US corporate giants step up efforts on carbon-free grid

A coalition of major US companies is seeking to address critical missing links in the transition to a carbon-free power grid, building on a surge of corporate renewable energy purchases in recent years.

Akamai Technologies Inc., General Motors Co., Meta Platforms Inc., Prologis Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Walmart Inc. on July 18 announced a joint effort with nonprofit research group RMI, formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute, to focus on additional corporate actions to spur power system decarbonization, reliability and affordability amid rising demand for electricity.

Dubbed the Zero Emissions, Reliability Optimized Grid Initiative, or ZEROgrid, the effort points to the private sector's next wave of activities to transform electric supply and demand beyond setting individual climate targets and buying renewables. The initiative is kicking off with development of an overarching road map to better quantify the impacts of new and emerging corporate clean energy measures, coupled with concerted outreach to US grid operators.

"We want to give companies as broad of a toolkit as possible to understand how their activities can support reliability of the broader US power system because they see it as a threat to their business, and we know they have a lot of creative solutions they could bring to bear to fix that problem," Mark Dyson, managing director of RMI's carbon-free electricity program, said in an interview.

"It's not necessarily straightforward to really understand the emissions impact even of a [power purchase agreement], let alone some of the more complicated things that we're thinking of working on with our partners," Dyson added.

Such next-level activities could include participation in virtual power plants that orchestrate remote-controlled distributed energy resources, investment in battery storage stations, support for new transmission lines, and contributions to grid-enhancing software and hardware innovations.

"We believe that by working with the broader stakeholder network around these topics, by developing a framework to assess the impact of those kinds of activities, we can make it clearer and more attractive to a wider number of companies to pursue those activities, which we know are required to meet our climate goals and support reliability," Dyson said.

'Missing element'

Along with developing the road map, the ZEROgrid initiative seeks to foster closer collaboration between corporations and regional transmission organizations and independent system operators, as well as grid operators in areas not covered by RTOs or ISOs.

"We want to make sure that we have the best thinking in the industry, not only from our partners and from our team at RMI but from other peer organizations, from reliability organizations, from utilities, on really what it would take, for example, for a company to materially advance a transmission project or materially reduce barriers to deployment of virtual power plants in a given geography," Dyson said. "Right now, those pathways are pretty unclear."

For participating companies, ZEROgrid is an outgrowth of their growing relationships in the power sector.

GM, for instance, has been expanding rapidly into renewables, electric vehicle and battery manufacturing, EV infrastructure and stationary energy storage. In 2022, the diversifying automaker launched GM Energy, a new business unit with a growing suite of product and service offerings for residential and commercial energy consumers. That includes electrifying fleets of vehicles and using EVs to power homes or send energy back to the grid to support overall system reliability during times of high demand.

Having fundamental, far-reaching conversations with wholesale grid operators like PJM Interconnection LLC, Midcontinent ISO and the California ISO on how to solve the power system's toughest challenges is "the next really central element" for corporate clean energy initiatives, said Rob Threlkeld, GM's director of global energy strategy.

"I think that has been [a] missing element," Threlkeld said in an interview.

The speed at which both the climate and the grid are changing creates a pressing need for a "comprehensive discussion" with ISOs and RTOs, Threlkeld said.

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