A lot of energy conversations now start with a target: net zero by some year, a carbon reduction commitment, a sustainability pledge already made before anyone's looked properly at the business itself. It's an understandable starting point. It's usually not the right one.
The problem with starting at the target
Starting with "how do we hit net zero" tends to skip a step that actually matters: what is this business trying to achieve, and where does energy sit within that. A target adopted first and justified afterwards has a habit of producing decisions that look good against the target and less good against everything else the business actually cares about.
Cost comes first, and that's not a compromise
Every organisation has a genuine, ongoing interest in what it spends on energy, regardless of any carbon position it's taken. Starting there isn't a lesser or less ambitious starting point - it's simply the one that's true for every business, immediately, and it tends to surface decisions that are good on their own commercial terms before carbon ever enters the conversation.
Resilience is its own reason
Keeping the business running through a supply interruption, a price shock or a network constraint is a real objective independent of any sustainability commitment. Solutions that improve resilience - onsite generation, storage, flexible operation - frequently overlap heavily with what a carbon strategy would recommend anyway, without needing the carbon framing to justify them.
Compliance is often the actual deadline
Regulatory and reporting obligations - not aspirational targets - are frequently the thing with a genuinely hard deadline attached. Starting from what's actually required, rather than what would be nice to achieve, tends to produce a more honest sense of what's urgent versus what's simply desirable.
Growth changes the entire calculation
A business planning to expand, electrify a process, or add significant new demand has an energy strategy question that's fundamentally different from a business trying to optimise its current footprint. Leading with a static carbon target risks building a strategy for the business as it exists today, not the business it's actually going to be in three or five years.
Then carbon
None of this means carbon doesn't matter, or that it should be an afterthought. It means that a carbon strategy built on top of a genuine understanding of cost, resilience, compliance and growth tends to be more deliverable, more commercially sound, and often achieves more real carbon reduction than one that started as the headline and had everything else fitted around it afterwards.
The uncomfortable version of this argument
The businesses that make the most genuine progress on carbon are rarely the ones that led with the target. They're the ones that solved a real operational problem well, and found the carbon reduction came along with the solution rather than needing to be the reason for it. That's a less satisfying story to put in an annual report. It tends to be the one that's actually true.
This isn't an argument against ambition on carbon - it's an argument for sequencing that actually delivers it. If you want an energy strategy conversation that starts with your business rather than a target, get in touch.