The road to vehicular electrification seems to be paved with both great ambition and serious bumps. A heady optimism surrounded EVs after Tesla launched its first highway-legal roadster in 2008. In the decade to follow, manufacturers rushed to introduce their own models as the market took off. 

But global sales have slowed in recent years. The exuberance of early adopters has been replaced by the more rational, cost-conscious calculations of mainstream buyers. In some places, incentivizing subsidies have been dropped and charging infrastructure has lagged. Meanwhile, the massive Chinese market has shown more interest in its own brands than Western imports. 

All of this volatility has led many brands – Volvo, GM, Ford, Tesla and Mercedes among them – to walk back on their ambitions: retracted promises of all-electric fleets, reduced capital investment in their EV lines and resurrected conventional models.

But not Jaguar. The British luxury brand is moving in the other direction. As of 2026, it will sell nothing but electric cars. The bold move is part of a complete rebrand by parent company Jaguar Land Rover, which is ditching its emblematic leaping feline, diversifying its portfolio to four brands (Jaguar, Range Rover, Defender and Discovery) and moving Jaguar from the premium segment into the even more rarefied territory of super-luxury. 

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Rawdon Glover, managing director at Jaguar since March 2023, is addressing the company’s sagging sales with a complete reboot. All of Jaguar’s existent models (including its EV, the I-Pace) are being discontinued while it enters a kind of one-year dormancy, with no new sales this year. In 2026, it intends to re-emerge with three entirely new, all-electric models: a four-door grand tourer called the Type OO, which made its real-world debut in Paris in March, and two SUVs, none of which will cost less than US$155,000.

All three are expected to offer all-wheel drive, fast charging (10% to 80% in roughly 13 minutes) and ranges around 700 kilometres. The company will also be offering its EV clients a suite of services, including memberships in supercharging-station clubs, designer wallbox chargers for their homes and an exclusive drive-share program.

Glover’s strategy for rescuing the Jaguar brand seems to be more about profitability than sustainability, but there’s nothing wrong with that. “Luxury brands create irrational need,” Glover told Britain’s Top Gear magazine last year. “No one needs a Hermès work bag.” Nor does anybody need an ultra-luxury car, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the EV marketed as an object of desire.

Time will tell if Jaguar’s wager pays off. Industry insiders believe that by narrowing its portfolio and targeting a very select clientele, Jaguar will reap higher returns. If it does, it will have paved at least one viable path to an EV-only future. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer who focuses on the issues that will most impact the next generation: sustainability and education. 

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In 2016, New York’s Elmhurst Dairy closed its doors as the last remaining fluid-milk plant in the city. The following year, under the continued leadership of second-generation owner Henry Schwartz, the company rebranded as Elmhurst 1925, shifting its focus to plant-based milks. “Established 1925. Founded 2017” is now the proud tagline of the reinvented company, which has since experienced significant growth. 

“After 92 years in business, it was time to embrace a new model and look towards the future,” Schwartz said in a press release at the time, “to lead the plant-based revolution, and create clean label products that are just as delicious and nutritionally robust as dairy milk.”

Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. dairy-milk market experienced a notable decline, with consumers quitting milk faster than in each of the previous six decades. Public awareness of the environmental impacts and animal welfare concerns associated with traditional dairy production, as well as health risks linked to dairy consumption, helped feed a burgeoning demand for plant-based milk alternatives. This market is projected to continue on a strong upward path, with an estimated compound annual growth rate of between 7.6% to 8.9% reaching more than US$40 billion by 2033/2034. 

 The company uses a proprietary process known as HydroRelease, developed over five years by food scientist Cheryl Mitchell. HydroRelease begins with whole nuts or grains and uses water to separate the nutritional components. These components are then recombined to form a milk-like liquid that retains the original nutritional profile of the source ingredient, without the need for the gums, stabilizers or emulsifiers commonly used in other plant-based milk products on the market. The process results in products with higher protein content and cleaner labels than many of their competitors.

Additionally, all Elmhurst 1925 products are non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free and kosher. “We do it naturally,” Mitchell says on the company’s website, “without adding junk.”

The move has paid off. Elmhurst 1925 has since experienced strong growth and within a few years of making the transition had more than tripled the number of stores where its products are sold. In January 2025, Elmhurst recorded US$35 million in annual revenue, up from $11 million in 2023.

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After Elmhurst made the switch from cows to nuts, the company rapidly diversified its offerings, creating milks from almonds, cashews, hazelnuts and walnuts. It continued to expand its range, launching milks and creamers made from oats, coconuts and pistachios.

Not all these experiments were successful – peanut milk and hemp creamer were trialled and discontinued – but the spirit of trying new things persisted, evolving beyond beverages into plant-based foods. In 2024, it launched a new oat- and hemp-based sour cream and a plant-based “chick’n” kit that allows consumers to create their own hemp-protein-based meat alternative at home. 

Elmhurst’s successful shift from dairy milk to plant-based foods reflects a significant pivot in an evolving marketplace. As consumer appetite for plant-based alternatives continues to rise, companies that meet that demand and demonstrate authentic commitment to the environment are likely to thrive. As Schwartz has said, “It’s about transforming with the times.”

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance journalist covering food, farming, animal and environmental topics for Canadian media. She is also a correspondent for Sentient, covering culture and misinformation.

The post Why New York City’s last dairy switched from cows to nuts appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On a grey day in November 2009, a motley crew of German environmentalists paraded across a square in downtown Copenhagen carrying a massive, inflated dinosaur whose torso was a black chimney spewing black balloons. Over megaphones, they explained that their “coalosaurus” protest was directed at the coal-fired power plant that Danish energy giant DONG intended to build on Germany’s Baltic coast.

Local Copenhageners biking to work seemed to be paying no attention, but DONG was. The company, which had been established by the Danish government in 1972 as Dansk Naturgas with a mission to develop oil and gas resources in the North Sea, had grown to become the country’s main supplier of power, and in 2009, that supply was still largely rooted in coal and gas. 

For DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas), the coalosaurus was not the only sign that something had to change. In 2009, Copenhagen played host to COP15, and the irony was writ large: a climate conference held in a country whose state-owned power system was one of the most carbon-intensive in the world. Furthermore, the economics of fossil fuels were rapidly changing. As climate consciousness grew and the price of natural gas fell, DONG’s S&P credit rating slid into the negative.

The company embarked on one of the most radical – and successful – corporate transformations of all time. Having announced its intentions the previous year, DONG cancelled its coal plant plans in 2009 and launched a program to flip its energy mix to 85/15 renewables/fossil fuels within a generation. It ended up accomplishing that feat in a decade. 

To do so, it went all in on offshore wind energy. As an emerging market, offshore wind was expensive to produce – twice the cost of onshore – but as DONG divested of its fossil fuel assets, it put all of its resources into optimizing every aspect of offshore construction and operation. It began investing in, buying and developing offshore farms across Europe and the United States.

Having sold off the last of its oil and gas production business in 2017, DONG changed its name to Ørsted, after the 18th-century Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered the connection between electricity and magnetism.

By 2019, Ørsted owned 30% of the global market in offshore wind energy, with farms in Denmark, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Taiwan. That year, Corporate Knights crowned it the world’s most sustainable energy company. While it still gets some revenue from the distribution of fossil-fuel-derived energy, 91% of Ørsted’s earnings aligned with the European Union’s taxonomy of sustainable activities in 2024, the same year it closed its last coal-fired power plant. 

Ørsted’s transformation was remarkable not only in its speed and scale. In 2016, the company went public on the Copenhagen stock exchange in a US$15-billion initial public offering: at the time, the world’s second biggest ever. Its stock price soared, with the company’s market value peaking in 2021 at more than US$95 billion.

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In recent years, Ørsted has faced headwinds – inflation, higher interest rates and the supply chain breakdown that resulted from the pandemic. Donald Trump’s January announcement that “we are not going to do the windmill thing” and subsequent dismantling of green infrastructure funding further threaten Ørsted’s U.S. projects.

But the company is open about the challenges it has faced; it shares a white paper on its website detailing lessons learned along the way, and the ongoing case for offshore wind. And it remains steadfast in its mission, in the words of former CEO Mads Nipper, “to prove that there is no long-term trade-off between sustainability and financial value creation.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post How Orsted ditched coal and became a titan of offshore wind appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In 2008, the Italian oil company ERG faced a crossroads. Having sold its 49% stake in a Sicilian refinery to Russian oil giant Lukoil just before the markets crashed, it had cash to burn. And it had a fundamental choice to make.

The company had always been pragmatic. It was established in 1938 as a small oil, tar and chemicals business; in the postwar reconstruction period, its founder, Edoardo Garrone, pivoted to brick manufacturing. But as the demand for oil grew, Garrone turned to production and refining and, from its base in the port city of Genoa, positioned ERG to fuel the country’s industrial boom of the 1950s and 1960s. 

But in the decades to follow, the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis and the growing dominance of Saudi Arabia and Asia in refining technologies led the family-owned company to question its sole reliance on hydrocarbons. In 2004, it dipped its toes into renewables, entering a joint venture with a Spanish renewable-energy company before purchasing an Italian wind company that expanded into the French market.

In 2008, when ERG was weighing its options, pragmatism again prevailed. Garrone’s grandsons, who serve on the board, agreed with fellow shareholders and CEO Luca Bettonte that the company should concentrate on the fastest-growing segment in the energy sector: renewables. “I can’t say we made the decision because we wanted to save the world,” Bettonte told Corporate Knights in a 2021 interview. “But the idea to go green played a part in it.” 

What happened in the years to follow was transformative. By 2013, ERG had become Italy’s leading producer of wind energy. It now has installed capacity in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Sweden, making it one of the continent’s top 10 wind companies. It also owns major solar installations in Italy, Spain, France and the United States. 

In October 2023, ERG divested of its last remaining hydrocarbon asset, with the sale of a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant in Sicily. It now calls itself a pure wind and solar energy company. 

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The winds will not always blow in its favour; ERG’s aggressive push into the United States, which began in 2024, will not proceed as smoothly as hoped under the administration of Donald Trump. And it remains vulnerable to shifting regulatory frameworks and unstable electricity prices – not to mention the weather. Nonetheless, its renewable capacity – and earnings – continues to grow.

ERG’s wholesale transition from black to green took little over a decade, and with it the company redefined itself: no longer responding to Italy’s demand for oil, it sees itself – in its own words – “inspiring change to power the future.” 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Italy’s ERG proves you can trade oil for renewables and win appeared first on Corporate Knights.