Jamie Melrose
We've just published our 2024 Impact Report for the Guinness Sustainable Energy Strategy. This is the 6th iteration of the Impact Report where we try to estimate the positive impact delivered by the products and services sold by our portfolio companies.
We benchmark that positive impact against the continued use of incumbent technologies. So for heat pumps, for example, that's looking at the emissions saved compared to a conventional gas boiler for example. The fund owns a number of names that operate within the same supply chains. So one of the areas where we think we're a little bit differentiated to our peers is that we adjust our figures downwards to reflect the product's cost contribution to the final impactful product or service.
As an example of that we talked about in the report, Vestas, a leading wind turbine manufacturer, so Vestas publishes its own estimates for the carbon avoided thanks to their wind turbines that to set up and run a wind farm, you need so much more than just a turbine. There's the foundations, the electrical infrastructure and the labour to install, operate and service it. There in, we think that the turbine makes up around 40% of the overall cost of generating wind energy. So we use that as our scaling factor to adjust Vestas' reported figure downwards to help avoid double counting with other companies operating in the same supply chain.
There's no industry standard when it comes to impact measurement, but equally we don't want our approach to be a black box that just spits out a number that clients can look at. So throughout the report, we give detailed examples to help give our clients an understanding of how this measurement process works in practise. For more information, visit the full Impact Report 2024 on our website.
