At-a-Glance:
A group of eight large companies, including tech and entertainment heavy hitters such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Disney and Netflix, are joining environmental groups and the U.N. to devise ways to scale funding for climate solutions. The collective will be called the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions (BASCS), and will serve as a knowledge-sharing network that has the potential to accelerate companies’ emissions reduction efforts. To learn more, read “Exclusive: Major companies united to push climate solutions.”
Key Takeaways:
- The new alliance allows firms that might otherwise compete with one another to launch clean energy projects to collaborate before engaging in such competition.
- The alliance is explicit about preventing companies from simply trying to offset their emissions, and firms that join need to agree to core principles that emphasize the need for absolute emissions cuts.
- Max Scher, who heads clean energy and carbon programs at Salesforce, told Axios that the alliance is unique in that it’s by businesses for businesses, and aims to break down silos in which many currently operate.
Path to 100% Perspective:
The global energy market is constantly evolving. Current market trends show the energy landscape is in transition towards more flexible energy systems with a rapidly increasing share of renewable energy, declining inflexible baseload generation and wider applications of storage technology. The declining costs of renewables have begun to reduce new investments into coal and other inflexible baseload technologies; a transition which will eventually cause renewables to become the new baseload. In 2017 itself, 14% of electricity generation worldwide was attributed to wind and solar. A focus on a renewable energy future is now unwavering for collaborators across public and private sectors alike.