Energy & Policy Institute: Investor-owned utilities falling short on decarbonization goals

A review of publicly available data by The Energy and Policy Institute’s Joe Smyth and David Pomerantz finds that investor utilities are failing to align their businesses with the Paris climate agreement goals and investors’ expectations, according to a new scorecard of major emitting companies.

The Climate Action 100+ Net-Zero Company Benchmark assesses the climate plans and performance of 159 large companies in several sectors, including electric utilities, oil and gas, automobiles, and more. Among the companies scored in the assessment are several large U.S. electric utilities: AESAmerican Electric PowerDominion EnergyDuke EnergyExelonFirstEnergyNextEraNRGPPLSouthern CompanyVistra EnergyWEC Energy, and Xcel Energy. The assessment also scored Berkshire Hathaway, the parent company of Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

Overall, each of the utilities assessed mostly failed to meet the criteria that the investors established in nine categories. In several categories, every U.S. electric utility failed. No U.S. investor-owned utility met more than two of the nine criteria. Berkshire Hathaway failed to even partially meet a single one of the criteria.

In one category focused on whether companies have aligned their capital expenditures with their decarbonization goals, the investors found that only one investor-owned utility, WEC Energy, partially met the criteria, while the others failed.

A recent report by the Sierra Club and Dr. Leah Stokes, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, similarly found that despite a growing number of decarbonization commitments by utilities, most have so far failed to turn those goals into concrete plans to close coal plants, stop building new gas plants, and invest in clean energy.

All the investor-owned utilities also failed to meet the criteria for the Climate Action 100+ investors’ assessment of their climate policy engagement, which considers whether a company’s lobbying positions and trade associations support policies that would help meet the Paris Agreement goals. Duke Energy, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, Vistra Energy, and Berkshire Hathaway totally failed to meet the climate policy engagement criteria, while the other electric utilities partially met the criteria.

Read the full report at The Energy & Policy Institute.