CITY OF MELBOURNE (dpa-AFX) - Rio Tinto Group (RIO), a mining and mineral processing company, Tuesday said that has energized a new 25-megawatt solar plant at its Kennecott copper operations in Utah, where tellurium produced at the site is used to manufacture the panels powering the solar plant.
Kennecott now has 30MW of solar capacity along with the 5MW solar plant completed in 2023 to power nearly 1,026 average American homes annually and reduce Kennecott's Scope 2 emissions by about 6 percent and according to the company, this is equivalent to removing 4,400 cars from the road each year .
The Kennecott site began producing tellurium in 2022 as a byproduct of copper refining, which is then converted to into thin-film semiconductor materials by 5N Plus Inc. in Canada and then supplied to First Solar for the manufacturing of the photovoltaic panels now installed at Kennecott.
In pre-market activity, RIO shares were trading at $84.54, down 0.70% on the New York Stock Exchange.
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