What emergency?

Jono Brent, Interim CEO, Orion Group

Nearly 41 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference in Geneva and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. Since then, we have heard similar alarm bells at the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement.

In August 2018, 15 year old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg started calling her government to account for their inaction. A few months later, she pulled no punches in her address to the United Nations Climate Action Summit:

 "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction,
and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you!"

Closer to home, in May 2019 Environment Canterbury was the first council in Aotearoa/New Zealand to declare a climate emergency. This set off a wave of similar declarations from local government authorities across the country.

But do we really believe this is an emergency?

In the last eight months we have seen faster and more cohesive action to curb the effects of a pandemic than to mitigate the effects of climate change – a problem that can seem so large and distant that it's difficult to see at an individual level how our actions can make a difference.

But the solutions are within reach and it is clear from the science that if we don't move faster and more cohesively to address what is actually a climate crisis, the effects will be far more catastrophic than what we have seen to date of COVID-19.

All our declarations are irrelevant if they don’t result in meaningful and lasting change. We need to urgently upscale our efforts with action that is fitting for the words 'crisis' and 'emergency'. And we need a combined approach from government, citizens, and the corporate sector.

Two decades ago, global energy company Iberdrola committed to a growth strategy based on clean energy and reducing operating emissions by 50% by 2030. Under the leadership of CEO José Ignacio Sánchez Galán, this strategy has seen their size and results multiply by a staggering factor of five. Today Iberdrola is Spain’s largest electricity company, one of the top five in the world, and a leader in wind power.

Driven by a calling to serve not only investors but all stakeholders and society as a whole, Galán pressed on with an ambitious strategy focused on their core business of generating and distributing sustainable and renewable energy through plants, networks, and storage facilities – despite sceptical reactions from competitors and investors who viewed them as trying to push some crazy ideas through a heavily regulated industry.

If someone thinks you’re crazy, one thing’s for sure – you’re disrupting the status quo.

The only similar commentary I’ve heard about Aotearoa/New Zealand’s electricity industry from the outside is when someone was describing our inaction, not our action. In other words – it was crazy that we weren’t doing more, with all the advantages available to us.

We might not have the scale of global utility organisations but we enjoy many benefits that make us the envy of other nations. We are small, quick to adapt (when we believe in the need to do so), and are blessed with a natural environment that gifts us renewable energy options.

In the words of our Board Chair, the pathway forward for the energy sector is the equivalent of a climate no-brainer. We are ideally positioned to be a catalyst for decarbonising transport and process heat which together account for 30% of our total emissions. We can make a real difference by providing the electrical energy required to achieve this.

If we want a sustainable future we must transform the way our industry works. And if we want to transform our industry we must first transform ourselves.

For the past 12 months the Orion Group has started its own transformation journey, driven by our Group purpose to power a cleaner and brighter future. At the heart of our new Group strategy are the communities we serve and the sustainable future we want to create, with our priorities mapped to seven sustainable development goals.

It is no longer enough to simply focus on providing a safe and resilient network for today – we know we can, and must, do more for tomorrow. We also know we have a lot to learn from tangata whenua and te ao Māori when it comes to kaitiakitanga and the careful stewardship of our natural resources.

Getting to this point hasn’t always been a comfortable journey but we are deeply committed to taking climate action, reducing inequalities, working for affordable and clean energy, and working in partnership with others to achieve a sustainable future.

One of the ways we are doing this is through an exploratory initiative called the Energy Academy, a joint programme of work by Orion and Connetics motivated by a shared desire to transform industry capability.

Far from being a ‘bricks and mortar’ institution, our intent was to walk the talk of a more collaborative approach to solving some of the most pressing challenges facing our industry: an aging workforce, inflexible career pathways, training funding models, and competitive behaviour that inhibits innovation and knowledge sharing. The current situation is unsustainable and we know we cannot solve these problems alone.

This is new territory for us and we don’t have a detailed roadmap or a hidden hand with trump cards and pre-set answers. I acknowledge that there’s a fair amount of scepticism out there because our own behaviour in the past has contributed to some of the problems we are now trying to solve.

As the third largest electricity distribution business (EDB) in the country, and the largest in Te Waipounamu/the South Island, we have been guilty of sometimes leading with answers instead of questions.

It is in our nature to come up with solutions as soon as we sense the slightest hint of a problem, and to do so as a self-contained unit. As an EDB we are rewarded for our resilience and restoring power to our customers if supply is interrupted for any reason.

We are always trying to put things back to normal and solve problems in their entirety before implementing solutions, so it can be a challenge to look forward with incomplete information.

As a lifeline utility, failure is bad so we avoid it. It is therefore counter-cultural to adopt a ‘fail fast and move forward’ approach to solving problems. Rapid prototyping and iteration – the hallmarks of Design Thinking – have largely been a foreign concept for us until recently. But we are getting better at this.

In July we published our first report prepared in accordance with the recommendations for the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). It’s an important – and imperfect – first step, providing a critical baseline for us to measure our future efforts. It’s also a public invitation to the communities we serve to hold us to account for the ambitious targets we have set:

·         a 50% reduction in Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (excluding losses) by 2030; and

·         an 80% reduction in Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (excluding losses) by 2050.

There isn’t currently a solution for all of our Scope 1 emissions. But waiting for one before putting a target on the record doesn’t align to our purpose and the impact we want to have.

Traditional stories have one or two heroes. Global warming is neither a new story nor a traditional one and it requires heroic action from all of us. We have created our climate crisis and nothing less than our collective action will be enough to stop it in its tracks. None of us are extras in this story – it’s time to be brave together and write the ending we want our children and grandchildren to read.