Accelerating Corporate Climate Action

Semiconductor manufacturing is an energy-intensive industry, but over the last decade, Intel has completed more than 2,000 energy conservation projects for a total savings of 4.5 billion kilowatt-hours, or enough electricity to support more than 400,000 average American homes for one year (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2020). Today, reducing operational energy use is core to Intel’s overall climate strategy and 2030 goal to drive an additional 10% reduction in our absolute Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions from a 2020 baseline and to save an additional 4 billion kilowatt-hours of energy.

Energy Conservation Blog image.png

© Intel

Institutionalizing Energy Conservation

Key to the success of any energy conservation program is support from senior management. In Intel a global network of dedicated energy managers, champions, and subject matter experts partner with local operations teams to identify, design, and implement innovative energy conservation projects. These experts share cross-site learnings and offer technical expertise to guide project managers and system-level engineers through the process of scoping, resourcing, funding, and delivering these energy efficiency and conservation projects. Financial investment is required to drive energy conservation at scale.

Strategic Investment Areas

Although energy conservation opportunities are present across the spectrum of Intel’s manufacturing operations, we have identified strategic investment areas to enable identification of best solutions, shared learning, and increase speed of implementation: 

Efficient lighting: Upgrading lighting can be a good way to demonstrate early success for an energy conservation program, especially longer lifetime warranty for LED lighting products and solutions. In Intel cleanrooms, custom lighting fixtures are required for integration into the ceiling grids. We implemented an LED solution that delivers operational energy savings of 80% to 95% compared to the previous lighting system. The cleanroom LED solution replaced every four fluorescent fixtures with two LED fixtures with integrated control, occupancy and light level sensors, and increased light output.  

Chilled Water Cooling: Given the heat removal required in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, chilled water systems are significant energy users, accounting for up to 20% of total electricity use. Chiller technology has evolved significantly with the use of low global warming – potential refrigerants, magnetic bearings, medium voltage frequency drives, and improved control modes of operation. Intel conducted a detailed assessment of all our chilled water systems to understand their configurations, modes of operation, overall system health, and opportunities for improvement. Intel identified an opportunity for an average of 20% energy performance improvement. Based on these findings, we initiated an effort to begin converting existing chilled water systems to new full variable primary flow systems. These conversions also present an opportunity to integrate Internet of Things-based controls with online remote system experts to provide operator support and optimize energy savings.

Compressed air: Semiconductor manufacturing has always required the use of clean, dry air. The production of this air requires dryer systems and compressors, both of which use energy. 
Typically, over 80% of energy used to generate compressed air is lost as heat. As such, implementation of a centralized heat recovery system allows productive use of that heat. The impact of allowing the compressors to run slightly warmer to use the available heat requires additional cooling of the air. While there is energy required to cool this air, it has an additional benefit of allowing removal of moisture with a water separator before the drying process, reducing its energy intensity. These measures, including variable frequency compressors, have allowed Intel to improve energy performance by up to 20%.  

Heat Recovery/Electrification: For manufacturing facilities where heating is required, the available heat from equipment lends itself to a holistic factory approach to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Intel commenced the journey of heat recovery first with chiller condenser water providing heat for incoming city water while reducing cooling tower load. In the late 1990’s, we began using chillers to provide heating, and what followed was a move to standardize specifications, dedicating heat recovery chiller/heat pumps for cleanroom makeup air low temperature heating. This shift reduced boiler fossil fuel heating by over 30%. New developments in higher temperature heat pumps allow for the increased possibility of boiler replacement. In addition, the electrification of heat provides for a more immediate route to using renewable energy where biogas is not available.

Technology as an Enabler

Technology can enable understanding of where and how energy is used to improve energy management, and verify impact of energy conservation actions. Intel-based Internet of Things-enabled sensors, devices, and data analytics give intelligence to equipment and deliver operational insights to lower maintenance costs, enable new lines of business, and improve overall productivity. 

Encouraging Industry Action

Acting alone, Intel cannot achieve the broad, societal impact we aspire to. Our 2030 corporate responsibility strategy and goals reflect even greater ambition for ourselves, as well as a growing sense of urgency to work with others to address challenges no one can tackle alone. We are committed to applying our deep experience as a leader in global manufacturing and leveraging our unique position within the technology ecosystem to help our customers achieve their own sustainability goals and accelerate progress in key areas across the entire technology industry.

Our business sits at the intersection of disruptive trends – rapid urbanization, e-commerce growth and technological innovation – that are fundamentally shifting markets and everyday life. As one of the key players in the transportation sector – the largest contributor to global GHG emissions – UPS is capitalizing on this disruption to shape a future in which we minimize our environmental impacts and conserve resources for future generations.

We accept the responsibility to address our environmental impacts, including setting a goal to reduce emissions 12% across our global ground operations by 2025. Collaboration is critical to achieving this goal, so we are working with vehicle manufacturers, fuel suppliers and other partners to create more sustainable solutions across our fleet and facilities.

Leading the Charge on Fleet Electrification

UPS has been pioneering alternative vehicle solutions since the 1930s when we began using electric vehicles in our fleet. In recent years, the main barrier to large-scale uptake of electric vehicles (EV) is lack of supply – there just aren’t enough electric vehicles available for freight and delivery usage. We’re accelerating our own electrification efforts, collaborating with small and large manufacturers alike to enable more rapid adoption of a variety of EVs.

We’ve placed an order for 125 of Tesla’s fully-electric semi-trucks and, in partnership with Workhorse, we launched the first EV that rivals the cost of conventional fuel vehicles. Through an investment in EV startup Arrival, we’ve committed to purchase 10,000 EVs purpose-built to UPS’s specifications and at global scale.

But there's another side of the EV story that often gets overlooked: even if the vehicles are in place, charging infrastructure remains a challenge. To address this, we convened the Smart Electric Urban Logistics (SEUL) consortium in the UK to deploy smart-grid technology that enables simultaneous recharging of an entire fleet of electric vehicles. We nearly tripled our EV capacity from 65 to 170 vehicles based in the London center, and are evaluating opportunities to scale this technology to other facilities.  

While EVs play an important role in reducing emissions and pollution from transportation, congestion can be a bigger issue in some cities. In those areas, we’re working with cities to deploy cycle logistics solutions that improve last-mile delivery in dense urban centers, with more than 30 pilot programs underway around the world.  

Spurring Market Demand for Renewable Natural Gas

While EVs are currently best suited for dense urban environments, we are continuously developing lower-emission solutions for longer routes in suburban and rural areas, including replacing 40% of our fuel with alternative sources by 2025.

In 2019, we announced the largest-ever U.S. purchase of renewable natural gas (RNG), which will reduce GHG emissions across our fleet by more than 1 million metric tons. We’re also adding 6,000 trucks that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), doubling our CNG capacity. Our expansive natural gas fleet has helped catalyze the market for production of cleaner fuels as we work toward increased use of RNG.

Collaborating on a Path Forward

With more than 10,300 alternative fuel and advanced technology vehicles driving more than 1 million miles each business day, we’ve learned a lot about which solutions work best in different operating conditions. In short: there is no silver bullet that suits every delivery scenario. At UPS, our approach is to continue to work with vehicle manufacturers, fuel suppliers and city officials to test new solutions, scale what works, and learn from what doesn’t.

NRG Energy, Inc. is an integrated power company, dual headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey and Houston, Texas. NRG brings the power of energy to its customers by producing and selling electricity and related products and services in competitive markets in the U.S. and Canada.

Composed of dynamic retail brands and generation assets, NRG provides electricity to over 3 million homes and businesses, while generating approximately 23,000 MW of electricity.

Embedding Sustainability

Sustainability is an integral piece of NRG's strategy and ties directly to business success, reduced risks and brand value. To guide action within our company, we developed five pillars as a framework:

• Sustainable Customers focuses on providing solutions that help our customers transition towards a clean energy future.
• Sustainable Business focuses on establishing strong leadership in governance, transparency, reporting, and stakeholder engagement.
• Sustainable Workplace involves supporting a strong, healthy, and engaged workforce as well as being a positive force in the communities in which we operate.
• Sustainable Operations centers on reducing the negative environmental impact of our operations and generation assets.
• Sustainable Suppliers represents our initiatives to address the risks and opportunities within our value chain partners.

Climate Leadership and Goal-Setting

Though NRG began its carbon-reduction initiatives over a decade ago, we formalized our commitment to decarbonization in 2014 to remain competitive and a sector leader while working to avoid the worst effects of global climate change. As part of this commitment, we established goals to reduce absolute GHG emissions 50% by 2030, and 90% by 2050, from a 2014 baseline. These goals were the first of their kind in the U.S. power sector and NRG was named one of the first 10 companies in the world to receive certification by the Science-based Targets initiative in 2015, an endorsement that our ambition aligned with the 2-degree Celsius guidelines set by the COP21 convening in Paris. By 2019, we measured significant progress across our decarbonization initiatives, achieving a 37% absolute reduction of GHG emissions and placing our progress trajectory well ahead our 2030 goal.

These goals are only as good as the best available science. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revised its guidance to limiting warming to a 1.5-degree Celsius scenario. As such, NRG took the step of re-evaluating our climate goals, especially given that we were on track to meet our existing targets well ahead of schedule. Once the updated trajectories were calculated and the new dates proposed, these goals were vetted within the company leadership and our Board of Directors. On September 24, 2019, we announced the acceleration of our absolute GHG reduction targets to align with the new 1.5-degree Celsius scenario. Our new goals are to reduce emissions 50% by 2025 on the way to net-zero by 2050. We’re proud to announce that we are already 83% of the way to our 2025 goal.

U.S. CO2e emission goals.jpg

Achieving Incremental Carbon Reduction

Our decarbonization efforts are the result of the retirement of uneconomic units, retrofitting coal facilities to gas, running plants less frequently, or by displacing the operation of older, less- efficient units. Our path towards achieving our long-term environmental goals is to capitalize on progressive market opportunities that help us reach our net-zero goal, particularly in areas such as process development, improvements in the economics of new technologies, and the establishment of forward-thinking policy.

Communicating our Progress

Climate goals come with a litany of reporting groups, worksheets, and standards. We’re committed to best-in-class reporting principles to ensure that we’re transparently accounting for our progress in a way that’s comparable and decision-useful. We also ensure our latest environmental data is available to the broader investor community by completing CDP Climate and Water questionnaires. By leveraging leading available reporting standards like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) table and supporting the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), we’re translating sustainability action, climate risk and opportunity, to the financial community in a way that supports long-term decision-making.

Establishing these targets was an important step for us and our sector. Adopting a climate commitment is the right thing to do, but it also places us at the forefront of an electric power transition that is customer-driven. As our stakeholders see decarbonization and electrification as key parts of their lives and their futures, it is important to establish ourselves as a partner in this transition. And we see setting science-based targets as part of the foundation of any resilient climate action plan.