Stonyfield Organics has announced it will use 100% renewable electricity in its Londonderry manufacturing facility by the end of 2022. The facility employs about 400 people.
The company committed in June to going 100% renewable in the facility by 2025, but it says it will meet its goal three years early.
In their effort to go 100% renewable, Stonyfield is supporting the construction of four new solar projects in New Hampshire, from which they will buy power.
The company is also supporting construction for three solar projects in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and will buy renewable energy credits from those projects to meet their goal.
Brendan Bell, the chief operating officer of Aligned Climate Capital, which owns the solar projects in New Hampshire that will help power Stonyfield, says it’s harder for companies in New Hampshire to use solar power than in neighboring states.
In New Hampshire, projects like Stonyfield’s need to be under 1 megawatt to participate in net metering.
The Minnesota and Wisconsin solar projects that Stonyfield supports will sell electricity to local rural electric cooperatives, allowing them to use less coal, which their regional grid relies heavily on.
Stonyfield is also working to use 100% renewable energy for its dairy supply chain by 2025, and have a carbon-positive supply chain by 2030.
A 2013 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations showed that the livestock supply chain represented 14.5% of global human-induced emissions. Emissions from the dairy sector increased 18% between 2005 and 2015, according to another U.N. report.
Stonyfield says they were the first manufacturer in the U.S. to offset their greenhouse gas emissions from facility energy use in 1997.
