Provision Retail Energy Sustainability Report

Empowering consumers to neutralize their energy emissions while restoring the environment through reforestation aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals 7 and 13.

Certified CarbonBetter energy plans allow customers to use their energy for good.

Provision is a retail energy supplier, providing natural gas and electricity to customers in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Operating within a deregulated energy market, Provision has carved out a niche in providing its customers with certified CarbonBetter^™ energy plans, which provide a unique opportunity for their customers to reduce their carbon footprint without impacting their wallets or significantly changing their lifestyles. Provision’s CarbonBetter plans include a commitment to 100% clean energy by automatically offsetting their customer’s natural gas consumption through carbon offsets, investing in clean energy through renewable energy certificates (RECs), and planting trees. Provision has a goal of planting at least 100,000 trees on behalf of its customers.

Provision’s Shift to Energy for Good

Leveraging its unique position in the energy value chain, Provision began offering CarbonBetter plans in the fall of 2020 as a means to enhance its service offerings by driving long-term environmentally beneficial changes at scale while maintaining competitive rates.

Benefits associated with CarbonBetter plans are automatically incorporated into every plan with no additional charge to the customer. Competitive forces in the deregulated market allow Provision to be at the forefront of change without additional red tape within existing regulated markets. Provision sees the benefits and opportunities to drive real impacts on their customers’ behalf as essential, even when their competitors may view these items as unnecessary costs.

As Provision purchases offsets and RECs, plants trees, and works with more than twenty-two utility partners, they have committed to transparency in every step of the process by highlighting their partners and sharing projects on their website’s blog. They are eager and excited to make local impacts toward cleaner energy for their customer base and invest in the future of energy.

In Provision’s effort to supply customers with 100% clean energy, they are aligning and directly supporting two of the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, which were published as calls-to-action to meet the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Provision’s initiatives directly support SDG 7 to “Ensure Access to Affordable, Reliable, Sustainable and Modern Energy for All,” and SDG 13 to, “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.” 

Provision’s 2020 Carbon Footprint

Provision is not a human capital-intensive business. They do not have their own generating fleet, nor do they own or maintain transmission, distribution, or pipeline infrastructure for the delivery of the gas and electricity they sell.

In evaluating their environmental impacts, Provision has focused on the volumes of natural gas and electricity sold to their customers for 2020. They have excluded their shared office space from their impact assessment, but additional details on their office building have been documented by their parent company, CarbonBetter.

Carbon emissions were calculated based on Provision’s customers’ total consumption. These emission calculations were used to evaluate the number of offsets and RECs to purchase on behalf of their customers through their CarbonBetter plans.

Provision is proud to go above and beyond traditional Scope 2 emissions (indirect emissions associated with generated energy) by quantifying the emissions of their customer base. Because Provision shares its office space with CarbonBetter, Provision does not generate any indirect emissions; rather, these emissions are accounted for by CarbonBetter. Moving forward, Provision intends to seek additional opportunities to find impactful offsets while reducing their impact and the impact of their customers. 

RECs vs Offsets – What’s the Difference?

Offsets and RECs are sometimes used interchangeably; however, they are different instruments and are used and applied differently.

The purchase of RECs aids in the long-term sustainability of clean energy projects, and Provision is firmly committed to doing so for the foreseeable future. Additionally, Provision has purchased carbon offsets in the form of a no-till agriculture project.