Energy

GM Advances its Solar Mission at Warren Transmission

Oct 20, 2015 11:40 AM ET
Campaign: GM Energy Efficiency
General Motors and DTE Energy are partnering on a new 800-kilowatt solar array which will be GM’s largest in Michigan when construction is complete at the end of this year.

Our march toward a clean energy future continues. We’re partnering with DTE Energy to build a new 800-kilowatt, 2,800-panel, 4.25-acre solar array at our Warren Transmission plant in Michigan.  

The array will generate around 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually, the energy equivalent to powering about 135 homes in southeast Michigan for a year. And since the electricity will go back to the grid, Warren Transmission’s array really will power some of those homes.

Warren Transmission builds front-wheel drive transmissions for a variety of GM’s most-popular cars, crossovers and SUVs, as well as the drive unit for the all-new 2016 Chevrolet Volt.

When complete, it will be our largest solar array in Michigan.

Sound vaguely familiar? Maybe because around this time last year, we announced we were building our largest solar array in the Western Hemisphere at our Lordstown Complex, home of the all new Chevrolet Cruze.

And the October before that we announced we were building a 1.8-megawatt rooftop solar array at our Toledo Transmission plant, the largest in Ohio at the time.

What can we say? We tend to go large in October.

So what do you get when you add up such a large array of large arrays?

Well, we currently house 47 megawatts of solar at 20 facilities globally. After the Warren Transmission array is complete, our global footprint of solar projects will be equivalent to the size of nearly 125 American football fields.