RE100: We're in the 100% green electricity club

This week at Virgin Media we’re talking all things sustainability performance. We’ve published our 2018 sustainability report, the update on our progress in the penultimate year of our five year strategy. The report highlights a series of achievements but we’re particularly proud to say that 100% of our contracted electricity[1] comes from renewable sources. That’s for our entire building and technical estate across the UK and Ireland, since 2018. Now we’re going one step further, making a firm long-term commitment to green power by joining The Climate Group’s RE100 initiative.


RE100 is a global corporate leadership initiative bringing together influential businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity. As an RE100 partner we join the likes of Apple, Fujitsu, HSBC, Marks and Spencer and H&M[2] to accelerate change towards zero carbon electricity grids at a global scale. As a large UK business we’re also doing our part to support the UK’s drive to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.


Core activity of the RE100 initiative includes highlighting barriers to realising the business and economic benefits of renewable electricity and supporting members to focus and address policy and market barriers to corporate sourcing of renewable electricity.


This commitment further supports the ambition we hold to grow our business without increasing our carbon footprint, which is one of our five 2020 sustainability goals. Alongside expanding our network to connect more than 15 million homes and over 45,000 businesses as part of the £4 billion investment in Project Lightning, we’ve reduced our carbon footprint by 22% and by 80% per terabyte of data since 2014. This reinforces our strong commitment to driving down energy consumption as well as ensuring we source 100% renewable electricity.


Jeanie York, our Chief Information and Technology Officer, is the executive sponsor for our lower impact goal. She had this to say;

“I’m proud that Virgin Media is joining the RE100 initiative alongside many leading brands to push for more renewable electricity generation. At a time when the UK has just set a world leading target to be net zero by 2050, it is vital that businesses like Virgin Media make the long term commitment to purchasing renewable electricity. While we already source 100% of our contracted electricity from renewable sources we’re committed to doing more. We are focused on reducing our overall energy consumption and making great strides against our 5 year carbon goal, already achieving a 22% reduction since 2014.”


Find out more on our 2018 sustainability performance here.



[1] Representing 99.5% of our total electricity consumption – with the remaining 0.5% relating to shipperless sites to be covered in 2019

[2] 190 organisations have signed up to the RE100 initiative to date