For years, going solar and/or buying wind came at a financial cost in most situations. Putting aside off-grid or unreliable grid situations, people ‘went solar’ because they saw it as the right thing to do even if those electrons would end up costing them more. Solar installations were so expensive that the invariable advice, from a true professional, was “maximize efficiency before installing a watt of solar” since the efficiency might end up ‘costing’ 4-5 cents per watt in a life-cycle analysis and the solar would be several multiples (likely 5x or more) of that. In this ‘high-
Solar system’s environmental benefits
cost’ environment, the payoff for many: they were reducing carbon emissions. Projected carbon reductions were prominent in the sales pitches when I put solar on my house … in many ways, more emphasized that financial benefits. And, according to Enphase, my system has offset the equivalent of two acres of trees.
This sort of measure, that carbon benefit, is often prominent in press releases of clean-energy deployments. Hewlett Packard Enterprises, which has made a RE100 (a 100% renewable electricity supply) target, just announced a 30-megawatt solar agreement in India. From that announcement,
This will result in an annual reduction in excess of 40,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, equivalent to powering more than 35,000 households in India for one year.
This is great that Corporations are deploying clean energy, rather than dirty energy, systems to meet their electricity demand requirements. And, that they are valuing the reduced emissions and publicizing them. After all, at least to some extent, what you talk about reflects on what you value and see others as valuing.
The days of that pain decision (deciding to incur costs for clean electrons) are increasingly behind us. In bid after bid, solar and wind projects are coming in well (actually, far) below fossil-fuel polluting electricity options. Solar and wind prices, in market after market, are coming in so low that building new wind turbines and installing new solar panels (even with storage (batteries or otherwise) has a lower price tag that buying power from existing natural gas and coal plants. (Forget diesel, price wise, diesel just can’t compete …) And, amid continued plunging renewable prices, this will be true in more markets tomorrow than today and even more the day after tomorrow.
Hewlett Packard’s press release provides a good statement about the vision for sustainability in the information technology and data center market.
As the demand for computing power grows exponentially, there has been a push from both outside of, and within the IT sector to reduce the carbon emissions and energy consumption associated with the world’s rapidly expanding IT infrastructure, which consists largely of data center facilities. The reality is that efficiency improvements won’t be enough to meet the exploding demand for data, and the compute power necessary to provide it. Renewable energy sources—such as wind and solar—are continuing to play an increasingly important role in the energy sourcing plans of many large IT companies on their quest to reduce their use of carbon-intensive energy, particularly in rapidly developing countries where coal is still the predominant source of power.
What is not in that announcement is any indication of the financial value Every day that passes makes it more likely that firms will ‘make more green ($US) by going green’. For the hard-nosed green-eye shade accountant, clean energy pencils out as the better investment — even without consideration of the substantive environmental benefits. It is perhaps past time for firms to emphasize those financial benefits at least as strongly as the environmental ones.
“Greening” is no longer simple a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concern, but one about delivering better returns to the shareholder. Making that clear in press releases, investment briefings, and internal strategy documents will make tomorrow’s ‘no-brainer’ clean-energy choice that much easier to make.