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The Ford Car Manufacturer Entrusts Reibel Belpower With The Responsibility
For Equipping Its European Factories With Photovoltaic Solar Installations
By 2010, a first project, with a capacity of 5 MW that can be extended to 20 MW, will be developed in the extremely sunny area of Valency (Spain).
After having staked out in the course of this year the first milestones of its development in Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, BelpowerTM, a department of the Brussels logistics company, Reibel, tasked to produce and distribute various forms of renewable energy, has landed its first king-size industrial project.
It has just indeed entered into an equipment and partnership contract with Ford, the third largest car manufacturer in the world, which might well propel it into the world of the greats. Under the terms of this agreement, Belpower will install, during the next three to four years, photovoltaic solar panels with a capacity of 5 megawatts (MW) on the site that Ford exploits in Valency, in Spain, in an area of strong sunshine. An extension up to 20 MW is already on the cards.
In theory, work will begin in May 2007.
The investments, the amount of which has not been revealed, will come from mixed capital sources. The installation will remain the property of Belpower, which will place the energy produced on the site at the disposal of its partner, but will also be able to sell to third parties. A new division, Belpower Iberica, will be tasked to run the project and those that will follow in this area. Reibel will own 95% of it.
Belpower Iberica will be able to count on an investment package ranging between 35 and 100 million euros for the three next years. Belpower is further delighted with the support that the local and national political authorities are showing it.
But the alliance with Ford is not destined to remain limited to Spain: In the middle term, other sites of the American manufacturer, in Europe and beyond, will be also be involved. It should be known that concern for the quality of the environment is becoming, more and more, a major issue in the United States, and that in this context, Ford sees its partnership with Belpower as the most efficient way to apply its environmental policy, in that it will be able to pride itself to have a greener manufacturing of the vehicles by having voluntarily integrated an ecological component into its production process.
The joint projects of Ford and Belpower relate in particular to the Belgian sites of Genk and Lommel, plus those of Saarlouis (Germany) or Dagenham (the United Kingdom) and Bordeaux (Fr). It is however self-evident that such a partner constitutes the ideal key for accessing the American market…
Contact: Giovanni Esposito, Managing Director, Tel. 02/ 421 99 16.
Listed since December 2005 on the Brussels Euronext Free Market, REIBEL is a logistics service provider in the fields of sea, land, air, railway or multimode transport, and is also involved in intermediation. Its customers include top-notch private operators and non-governmental organisations alike.
Its Belpower department has the role of producing and distributing green energy, mainly photovoltaicly. For this purpose, the construction of a European network was started at the beginning of this year. Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Spain are the first links in the chain, before France, Germany and, in the longer term, the United States, Greece and Austria.
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