J.B. Hunt launches solar farm to power its three HQ buildings
40-acre solar facility in Gentry, Arkansas, will generate 9.3M kWh annually, offsetting 80% of electricity used at company’s nearby Lowell headquarters.
The 40-acre solar facility in Gentry, Arkansas, includes nearly 18,000 solar panels and 10,000-plus bi-facial solar modules to capture sunlight, which is then converted to electricity and transmitted to a nearby electric grid for Carroll County Electric. The facility will produce approximately 9.3M kWh annually and utilize net metering, which helps transfer surplus power onto the power grid.
Construction of the facility began in 2024. The project was managed by NextEra Energy and completed by Verogy. Both Trio (formerly Edison Energy) and Carroll Electric Cooperative Corporation provided ongoing consultation throughout planning and development.
“By commissioning this solar facility, J.B. Hunt is demonstrating our commitment to enhancing the communities we serve and to investing in economically viable practices aimed at creating a more sustainable supply chain,” Greer Woodruff, executive vice president of safety, sustainability and maintenance at J.B. Hunt, said in a release. “The annual amount of clean energy generated by the J.B. Hunt Solar Facility will be equivalent to that used by nearly 1,200 homes. And, by drawing power from the sun and not a carbon-based source, the carbon dioxide kept from entering the atmosphere will be equivalent to eliminating 1,400 passenger vehicles from the road each year.”
The French transportation visibility provider Shippeo today said it has raised $30 million in financial backing, saying the money will support its accelerated expansion across North America and APAC, while driving enhancements to its “Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platform” product.
The funding round was led by Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund, with participation from existing investors: Battery Ventures, Partech, NGP Capital, Bpifrance Digital Venture, LFX Venture Partners, Shift4Good and Yamaha Motor Ventures. With this round, Shippeo’s total funding exceeds $140 million.
Shippeo says it offers real-time shipment tracking across all transport modes, helping companies create sustainable, resilient supply chains. Its platform enables users to reduce logistics-related carbon emissions by making informed trade-offs between modes and carriers based on carbon footprint data.
"Global supply chains are facing unprecedented complexity, and real-time transport visibility is essential for building resilience” Prashant Bothra, Principal at Woven Capital, who is joining the Shippeo board, said in a release. “Shippeo’s platform empowers businesses to proactively address disruptions by transforming fragmented operations into streamlined, data-driven processes across all transport modes, offering precise tracking and predictive ETAs at scale—capabilities that would be resource-intensive to develop in-house. We are excited to support Shippeo’s journey to accelerate digitization while enhancing cost efficiency, planning accuracy, and customer experience across the supply chain.”
The move delivers on its August announcement of a fleet renewal plan that will allow the company to proceed on its path to decarbonization, according to a statement from Anda Cristescu, Head of Chartering & Newbuilding at Maersk.
The first vessels will be delivered in 2028, and the last delivery will take place in 2030, enabling a total capacity to haul 300,000 twenty foot equivalent units (TEU) using lower emissions fuel. The new vessels will be built in sizes from 9,000 to 17,000 TEU each, allowing them to fill various roles and functions within the company’s future network.
In the meantime, the company will also proceed with its plan to charter a range of methanol and liquified gas dual-fuel vessels totaling 500,000 TEU capacity, replacing existing capacity. Maersk has now finalized these charter contracts across several tonnage providers, the company said.
The shipyards now contracted to build the vessels are: Yangzijiang Shipbuilding and New Times Shipbuilding—both in China—and Hanwha Ocean in South Korea.
Penske said today that its facility in Channahon, Illinois, is now fully operational, and is predominantly powered by an onsite photovoltaic (PV) solar system, expected to generate roughly 80% of the building's energy needs at 200 KW capacity. Next, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, location will be also active in the coming months, and Penske's Linden, New Jersey, location is expected to go online in 2025.
And over the coming year, the Pennsylvania-based company will add seven more sites under its power purchase agreement with Sunrock Distributed Generation, retrofitting them with new PV solar systems which are expected to yield a total of roughly 600 KW of renewable energy. Those additional sites are all in California: Fresno, Hayward, La Mirada, National City, Riverside, San Diego, and San Leandro.
On average, four solar panel-powered Penske Truck Leasing facilities will generate an estimated 1-million-kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable energy annually and will result in an emissions avoidance of 442 metric tons (MT) CO2e, which is equal to powering nearly 90 homes for one year.
"The initiative to install solar systems at our locations is a part of our company's LEED-certified facilities process," Ivet Taneva, Penske’s vice president of environmental affairs, said in a release. "Investing in solar has considerable economic impacts for our operations as well as the environmental benefits of further reducing emissions related to electricity use."
Overall, Penske Truck Leasing operates and maintains more than 437,000 vehicles and serves its customers from nearly 1,000 maintenance facilities and more than 2,500 truck rental locations across North America.
In addition to its flagship Clorox bleach product, Oakland, California-based Clorox manages a diverse catalog of brands including Hidden Valley Ranch, Glad, Pine-Sol, Burt’s Bees, Kingsford, Scoop Away, Fresh Step, 409, Brita, Liquid Plumr, and Tilex.
British carbon emissions reduction platform provider M2030 is designed to help suppliers measure, manage and reduce carbon emissions. The new partnership aims to advance decarbonization throughout Clorox's value chain through the collection of emissions data, jointly identified and defined actions for reduction and continuous upskilling.
The program, which will record key figures on energy, will be gradually rolled out to several suppliers of the company's strategic raw materials and packaging, which collectively represents more than half of Clorox's scope 3 emissions.
M2030 enables suppliers to regularly track and share their progress with other customers using the M2030 platform. Suppliers will also be able to export relevant compatible data for submission to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a global disclosure system to manage environmental data.
"As part of Clorox's efforts to foster a cleaner world, we have a responsibility to ensure our suppliers are equipped with the capabilities necessary for forging their own sustainability journeys," said Niki King, Chief Sustainability Officer at The Clorox Company. "Climate action is a complex endeavor that requires companies to engage all parts of their supply chain in order to meaningfully reduce their environmental impact."
The clean energy transition continuing to sweep the globe will give companies in every sector the choice to either be disrupted or to capitalize on new opportunities, a sustainability expert from Deloitte said in a session today at a conference in Orlando held by the enterprise resource planning (ERP) firm IFS.
While corporate chief sustainability officers (CSOs) are likely already tracking those impacts, the truth is that they will actually affect every aspect of operations regardless of people’s role in a business, said John O’Brien, managing director of Deloitte’s sustainability and climate practice.
For example, regulatory requirements on carbon emissions are expanding in every region, which means that even if a specific company doesn’t have to change its own practices, it will almost definitely need to flex to accommodate its partners and suppliers as they track scope 3 emissions or supply chain practices.
Likewise, companies are starting to challenge the classic concept of “force majeure” events than can cancel service providers’ contractual duties due to unforeseeable weather events. As the new argument goes, extreme weather patterns increasingly occur in accordance with climate scientists’ forecasts, so those hurricanes and wildfires are in fact foreseeable after all.
But one strategy for coping with the cost of those changes is to mine the power of the data that most companies will soon need to collect as part of their evolution. Instead of simply tracking its trucks to trim their routes and emissions, a transportation company could use the same data to manage their maintenance and fuel consumption.
“The climate management transition is going to be a massive disruption, but with that comes massive opportunity,” O’Brien said from the keynote stage at the “IFS Unleashed” show. “Don’t waste compliance efforts just on compliance, use it to create new value. You’re collecting all that new data, so use it!”