Industry News

Aiming to minimize carbon footprint in their business operations and to help mitigate the effects of climate change, Toyota Motor Philippines Corporation (TMP) recently inaugurated its 1-megawatt (MW) Solar Array at its manufacturing plant in Santa Rosa City, Laguna.

According to Toyota, the newly-inaugurated facility is consists of 2,640 pieces of 385Wp photovoltaic (PV) panels and 22 units of 42kW Huawei inverters. With the solar array supplying 4% of the company's annual electricity requirements, TMP will be able to reduce the company's CO2 emissions by 12 kg CO2 for every vehicle produced or around 790 ton CO2 per year. Likewise, it is estimated to generate energy cost savings of around Php10 million annually.

Toyota's 1-MW Solar Array is among the first batch of projects that qualifies after the Philippine Government signed the Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) partnership with the Japanese Government last year. JCM is one of Japan Government's ways to effectively address climate change by funding leading low-carbon technologies and systems in developing countries and purchasing the carbon credit from the project. Under the JCM, Japan Government will provide a subsidy to TMP, which will cover 30% of the total cost of solar panels, inverters and monitoring device.

Meanwhile, Toyota PH also partnered with Spectrum, a Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) subsidiary, which provided technical expertise and carried out the solar array installation on a 10,000-sqm area at the roof of TMP's Material Handling Operations building.

Mr. Satoru Suzuki, President of Toyota PH expressed his optimism saying, "While attaining zero carbon footprint in business operations is a great challenge, which other people even consider impossible, we, at Toyota, will continue to challenge ourselves in making our impossible, possible. I believe that this is the only way for us to make a contribution towards a sustainable future."