Achieving Carbon-Neutral Car Manufacturing Plants

Sammanfattning: On Toyota Motor Europe request, a study on renewable energy investment opportunities has been conducted in order to assess the potential of alternative energy sources to contribute to the ultimate target of carbon-neutral car manufacturing plant. The project work was developed in a step-by-step approach. The first step started with an evaluation of the current performance of seven production plants. A selection of 12 indicators covering 5 areas of concern have been used to quantify and compare the relative performance of their production activities in terms of energy use, energy-related CO2 emissions, energy cost, energy security and European target for renewable energy sources in final energy use. The next step of the project was the creation of an energy model (mathematical model) to estimate the potential environmental and economical benefits from renewable energy technology implementation on-site. This second step resulted in a global roadmap (ranking of options) for Toyota Motor Europe as a whole and in EMC-specific roadmaps for each production plant, in order to achieve CO2 emission reduction in the most cost-efficient way. As a final step for the project, a concrete example of the roadmap application is given to estimate the environmental performance improvements in production activities. This project concludes that renewable energy sources have the potential to be a major contributor in carbon-neutral plant activities. Therefore renewable energy sources combined with other energy and CO2 reduction activities makes the ultimate target of carbon-neutral plants a reasonable target to be reached.