Grid-scale battery technology is now a critical tool in delivering global climate goals, enabling renewable energy to be deployed consistently, at scale. Unlike other large infrastructure sectors, which grapple with controlling and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, big batteries have virtually no direct GHG emissions once operational. But this doesn’t mean the sector has a free pass on sustainability. As battery storage scales around the world, ensuring the batteries themselves are as sustainable as the low-carbon environment they are capacitating becomes even more critical.
At Pacific Green, this challenge is front of mind for us. We’re proud of the role our projects and technology are playing in accelerating the net-zero transition. But we’re also aware that we, as a company, must always operate sustainably. So, over the last year, we have been assessing what approach will best enable us to continually improve the sustainability performance of our business and our individual projects. That exercise has led to the completion of our first sustainability strategy, which will be published in 2025. As we gear up for publication, we wanted to share some insight into our sustainability vision, approach and goals.
A company vision rooted in sustainability
Pacific Green only exists to accelerate green technology. All of our operations and technology ultimately deliver more efficient, less energy and carbon intensive businesses and economies. So, sustainability is at the heart of our company. Yet we now want to go further.
Our vision of sustainability is outlined in our new Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Charter. The charter sets the vision for our 2025 strategy and is founded on four key pillars, environmental stewardship, innovation, collaboration, and adaptability.
These pillars will influence the ESG approach and broad goals we will be addressing in our strategy. While we are currently assessing our sustainability materiality, some key objectives have already been identified in our Charter.
Environmental Impact
As well as creating environmental benefits through renewable energy storage and cleaner air, we will work locally to increase biodiversity and constantly strive to reduce our environmental impact.
- Mitigate global Green House Gas (GHG) emissions by delivering renewable energy solutions and emission cleaning technologies.
- Reduce our carbon footprint.
- Minimise impact, and where possible deliver a net-benefit, to local land and biodiversity where we operate.
Social impact
Engaging with local communities from the early stages of project development, we will seek to understand their history, needs, and aspirations and make meaningful contributions as valued partners. Embracing diversity and inclusion we create high quality employment opportunities and generate new avenues for education.
- Strive for ethical supply chain and labour conditions throughout our operations and those of our suppliers.
- Foster a supportive working environment, prioritising employee satisfaction and wellbeing.
- Deliver tangible local community engagement including dialogue with first nations communities, and communities living and working near our projects.
Governance impact
Maintenance of ethical and just institutions and a mandatory code of conduct to ensure integrity and transparency within the workplace whilst allowing investors to make informed investment decisions.
- Provide equal opportunities and diversity.
- Maintain ethical and just procedures and governance in running the company.
- Increase transparency and consistency of sustainability reporting.
Driving continuous improvement
These broad goals have already emerged through our materiality assessment process and through discussions with our team around the company we want to be. These themes will be unpacked further in our strategy, where meaningful, practical targets and KPIs will be set to enable us to gauge progress. This information will be public, enabling our stakeholder to also assess our performance.
This approach will not only improve the impact we have on people and planet. It will also make us a better business.
You can read more about our approach to sustainability here, and we will be posting more about our sustainability journey next year as we finalise our strategy.
Publish date: 13 December, 2024