By: Supraja Sudharsan, student at Georgia Institute of Technology
What does it take for a manufacturing firm with 24/7 operations to incorporate sustainability goals into its daily activities? I learned the answer to the question this summer at Owens Corning.
Owens Corning is an innovator in fiberglas™ technology operating in 27 countries around the world, with its products’ end-uses ranging from insulation and roofing shingles to wind turbines. The company has been a member of the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index for the last five years, and has rallied around climate change issues to achieve key milestones in its energy intensity and greenhouse gas reduction goals since 2002. Having picked the so-called “low hanging fruits” in energy efficiency, Owens Corning now aspires to purchase 100 percent of its primary energy from renewables. In this, the company’s most recent milestone has been the installation of the largest onsite solar PV system in New York State funded by the New York Sun program in 2013.
One reason this has been possible is due to a shift in the cost of renewable technology, with solar and wind approaching grid parity in some regions of the United States. This has provided an opportunity to enter the renewables space that did not exist a few years back. Technologies like net metering, which allows businesses to sell excess clean energy back to the grid and profit from their renewable deployment, and availability of third party energy suppliers in some states, as well as a means to track and retire the renewable certificates and the reporting standards that have emerged around these, have all been crucial for enabling this shift towards greater renewables. Read More