By Jefferson Gerwig, Director of Procurement

Many companies today are stepping up their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs. As providers of renewable energy solutions, solar companies like Inovateus are by nature well positioned to excel in the environmental part of ESG — and we’re taking this a step further with our goal of making our own operations carbon-neutral by 2025.

But to deliver on our mission of building a brilliant tomorrow, we don’t want to stop there. We are also finding ways to address the social and governance areas. For the social aspect, that means adhering to high standards for human rights, work safety, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and labor, both in our own operations and throughout our supply chains. Those high standards extend to governing our company with integrity.

Ensuring success with the Inovateus Stewardship Team

In 2019, Inovateus created a stewardship team to ensure success in all the ESG areas. That includes not just building up ESG internally but also building our solar projects with diverse partners and ethically manufactured equipment. Our stewardship vision aligns with many of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that were established by the United Nations in 2015.

Within this framework, we focus on three key areas: resource preservation, energy intelligence, and vitality of life. This includes creating a culture of safety, health, wellness, and innovation for all, which extends beyond our own operations to our suppliers and the communities we work in. As we note in our 2020 sustainability report, the culture we are creating contributes to a more sustainable ecosystem, a more positive future, and a more brilliant tomorrow.

Expanding our stewardship mission 

With these ESG goals in mind, Inovateus is always seeking ways to improve. As a board member of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), we have expanded our stewardship mission to ensure that both Inovateus and our partners meet and even exceed SEIA’s Environmental & Socal Responsibility (ESR guidelines.) SEIA developed these guidelines to encourage its members to gather data on diversity and inclusion and to ensure that supply chains are not linked to labor issues.

Ethical and sustainable supply chain

The solar supply chain has been under scrutiny because of concerns about child labor and forced labor in China, a major source of the polysilicon used to make solar panels. But forced labor isn’t the only potential solar supply chain issue. Other concerns include the sustainability, health and safety, and social responsibility of all product and component suppliers.

To address these concerns and ensure corporate social responsibility, quality assurance, and environmental performance, we must be able to track products and components throughout the supply chain — from the source materials used to the finished products. That can be a difficult and daunting task, but solar companies now have a resource to guide them, SEIA’s recently developed Solar Supply Chain Traceability Protocol. The protocol, which includes a Solar Equipment Buyer’s Guide, helps manufacturers and importers demonstrate the provenance of their products via a traceability program, which gives solar companies insight on their supply chains.

Building on the SEIA Buyer’s Guide, Inovateus has created a survey for our equipment suppliers to help us ensure an ethical and sustainable supply chain. Our survey asks suppliers if they follow the SEIA Traceability Protocol, if they have a CSR policy in place that they can share, how they ensure compliance with U.S. and international labor laws, and whether they can show where their product and its inputs are manufactured. We also ask suppliers to provide independent audit reports.

We’re just starting the process of ensuring an ethical and sustainable supply chain, a task that is challenging and will evolve over time. But at Inovateus, we’re glad to take on this challenge, because we’re dedicated to leading in supply chain sustainability with products that are ethically manufactured.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in our supply chains, as well as in our own operations, is also important to Inovateus as part of our stewardship mission. We believe that our employees, subcontractors, and suppliers should reflect the communities we serve, so we are committed to following SEIA’s diversity guidelines for ourselves and those we work with. By enhancing the diversity of our own workplace as well as including and supporting diverse businesses in our supply chain, we create opportunity, promote innovation, and stimulate growth that enriches our industry as a whole.

As SEIA notes, there is no one-size-fits-all for supplier diversity, given the disparate sizes, structures, industries, and geographies of suppliers. For this reason, a good first step in arriving at reasonable DEI goals is to gather and review the data, which starts by creating a vendor intake form.

To help ensure that we choose our suppliers in the most equitable and inclusive way possible, Inovateus has created a questionnaire for our subcontractors and suppliers modeled on SEIA’s Supplier Diversity Template. Using this questionnaire to gather and review data about our suppliers will help us arrive at reasonable goals for supplier diversity.

Another source for supplier diversity goals is state and local guidelines, which we are starting to review. While it’s not yet common for states to mandate that solar companies include supplier diversity information in their annual reporting, there’s increasing interest in doing so, and some states already have guidelines in place. Illinois, for example, mandates that all energy suppliers submit an annual report on their procurement goals and spending for diverse businesses. California encourages solar providers to increase their use of women- and minority-owned businesses.

Our findings from this review will help Inovateus set new DEI goals and make changes to our current policies as needed. These will be detailed in our next annual sustainability report, which will be publicly available on our website.