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Confectioner MARS to Build a Massive Wind Farm

Accepted submission by janrinok mailto:janrinok@soylentnews.org at 2014-05-03 08:34:05
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The giant candy and pet food maker MARS Inc has taken a big step in the right direction by announcing that it will soon begin construction of a massive wind farm [treehugger.com] in Texas that will produce enough clean energy to power all of MARS' operations in the United States (they have 37 factories and 70 offices, so it's a pretty big deal). The wind farm will be erected near Lamesa, Texas, with 118 GE wind turbines (1.7MW each) producing annually about 800,000 megawatt-hours, equivalent to what it takes to power 61,000 U.S. households. This will be enough for MARS' 37 US factories, and represent about 24% of their global factory and office carbon footprint. Hopefully they keep rapidly improving that number and reach 100% before their target date.

Construction of the Texas wind farm will begin at the end of 2014, with about 10 turbines going up each week. It should be finished and fully operational by mid-2015. And to be clear, the wind farm will produce an amount of electricity equivalent to what they use across the US, it won't be directly connected to all those offices.

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