Covestro, a foam industry supplier, has signed a 90 megawatt (MW) virtual power purchase agreement (vPPA) with Ørsted, a clean energy provider in the U.S. market, headquartered in Denmark.
The 15-year agreement secures a portion of power from the Mockingbird Solar Center in Lamar County, Texas, marking Covestro’s first renewable energy agreement in the U.S. The vPPA is estimated to offset 70,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually at its Baytown, Texas, site starting in late 2024. It will also reduce the scope 2 emissions at Baytown, Covestro’s third largest production site.
“This important new announcement builds upon Covestro’s existing agreement with Ørsted and clearly signals our commitment to the use of renewable energy,” said Markus Steilemann, CEO of Covestro, with North American headquarters in Pittsburgh. “The inclusion of renewable energy to help power our facilities is a critical component to reducing our scope 2 emissions and becoming operationally climate neutral by 2035.”
The agreement is equivalent to energy used to power more than 15,000 homes, according to a news release.Covestro set ambitious climate neutrality goals in 2022. One major lever to reach these goals is energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power.
“The vPPA with Ørsted comes on the heels of our recent announcement of ISCC PLUS certification for our production site in Baytown, Texas,” said Haakan Jonsson, chairman and president of Covestro LLC. “These two initiatives represent our focus on sustainability and the strategic path we have set to minimize our carbon footprint across Covestro’s operations in the United States. Cumulatively, projects like this help us realize our path to becoming fully circular.”
