Who is making money from the transition to renewables?

The data from the Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy offer a unique insight into the sustainable supply chain. While the taxonomy itself quantifies corporate revenues and expenditures that align with the sustainability transition, it also credits all products and services that form part of the supply chain for sustainability-aligned products and services (for instance, a tire manufacturer’s revenue resulting from sales of tires for electric vehicles would be counted as sustainable).

When looking at data from the renewable energy sector, we can see a few key industrial groups earning most of the revenue from the sector. There are the obvious companies earning revenue from the generation and transmission of renewable energy, but we also see companies in the supply chain earning sustainable revenues. For example, electrical equipment manufacturers earn a significant amount of revenue from the sale of smart grid technologies and battery manufacturers earning revenue from the sale of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Interestingly, between 2019 and 2023, machinery manufacturers earned more than US$374 billion from the sale of wind turbines, and 51% of the sustainable revenue captured for the semiconductor manufacturing industry came from solar photovoltaic technologies (according to Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Intelligence).