VW starts up largest solar park at US auto factory in Chattanooga, TN. In December 2011, the Volkswagen plant near Chattanooga, TN was certified LEED Platinum. That's a difficult level to reach – as we described at the time – but the one billion dollars the company spent there fit snugly into the VW corporate storyline: we're going to make cleaner cars at cleaner plants. We're going to reduce CO2 emissions by 30 percent (between 2006 and 2015). We're going to make sure our production facilities are 25 percent more "environmentally compatible." We're going to Think Blue. Located just a short bus ride away from the factory, the 65-acre solar park (33 of which are the solar panels themselves) is the largest single array in Tennessee. It is also the largest solar park at a US auto factory. It is made up of 33,600 individual solar panels that together generate 9.58 megawatts of DC power (that's at the panels, it's 7.6 MW of AC power going into the plant) and 13.1 gigawatt hours of electricity a year. That's 12.5 percent of the plant's power needs. In CO2 terms, this means emissions are reduced by 6,675 tons a year, or the amount that 360 average US homes would generate.