Apple is helping to build a 40-megawatt solar power project in China's southwestern plateau in order to work toward its environmental and climate commitments, according to a company senior executive on Thursday.

The project, which will be able to power 61,000 homes a year, will add 80 million kilowatt hours of clean energy to the grid annually, said Lisa Jackson, vice president for environmental initiatives at Apple.

"We are excited about the amount because it will generate far more energy than is being used by all of our offices and retail stores in China," Jackson told Xinhua through a telephone interview.

Currently, Apple has 19 corporate offices in China, including 17 in the mainland and two in Hong Kong, as well as 21 retail stores in the country.

The project will contain two arrays of solar panels, which will be installed 85 miles apart in Hongyuan County and Zoige County of Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, Jackson said.

"We will put the clean energy onto the local grid in Sichuan and buy the power wherever the stores and offices are," she said. In the United States, solar farms are often built near Apple's facilities.

The project, the first of its kind Apple has launched outside the United States, will add China to the list of countries that power Apple's facilities entirely with renewable energy.

Those already on the list include the United States, Germany, the UK, Australia, Spain and Italy.

To develop the new project, Apple has worked closely with both its old and new partners, including SunPower, a U.S.-based company that Apple has cooperated with regularly, and four Chinese companies, Jackson said.

According to Jackson, two of the four Chinese companies are based in Tianjin, a port city in north China. They are Tianjin Zhonghuan Semiconductor Co., Ltd. and Tianjin Jinlian Investment Holding Co., Ltd. Another two are based in Sichuan Province, namely Sichuan Development Holding Co., Ltd. and Leshan Electric Power Company.

Tianjin Zhonghuan Semiconductor Co., Ltd. and Leshan Electric Power Company are publicly listed companies.

Apple will work collectively with all five partners on the two construction sites, and two joint ventures, Ngawa Hongyuan Huanju Eco-Energy Ltd. and Zoige Huanju Ecological Energy Co., Ltd., have been established to manage the project in the two locations, according to Apple.

A press release from SunPower revealed that each of the two arrays will have a capacity of 20 megawatts. The Hongyuan array has already had two megawatts built and connected to the grid as a pilot. The project is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year.

In this project, SunPower combines single-axis tracking technology with rows of parabolic mirrors, making its solar cells highly efficient, said the press release.

When complete, the project will be co-owned by Sichuan Shengtian New Energy Development Co., Ltd., SunPower's project development joint venture, and Apple, it said.

Noting that the project is built in an environmentally sensitive area, Jackson said it is a beautiful plateau with wonderful sunlight, which is great for solar projects, and an indigenous yak population, which local people raise for a living.

"We will not use cement to install solar panels or dig into the ground to lay cables in order to minimize the project's impact on local ecology and to ensure the pastures flourish," according to Apple.

"We are very proud that we come up with technologies that actually complement the natural environment and preserve the grassland, so that the area can still be used for grazing even as it is producing such a huge amount of clean energy," Jackson said.

Liu Zuoming, Ngawa's Party chief, said the new energy project will not only help protect the environment, but also bring social and ecological benefits to local people.

"We hope that it can be copied and spread to other parts of the prefecture and the province," Liu said.

Jackson said she hopes that this project will set a model for Apple' s suppliers in China to follow. The company has a total of 334 suppliers in China.

"Although they are not our facilities, we believe we should work together to remove their pollution and share climate responsibilities, since they are making Apple equipment," Jackson said. "When the project generates power onto the grid, we will learn a lot about how to do this in China and we are happy to share the information with our suppliers."

Apple has been striving to power all of its facilities worldwide with 100 percent renewable energy, and it has achieved a level of 87 percent so far.

The company increasingly relies on solar power. In February, it announced an ambitious deal to pay $848 million  over 25 years to buy electricity from a large solar power plant to be built in Monterey County, California, by First Solar.

Apple also has solar farms built near its data centers in Maiden, North Carolina and Reno, Nevada.

(Xinhua News Agency April 16, 2015)