Assessing the Impact of Voluntary Actions on the Grid

This consensus paper from ZEROgrid’s Impact Advisory Initiative outlines a framework for large energy consumers and policymakers to assess the consequential impact of voluntary corporate actions on grid decarbonization and reliability.

• The document defines the true impact of a voluntary corporate action as the difference in total emissions between a scenario where the action was taken and one where it was not.
• To fully capture the impact of an action, assessments must sum several contributing effects over the lifetime of the intervention, specifically including changes to short-run power plant operations and long-run changes to the total supply of different power plants.
• There is currently no generally accepted method to empirically verify estimates of structural change, meaning any approach used to measure total impact contains potentially significant levels of uncertainty.

APA

RMI (2024). Assessing the Impact of Voluntary Actions on the Grid. https://rmi.org/resources/assessing-the-impact-of-voluntary-actions-on-the-grid/

Chicago

RMI. Assessing the Impact of Voluntary Actions on the Grid. 2024. https://rmi.org/resources/assessing-the-impact-of-voluntary-actions-on-the-grid/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=Assessing the Impact of Voluntary Actions on the Grid |date=22 May 2024 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/assessing-the-impact-of-voluntary-actions-on-the-grid/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2024assessing, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{Assessing the Impact of Voluntary Actions on the Grid}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2024}, month = may, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/assessing-the-impact-of-voluntary-actions-on-the-grid/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }