Climate change

We recognise climate change as being a major issue, where International Power has an important part to play in managing its emissions, primarily carbon dioxide.

We are an energy company, and as well as electricity we also produce heat, steam and desalinated water for our customers.

Our strategy towards dealing with climate change has three main elements;

1. Generating electricity more efficiently
   

   We are actively reviewing the thermal efficiency at our power stations and implementing improvement programmes. These range from steam turbine upgrades, to improving combustion conditions. For example at our Bellingham plant in the US we have invested in new inlet fogging technology. This produces a cost-effective power boost which can increase output by up to 20% and save fuel by up to 5%.

   
   
2. Expanding renewables
   

   We continue to expand our renewables portfolio, which now has an aggregate capacity of 1,394MW. We will seek to further expand our renewables portfolio by acquisition and organic growth through working with local developers.

   Our wind expansion strategy focuses primarily on countries where wind energy operates within favourable regulatory regimes. In October 2009 we completed the acquisition of AIM PowerGen Corporation, one of Canada's largest independent wind farm developers, from Renewable Energy Generation Limited. The portfolio is concentrated in Ontario, with 80MW of wind farms in operation.  In addition, it has a development pipeline of 1,200MW in Ontario and across Canada.

   Following our initial investment in Spanish Hydro, Juneda PV solar power project (2MW) in 2008, we have continued to analyse various projects in our other key European markets and have begun to explore other solar technologies such as solar thermal power.

   
   
3. Investing in low carbon fossil fuel generation
   

   We continued to invest in the development of low carbon technologies. Our carbon capture and storage project at Hazelwood, in Australia, made good progress. The pilot project first went live in April 2009 and has been successfully capturing 25 tonnes of CO₂ per day.

   We have dedicated resources within our Operations and Engineering Teams to review technology trends and advances to ensure we are best positioned to participate in the drive towards a lower carbon environment internationally.

Our strategy has helped us to reduce emissions from 0.736 kg of CO₂/kWh in 2005, to 0.653 kg of CO₂/kWh in 2009. Further information on our emissions data can be found in the Environmental data section.

In order to provide an accurate representation of our total emissions for all products we have developed a methodology which has allowed us to calculate our data normalised by kWh equivalent. From 2005 we have used net reporting of CO₂, which reflects the extent of our ownership of each asset.

International Power has endorsed the ‘The Path to Climate Sustainability' which is a joint statement by the Global Roundtable on Climate Change (GROCC).