By developing technology that allows users to monitor and prevent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from everyday activities, IT companies can provide society with solutions to phase out fossil fuels and drive the necessary changes needed to mitigate climate change impacts. The industry is continuing to progress on these solutions, but at a pace that does not meet the urgency of the climate crisis.
Building on the contributions and leadership by companies such as Cisco, Ericsson, and Fujitsu, the sector has made significant progress in developing standardised methodologies for how IT energy savings solutions will be measured and evaluated on an ongoing basis. This should help to increase the confidence of energy policy makers and the investor community to feel confident of the savings potential from IT solutions.
Energy Savings Calculations
Ericsson, IBM and Cisco continue to lead in this category, with multiple well developed case studies providing clear evidence that the clean energy benefits of their IT energy solutions are tangible and quantifiable.
Public Metrics
Network and telecommunications companies Ericsson, Cisco, and Vodafone continue to provide well developed methodologies for accurately measuring the total energy savings associated with IT energy solutions at significant scale.
Investment
Google continues to set the bar for its clean energy investment leadership among IT companies, with Japan’s SoftBank a close second. Google’s clean energy investments, now topping $1bn US dollars since 2010, illustrate that Google understands and in fact embraces the idea that corporations can play an important role in providing a new and much needed source of capital to the renewable energy sector. SoftBank announced significant new renewable energy projects in Japan in the past year through its newly created subsidiary SoftBank Energy, totalling over 200MW of renewable energy.
Future Savings Goal
The ambition level for energy saved from the Japanese brands remains considerably higher than companies from elsewhere, with Fujitsu still best in class in terms of a savings goal with evidence of a solutions investment strategy that will allow it to realise its ambition.