Summary: Cisco Awarded Top International Honor for Energy Management

At the end of last month, September 30th,  Cisco received the International Corporate Energy Management Award from the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) for our global energy management program and our commitment to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally.

Ali Ahmed, who leads the Global Energy Management and Sustainability team within Workplace Resources at Cisco, was honored that Cisco received this award and very proud of the work that Cisco have done in setting aggressive targets and pursing high value projects to achieve the targets.

His Blog, summarized here, talks about:

• In 2009, Cisco met a goal we had set in 2006 to reduce business-air-travel emissions worldwide by 10 percent against a 2006 baseline
• In 2012, we met a commitment to reduce all Scope 1, 2, and business-air-travel Scope 3 GHG emissions worldwide by 25 percent against a 2007 baseline.
• In February 2013, we announced a set of five new goals related to our operational energy use and GHG emissions.

To achieve these goals, Cisco approved $57.5 million in funding for 2014 through 2017 for the creation of a program called EnergyOps.

Since we launched the EnergyOps program, we have completed or initiated 344 energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. This has reduced Cisco’s energy annual use by 105 GWh and GHG emissions cumulatively by over 1 million metric tonne of CO2e.

Examples of some of these projects include solar installations in the United States and India, numerous indoor and outdoor lighting improvements, and various types of upgrades to HVAC systems at many of our campuses, like our Shanghai location. Cisco estimates that the projects we have completed or initiated to date will save approximately US$15M annually.

Here’s a short summary of some of our recent activities with renewable energy from an earlier Ali Ahmed blog:

Cisco signed an agreement with NRG Renew LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of NRG Energy, Inc. (NYSE:NRG), to purchase the output of a 20 MW solar energy facility located in Blythe, California for our San Jose headquarters and surrounding Bay Area locations

Completed 4 on-site solar projects at our sites in Texas, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India taking our total solar production capacity over 2 MW

Launched a solar discount program for employees and contractors, along with their friends and family, to simplify and reduce the cost of installing solar panels on their homes leading to over 50 installations totaling over 250 kW in less than 1 year

Joined the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles supporting the increase in accessibility to renewable energy along with many of our peers in the technology industry

Ali’s blog can be read here: Cisco Awarded Top International Honor for Energy Management, and has links to find out more about the award and more information on Cisco’s commitment to reducing GHG emissions.