Longi Solar – Yiming Xu – 2022

Goals

In 2020, LONGi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd. (LONGi) joined the RE100 initiative launched by the Global Climate Group, committing to achieve 100% renewable electricity in production and operations worldwide by 2028. LONGi engaged Yiming Xu to study the pathways toward the RE100 target and carry out economic analysis.

Solutions

Yiming Xu proposed three pathways to achieve the RE100 target and carried out economics analysis:

• Certification of grid-based green electricity. Using logistic regression analysis, the proportion of certifiable grid-based green electricity was calculated based on the predicted proportion of grid-based renewable electricity.
• Installation of rooftop distributed PV. Assuming that all available roof area of existing and new plants is installed with PV, future roof-top PV generation was predicted.
• Purchase of green electricity certificates or green electricity trading. The portion that cannot be achieved through the first two pathways would be filled by purchasing premium green electricity.

The latter two pathways were analyzed for economics.

Potential Impact

The three pathways of certification of grid-based green electricity, installation of rooftop distributed PV and purchase of premium green electricity would reduce CO2 emissions while achieving the RE100 target.

In the analysis, the percentage of these three pathways per year was also mapped out, which can provide guidance for the company to set annual targets for each plant and form a reference for the overall planning of the company.