. NAFTA has a similar requirement set at 62 percent of auto components.
Trump and leaders of Mexico and Canada signed that agreement in November, however it has not been ratified by Congress, so NAFTA remains in effect. It is not clear how USMCA would have influenced or affected Toyota’s investment decision, as Trump claims, given that it is not yet in effect. Toyota representatives declined to comment on Trump’s tweet.
Other automakers in the region have been sharply critical of the Trump administration‘s trade policies, including tariffs on aluminum and steel. Misti Rice directs government affairs for Magna International, an automotive supplier with about 19 locations in the Ohio Valley region. She said last year that Magna has lost tens of millions of dollars due to the steel and aluminum tariffs.
“We believe that this is an industry under siege,” she said.
Automakers are anxious about another Trump proposal to impose tariffs on vehicle imports on the basis of protecting national security. Automakers warn that could sharply increase prices and push down consumer demand.
With reporting from: Eric Douglas, WVPB; Becca Schimmel, WKYU; Sydney Boles, WMMT; and Mary Meehan, WEKU.
