Contact is committed to leading the decarbonisation of New Zealand’s energy system. This isn’t just our sustainability plan – this is our core business plan. To help us deliver on this, we have set some ambitious emissions reduction targets, we’ve adopted best practice systems of incorporating climate change risk into our business planning processes, and we’re taking serious action to reduce our emissions – for our benefit, and yours.
Contact’s largest source of emissions (79%) comes from electricity generation. Over the last 7 years we’ve reduced our emissions from electricity production by 51% through closing a thermal power station and investing into more renewable generation. This has resulted in increasing our proportion of renewable energy resulting in reduced emissions for our customers, and New Zealand as a whole.
While energy use only contributes to 0.05% of our total emissions, we believe in leading by example, so we undertook energy audits in 2017 across our corporate and operational sites to identify areas where we can reduce our energy use. It also helped provide us with useful insights into our customer’s challenges and experiences.
Our energy audits identified significant opportunities for energy saving. While we were able to address some of these relatively quickly and at low cost, there are some that will take some time and investment – so putting it all into a plan to ensure it gets done is one of the things we’re doing to manage our own energy use.
We don’t believe in resting on our laurels, we believe we can go further so this year we set new emissions reduction targets in line with what science says is required to achieve the goals set by the 2016 Paris Agreement on Climate Change which is to limit global warming well below 2˚.
We will:
- Reduce our 2018 emissions by 30% by 2030
- Reduce our 2018 emissions per MWh by 37% by 2030, and
- Convert 1PJ of fossil fuel energy to renewable low carbon energy by 2022.