Expand grid decarbonization by associating more technology investment with voluntary corporate procurement

Noah Kittner ^*

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, United States

The transition to a decarbonized power system will require vast investments in carbon free electricity generation, transmission, and storage. Corporations, which collectively are linked to nearly 70% of annual greenhouse gas emissions, are an obvious source of potential investment, and thousands of companies have set public goals to reduce their emissions. Companies measure their progress in reducing emissions using a complex system of greenhouse gas accounting standards. These voluntary standards are undergoing once-in-a-decade revision processes, and regulators are increasingly relying on these standards to design their corporate climate change disclosure requirements. There is a unique and vital opportunity to revise corporate climate accounting, reporting, and target setting systems to catalyze private spending on critical decarbonization strategies like increasing electricity transmission or storage capacity which have historically been excluded or unrecognized by these systems.