Delivering an excellent ESG service

We have been providing asset management for The Renewables Infrastructure Group (TRIG) for over 10 years and in the UK&I alone we support 850MW of their solar, wind and storage projects. As part of our asset management offering, we provide Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) related services.

TRIG, who own a renewables portfolio exceeding 2.8GW in Europe, recognise that their responsibility goes beyond climate-related environmental considerations alone. TRIG want to ensure that sustainability and climate related environmental considerations are prioritised in the ongoing management and reporting of their assets. By supporting project-level ESG policies and activities, whilst keeping a pro-active sight of KPIs, community outreach activities and health and safety standards, we help our customer meet their ESG objectives.

In November 2022, InfraRed Capital Partners, TRIG’s Investment Manager, launched a newly developed ESG reporting platform for their entire operational portfolio including all of TRIG assets. Following this, within a six-week deadline our team worked to master and adopt the new platforms functionality
alongside completing 27 asset specific annual ESG surveys.

The work

In response to the increased demand from our customers to support their ESG strategies, RES has invested more into resource and systems to improve data collection methods and reporting in this
area. Our reporting processes seek to minimise the amount of manual input and instead utilise automated systems that can significantly reduce risk of human error as well as enabling our teams to
invest more time in identifying activities that may better optimise the performance of assets.

Using our industry leading systems and processes, our team could efficiently gather HSQE, community relations and environmental data for each of TRIG’s projects, achieving a streamlined and comprehensive report for all sites.

Once all the data had been gathered, our team spent time adopting our customer’s new ESG reporting platform to ensure that the data was collated and presented in a format that met our customer’s
requirements. By acting quickly and flexibly to apply the unfamiliar processes we were able to facilitate the transfer of data efficiently and accurately from our systems to our customers to meet their deadline.

We applied a unified approach to the documenting and reporting of the HSQE, community engagement and environmental events across all sites. Reports included actions required to be taken across entire portfolios, for instance, climate change risk assessments and safety awareness campaigns as these
events have portfolio wide impact. Details of site-specific improvements were also included On-site, we focused our efforts on delivering previously identified ESG opportunities across their solar portfolio
and progressed the implementation of biodiversity enhancements at eight solar farms. Further ESG enhancement activities proposed by RES for TRIG wind sites are under discussion and TRIG are
now looking to further develop their biodiversity approach on a portfolio level.

Having dedicated ESG resource within our asset management team means that we can spend more time collaborating with our customers to fully establish their needs and align with our customer’s sustainability targets.

Results

Despite the challenges of a new developed platform, our team successfully delivered all 27 ESG reports within the specified deadline.

All projects reported by RES in the UK&I, apart from one wind site, were given the highest score of 5. The single wind site was not awarded 5 due to its small size and older age, which does not support any community fund and was not a part of an independent safety audit programme in 2022.

ESG performance is scored by TRIG’s investment managers, Infrared, who apply the same standardised scoring framework across their global investment portfolio which includes communications and digital infrastructure and social and transport infrastructure industries.

We received extremely positive feedback from our client, who recognised the complexity of the surveys and our indepth understanding of their portfolio.

Strategic improvements

Currently RES are developing our own in-house Support Services reporting platform with a dedicated ESG section covering general and customised metrics. Collaboration between all the regions we operate in is a priority, with the objective to improve relations with our global customers by delivering an efficiently
enhanced ESG service.

Some of our other recent ESG activity includes submitting our first Science Based Targets for carbon reduction to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in 2022, joining the United Nations Global
Compact (UNGC) supporting the ten principles, and significantly evolving the impact of our Diversity and Inclusion networks.

Responsible and sustainable business practices are at the heart of what we do. By leading in the example of how we construct, manage and optimise our customer assets we demonstrate our vision to improve quality of life and secure a better future for us all.

Read more about our achievements in our Power for Good report.