Valentin Monteiro, Head of Sustainability at Schneider Electric recently spoke with We Don’t Have Time for an exclusive interview reflecting on Schneider’s work in 2023.
Commenting on the current state of initiatives at Schneider Electric, Valentin shared the core principles that we pride ourselves on as an impact company:
These are made up of “five simple principles. The first one being performance, because it is the foundation of doing good. The second would be business, to include sustainability in the core of what the company is doing thanks to innovation and technology. The third one is to raise the ESG bar to bring it into the core of the company strategy. The fourth would be setting a model and culture bringing everyone along to participate and commit. Leading us to the fifth principle of engaging all stakeholders, from customers, employees, suppliers, and the entire societal grid. In summary, we have to do well to do good, and do good to do well.”
With these five principles in mind, we’ve been able to not only reduce our emissions but also actively reduce the emissions of our supply chain and our global contributions to CO2.
“We are having an impact of 90 million tonnes of saved and avoided emissions, so roughly 30 million tonnes” of net CO2 emissions reduction every year when considering the footprint of our operations and value chain.
The key to making this impact was actively working with our suppliers over the last years, as “less than 1% of it is the actual operations of Schneider Electric” while the rest comes primarily from our customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. As such, it has been crucial for us to consider these Scope 3 emissions in our sustainability efforts to make our impact as significant as possible.
As Valentin pointed out, “we have a special program with the top 1,000 suppliers of Schneider Electric to help them decarbonize their operations by 50% by 2025.”
Beyond this work on decarbonizing their own value chain, Valentin further shared two core missions allowing Schneider Electric to have the most impact on society.
“We see two axes that we are really advocating for and supporting companies with… Electrification for decarbonization… and Digitization for efficiency.”
Electrification focuses primarily on how we can electrify the operations and processes of our customers, to help them phase out the fossil fuel consumptions of their energy mix.
Digitization is about leveraging sensing technology and data analysis to easily find the untapped potential for efficiency and then automate actions that allow customers to seamlessly reduce the energy consumption of their operations.
The benefit of this is that digitalization is already an important area of focus for a lot of businesses, including fellow We Don’t Have Time Partners Ericsson and BT, and in Sweden in particular “if you look at the pace of electrification vs the rest of the world, it’s expected to go twice as fast in the next decades”. This opens a massive number of opportunities on the market, requiring unprecedented speed of deployment to meet decarbonization goals. Something that can only be achieved with an open and collaborative approach, therefore it is key to bring all partners up to speed.
As we look forward to the next year, we’re excited to continue both advocating for and leading by example in relation to both Digitization and Electrification, and we hope that given the signed deals for a tentative phasing out of fossil fuels our leadership in this space will help to accelerate, or at least initiate the global decarbonization journey that both businesses and the society need to achieve in the coming years.
See Valentin’s full interview with We Don’t Have Time here:
https://youtu.be/f_socvO5DWU?t=25915
About the COP28 Climate Hub
•
•
4 w
Collaboration is key! We all need to work together to achieve global decarbonization.
•
•
4 w
Very interesting to hear from one of the biggest players out there!