A world-first project in West Virginia is powering a titanium-melting airplanes parts factory with an on-site solar/battery microgrid, an exemplar showing that we can run heavy industry on clean electrons!
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Reasons For Hope
A world-leading renewables-powered manufacturing project just began construction in the little town of Ravenswood, West Virginia. It consists of two build-outs right next to each other: the first is a new titanium airplane parts factory for Timet, and the second is a solar microgrid with large battery storage systems built by BHE Renewables to power the factory. (Both Timet and BHE belong to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, so coordination is easy). The titanium-melting plant and its solar/battery grid will scale up together, starting with 18 MW of power and planning to reach 106 MW by the end of 2027.
This project is also using some of the latest advances of the renewables revolution! The factory will include two types of electric furnace, and the microgrid’s batteries will likely use the cutting edge, cost-effective lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry, containing neither nickel nor cobalt.
“The project is perhaps the first to directly power a large industrial facility using solar-plus-storage technology.”
-Canary Media
There’s been a lot of amazing work in electric-powered manufacturing recently, with emerging success stories like electric steelmaking taking off across the USA, China and Europe. But this West Virginia project is special because of its unprecedented vertical integration: it’s generating clean electrons right next door to its factory, running its entire process from primary energy generation to raw metal melting to final product manufacturing at the same site with renewable energy.
Humanity is beginning to switch over our entire industrial stack to clean power! Tell your state leaders about this so they know to support future projects when they arrive near you!
Please note that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as renewables or sustainable. This is because most processes are irreversible. The best we can do is become more efficient in use of resources.
The Law's of Physics and Thermodynamics teach this, and our physical reality is governed by it.