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We know our customers want to conserve resources and reduce their carbon footprint. And we know that many countries have committed to ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 per cent by 2050.
Around the world, we're helping to make this happen.
At Eaton, we make products that help increase the amount of green power on the grid and maximise the efficient flow and use of that power. At the same time, our solutions help reduce pollutants in the air we breathe and lessen greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. We manufacture components for utility-scale, renewable power generation, including the proportional valves used in hydropower dams, wind turbines and concentrated solar power systems.
Our positive-impact portfolio delivers a range of sustainability benefits, including reduced environmental impact, increased use-phase efficiency, safety and reliability. In 2020, 47% of our net sales were from product solutions that met our rigorous positive-impact criteria, and 62% of our product revenue was from clean tech solutions which provide energy efficiency and help to advance sustainable development, including renewables, water infrastructure and sustainable transportation. Read our sustainability report to find out more.
For over 100 years the existing electrical grid has served businesses and consumers well. But as requirements for power evolve, we must respond to a fundamental shift in how consumers use power and how utilities provide it. To address the challenges of ageing infrastructure, renewable energy integration and widespread vehicle electrification, our world is in dire need of electric grid modernisation.
We help solve tough challenges using data and analytics garnered from intelligent power technologies and connected devices. We are laying the groundwork for the grid of the future. Our solutions are already strengthening the grid. Around the world, wildfires are exacerbated by climate change and growing in intensity and frequency – causing critical power outages. We work with utility companies to fortify the electric grid with smarter and more resilient power distributions. In one example, Eaton is helping utilities reduce risk by replacing traditional fuses that can cause a spark when they interrupt a fault with our industry-exclusive explosion-free fuses. We also provide underground power system solutions to help utilities limit the occurrence of power loss due to wildfires. And our intelligent solutions improve grid automation and control through high-fidelity data, analytics and the ability to remotely isolate areas with high wildfire risk.
Handprinting is a relatively new concept developed to measure the benefits of actions taken in an organisation's indirect control, or completely outside of it. As part of our collaboration with the MIT Sustainability and Health Initiative for Net Positive Enterprise (SHINE), we developed an initial handprint tool to calculate the reduction in carbon emissions from new products that our customers use compared to existing products for the same purpose.
The most accurate way of quantifying the positive impact of our products on decarbonisation is by conducting a comparative life cycle assessment for each of our innovative new products against an alternative, taking into account the specific application and usage scenario for each product sold. The handprint calculator simplifies assumptions and generic data for some life cycle phases, while increasing context-specific data in the use phase, providing an increased fidelity.
The calculator also acts as a first-screening tool for identifying improvement opportunities, discovering areas for deeper investigation where more accurate modelling is needed and helping create awareness around life cycle thinking for our product development engineers. The output from the tool will help us measure and steer our innovation portfolio toward being net positive on carbon. The calculator is currently undergoing detailed piloting on our innovation portfolio before formal integration into our new product introduction process.
While a traditional full life cycle assessment would take several hundreds of hours to complete for one product, our handprint tool provides an assessment in a few hours. This is very important to us as we engage with our customers on the environmental benefits of our products and inform other stakeholders of such benefits.
