Macquarie Group commits to 100% renewable electricity by 2025

Australian investment bank Macquarie Group has committed to purchasing all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, as the company becomes the latest to officially join the RE100 initiative that encourages the world’s biggest companies to make the switch to renewables.

“Macquarie will seek to develop projects to supply the green energy for its new Sydney headquarters and Melbourne office. Macquarie has been carbon neutral in sourcing its energy supply since 2010 through the purchase of carbon credits,” the bank said in a statement.

“The commitment from Macquarie Group means that it now joins the ‘Big Four’ Australian banks in agreeing to source all of their electricity consumption from renewable sources under the RE100 initiative.”

The commitment will see the company power all of its operations, including office buildings and data centres with renewable electricity. The company says that it will seek to enter into power purchase agreements directly with new projects to supply the bank with renewable electricity.

“Consistent with the dedicated power purchase agreements it has created for clients, Macquarie will seek to develop projects to supply the green energy for its new Sydney headquarters and Melbourne office,” the bank said in a statement.

The commitment from Macquarie bank sees it join other major Australian financial institutions, including Westpac, ANZ, NAB and the Commonwealth Bank in setting a 100 per cent renewables target.

“We’ve now got the big five banks signed up to RE100, which we are obviously very excited about,” the Australian Coordinator of the RE100 initiative, Jon Dee, told RenewEconomy.

Last week, Dee told an RE100 event hosted by Australian tech company Atlassian that renewable energy purchase commitments until the global RE100 initiatives had reached around 220TWh, which is comparable to the total annual electricity consumption of Australia.

More than 200 of the world’s largest companies have made commitments under the initiative, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Customer-owned bank, Bank Australia, became the first Australian bank to deliver on its RE100 commitment, when it announced in May that it had secured a power purchase agreement with the Crowlands wind farm in western Victoria, along with the installation of rooftop solar systems on the bank’s premises.

The commitment by the Macquarie Group to the RE100 initiative follows substantial commitments by the investment bank to grow its portfolio of investments in the global renewable energy sector.

In September, the bank unveiled a five-year plan to invest up to 20GW of new renewable energy capacity across the globe, including up to 4GW of generation capacity in emerging markets. Macquarie had flagged its commitment to the RE100 at the time.

In 2017, Macquarie acquired the Green Investment Group, established by the UK Government to finance new clean energy projects for A$4.2 Billion, and the company will continue to grow the fund with the future investments in new projects.

In October, Macquarie revealed that it had provided development capital to a mammoth plan for up to 11GW in renewable energy capacity, as part of the proposed Asia Renewable Energy Hub in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, that would look to export renewable electricity to the Asian region.