GHG emissions

Leading and enabling energy transition

Climate change

At the heart of our strategy lies our publicly declared target to reduce the GHG intensity of our electricity production from our portfolio by 50% by 2030 compared to 2020, largely facilitated by a rapidly rising share of renewables generation capacity, reaching a 50/50 green-brown ratio by 2030. We are also committed to reaching net zero emissions from our portfolio by 2050.

Our emissions

We aim to meet our target by focusing our investments on renewables and transitional low CO₂e emitting assets, including capturing viable fuel-switch opportunities and increasing and optimising the energy efficiency of our portfolio.

We monitor, measure and report on our portfolio’s absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions and the emission intensity and will continue to do so. While our targets are based on ACWA Power’s equity share in our projects, we will never lose sight of the total portfolio metrics and will continue to report them.

In conducting our emission calculations for 2022, we aligned with the most relevant internationally recognised GHG accounting and reporting standard for calculating and reporting emissions:

• GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (WBCSD & WRI, 2004)
• GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance (WBCSD & WRI, 2015)

ACWA Power’s Scope 1 emissions include direct emissions from stationary fuel combustion from our thermal assets. ACWA Power’s Scope 2 emissions include indirect emissions from grid-supplied electricity as a source for our assets.

We excluded the Scope 1 emissions from owned transportation fleet (mobile fuel combustion emissions). Also excluded are the Scope 1 emissions from fuel consumption and the Scope 2 emissions from grid-supplied electricity and district heating/cooling consumption, both from owned offices. These emissions are expected to represent less than 5% of total Scope 1 and 2 emissions. However, ACWA Power will work towards estimating these emissions in future.

In 2022, the total (Scope 1 and 2) CO₂e emissions across all assets measured 74.9 M t, of which ACWA Power’s share was 31.8 M t.

Since 2021, we have calculated the CO₂e emission intensity of our gross electricity generation by including Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions from electricity production. We have calculated the CO₂e intensity figure retrospectively for 2020 and 2019 using this same approach. We also calculate the CO₂e emission intensity of Reverse Osmosis (RO) water desalination as well as of thermal water desalination.

CO₂e emissions – Gross

CO₂e emissions – Scope 1

CO₂e emissions – Scope 2