Renewable energy and RE100/EP100
Purchasing power from renewable rather than conventional sources has been a key measure of our Greenhouse Neutral Programme. After starting to use renewable power at four European locations in 2005, we set ourselves the goal of using 100% renewable power at all locations where it is available in reliable and trustworthy quality by the end of 2013. Based on our quality assessments of available energy sources, we believe we reached this goal and used only renewable power at 25 locations in Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania at that time.
In making these quality assessments and selecting suitable sources, we have relied on a “minimum standard” that clearly states how we define renewable power and what requirements it needs to meet. At our Zurich headquarters, for example, we only buy “naturemade star” electricity (www.naturemade.ch), which meets high ecological quality standards in its production, beyond those required by environmental legislation. In Munich, we purchase our electricity from NaturEnergie (www.naturenergie.de), one of German’s premier suppliers of renewable energy.
RE100 and EP100
In a number of countries where we want to grow our business, there is a lack of renewable energy supplies in reliable quality. At the end of 2016, approximately 84% of the power we purchased across the Group thus came from renewable energy sources. We are committed to raising this figure to 100%, which is why we helped to establish the Climate Group’s RE100 initiative in 2014 as a founding member.
The goal of this initiative is to unite 100 of the world’s largest companies in a shared commitment to use 100% renewable power by 2020. To achieve this, the RE100 group approaches policymakers and regulators at national and sub-national level to make renewable energy more available. RE100 grew substantially again in 2016 and now includes more than 80 of the world’s largest companies.
In 2016, we also signed up to the EP100 initiative, launched by the Climate Group (www.theclimategroup.org) and the Global Alliance for Energy Productivity (www.globalproductivity.org). This is a shared commitment by leading global companies to double their energy productivity or, in other words, to get more economic output from each unit of energy.