Assessing the Impact of Voluntary Actions on the Grid

The document outlines a consensus framework for defining and measuring the impact of corporate voluntary actions on grid decarbonization, emphasizing that true impact is the difference in total emissions between a scenario where an action is taken and one where it is not. It highlights that total impact must account for both short-run power plant operations and long-run supply changes, while acknowledging that empirical verification of structural change remains difficult, leading to inherent uncertainty in impact estimates.

• The Impact Advisory Initiative defines the true impact of a voluntary corporate action as the difference in total emissions between a scenario where the action occurred and one where it did not.
• To fully capture the impact of an action, assessments must include the sum of various contributing effects over the intervention's lifetime, specifically covering changes to short-run power plant operations and long-run total supply of different 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} }