The RE100 list has continued to grow following the additions of Sky and Bloomberg, which have both pledged to meet their total electricity demand with renewable energy.
Sky announced it had joined the campaign yesterday, with its sites in the UK and Ireland already receiving energy from its own on-site renewable energy sources, or purchased from a renewable energy tariff. The company is planning to extend this procurement practice to its businesses across Europe.
A spokesperson for Sky said: “At a number of our sites in the UK, we already generate a proportion of our own energy, including the wind turbine incorporated into the design of Sky Studios in Osterley. We also make use of combined cooling and heating plants, biomass boilers and solar panels.
This followed Bloomberg revealing late last week that it had signed up to the campaign, marking a significant increase on its previous target to use 35% renewable electricity by 2020. As recently as last year, the company was only sourcing 1% of its electricity from renewable energy, but is expected to reach 21% by the end of 2017.
Curtis Ravenel, global head of sustainable business and finance at Bloomberg, said: “Sourcing renewable electricity enables us to diversify our energy supply, reduce costs, provide a hedge against rising traditional energy costs and helps contribute to cleaner, healthier communities.
“RE100 convinced us that they had gathered a strong coalition of committed companies, dedicated to real outcomes. That’s exciting to us. Collaborating with other companies who are demonstrating that distributed clean energy makes business sense will allow all of us to have a greater impact in bringing other companies along.”
The company says it will announce its strategy for meeting the goal later this month, but a spokesperson told Clean Energy News: “We are actively evaluating the feasibility of off-site renewable energy projects in the UK.”
According to the latest RE100 report published in January, more than 50 firms had signed up to the initiative, which aims to get the most influential companies around the world to commit to the 100% target.