27 Mar 2019 -- IBM received a 2019 Climate Leadership Award for Excellence in Greenhouse Gas Management Goal Setting from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and The Climate Registry. This is our second award in the Goal Setting category and seventh Climate Leadership Award in the program's eight-year history.
The award recognized IBM for:
- Setting our fourth-generation carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction goal — to achieve a 40 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 to 2025.
- Setting an accompanying second-generation renewable electricity procurement goal — to increase renewable electricity procurement to 55 percent of IBM's global consumption by 2025.
- Continuing our energy conservation goal — to conserve energy equal to 3 percent of the company's total annual energy consumption each year.
- Deploying a "Smarter Buildings" technology, which enables early identification of faults in almost any building system by using Internet of Things technology.
The energy consumption covered by these goals include that from co-location data centers.
Operational efficiency and energy conservation are at the core of IBM's efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Avoiding the consumption of energy is the best method available to reduce GHG emissions. IBM has a long history of implementing energy conservation and efficiency projects in its operations, maintaining a corporate-wide, energy conservation goal in place since 1996. From 2013 to 2017, the period of our third-generation CO2 emissions reduction goal, IBM reduced or avoided 1.6 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of annual energy consumption, an annualized 6 percent reduction and avoidance, while saving $139 million in annual operating expenses. These reductions were achieved through a strong focus on the efficiency of our IT infrastructure, the use of automated system management software to improve the efficiency of our building infrastructure, and traditional energy conservation and efficiency projects such as lighting upgrades to LEDs and improved time of day management of building HVAC systems.
Businesses play an important role in accelerating actions to limit global warming by implementing real, tangible operational changes that deliver emissions reductions. We will continue to set and meet meaningful GHG reduction goals and focus on driving emissions reductions across our company's core capabilities — our internal operations; the products, solutions and services we offer to our clients; and our research and development expertise.