Five ways businesses benefit from clean energy
It’s time to advance your business or career by recognizing what is misinformation and what is reality.
1. Operating cost: Save on lighting, cooling, heating, equipment operation, motors, and fleet operation. Lighting upgrades pay for themselves in one year. HVAC and process upgrades pay out in three years. Each electric fleet vehicle going 200,000 miles saves about $100,000. Just modernize existing capital budgets.
2. New products & market segments: Energy, IT, electronics, EV-related, other consumer products – My book is full of clean energy success stories. Why ignore opportunities in one of the most promising sectors? The Clean Energy Age includes a Top 10 List of climate action priorities for business people.
3. Better branding, public image & social media: Even if you can’t create a strong new product or market, you can improve your public image, brand image and employee satisfaction by greening your operations and community engagement. This has been verified by numerous corporate studies and case studies.
4. Less financial risk: This list is getting longer every day, with horror stories piling up: Asset value loss, operating losses, competitive disadvantage, lost supply chain opportunities, commodity volatility and cost punishment, higher insurance premiums, divestment and boycott campaigns, fines, carbon taxes, harmful new regulations, civil litigation and more. CFOs ignoring climate change risks can only be described as negligent.
5. Better corporate performance: Don’t believe me. Check Harvard Business Review archives. They’ve published numerous studies. In a famous 2011 comparison 90 green companies totally crushed 90 non-green companies over an 18-year period on profitability, revenue, stock price and so forth.