Volkswagen will boost its planned commitment to renewable energy, investing close to EUR1bn (US$1.44bn) in the production of environmentally friendly energy over two years, media reports said.
Citing Financial Times Deutschland, Reuters reported this would be a substantial increase over the previous mid-term target of roughly EUR600m VW announced at the end of June.
The German business daily said the company was looking to buy an interest in at least two offshore windparks in the process, and may announce by the end of the year it will form a partnership with windpark developer Windreich.
Volkswagen already has some exposure to wind energy. The municipal utility in the German port city of Emden, where it builds the Passat, operates a windpark estimated to supply 20million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.
“We are in talks with operators over a stake in offshore windparks,” a VW spokeswoman told the news agency.
Late in June, the group’s plant unit Volkswagen Kraftwerk signed a deal to draw roughly 10% of the electricity used in its 12 German manufacturing plants from hydropower generated by Austria’s Verbund starting 2013.
Volkswagen has set a target of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from its production plants by 40% over a period of 10 years compared with 2010, the reports noted.
