Corporate Sustainability Demands Significant Renewable Energy Investments
As global warming continues to become a worldwide problem, more and more companies and individuals are finding the need to adopt renewable energy. Being part of the RE100 global movement, more than 350 prominent corporations have pledged to use only 100% renewable energy.
A good number of them have signed the Climate Pledge, which was co-founded by Amazon. These companies have pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This is 10 years ahead of the target set in the Paris Agreement.
Furthermore, under the SBTi initiative, over 2,000 enterprises are pioneering the zero-carbon shift by defining emission reduction goals.
SBTi just announced its first Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which will necessitate quick, deep reductions in value-chain footprints to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C.
The Standard requires businesses to reduce emissions across their whole logistics system, including those created by their own activities, purchased heat and power, and emitted by vendors and end-users.
Companies must incorporate emissions minimization as a key selection tool when planning for the future. The historical estimated marginal carbon emissions per proposal are computed using data from the preceding calendar year.
WattTime’s five-minute excess emissions statistics and Edison’s project generation analysis, which simulates the project’s performance in observed weather circumstances, are used as inputs to the computations. This enables the reporting of past avoided marginal carbon dioxide emissions in MTCO2e for the chronological year under consideration.
This methodology, when combined with estimated project cash flows, enables consumers to assess solutions based on $/MTCO2e averted rather than just projected future profits from the project.
And, to have a measurable influence on climate change, clients must look outside of their footprints and refocus on their logistics system. As a result, top corporations are establishing programs to help their supplier partners cut their footprints.
These initiatives begin with education on why reducing emissions is vital to their industry, followed by data gathering to establish a baseline and the capacity to discover alternatives that can be adapted to meet the particular circumstances of each provider.
This is a massive operation involving perhaps thousands of enterprises in the supply chain. To have a true, measurable impact, firms must commit to not only setting additional emissions reduction objectives but also embedding carbon reduction into their company operations, both for purchasing and corporate culture considerations.
Moreover, corporate green purchases must be transformed into impactful renewables acquisitions. These objectives may be focused on local benefit, educational programs, and climate justice areas rather than reducing GHG emissions.
Beyond renewable power acquisition, having a project performance score that incorporates social and environmental justice criteria allows corporations to evaluate future renewable developments via this new perspective.
