Transforming the Grid for an Outage-Free, Clean Energy Future

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For more than a century, S&C’s values and guiding principles have steered the company forward. Today, those same values motivate us to help solve some of the biggest issues facing our planet today, from climate change-driven extreme weather and its impact on the grid to balancing the global transition to clean energy with our growing dependence on electricity.

None of this is possible without our team members. Their dedication to innovating and creating new technologies that deliver on our sustainability commitments to our customers, partners, and communities is why we are here today. They are the heart of everything we do.

That means it all starts with safety.

To build a sustainable future, we must first ensure team member safety and build on our already strong safety culture. With a vision that all injuries are preventable, we continue to evolve our safety programs and focus on leading indicators that promote leadership and team member engagement.

With safety at our core, we work to transform the grid into one that is more intelligent, reliable, and resilient. We do this work in alignment with our values and guiding principles. Our sustainability strategy and our recently published S&C Sustainability Report reflect these commitments in action.

In addition to feeling safe, we want our team members to feel heard and respected. To that end, we launch a yearly, anonymous team member survey, resulting in multiple 2022 Top Workplace recognitions, including for the manufacturing sector.

We also do a yearly engagement survey, and we apply feedback from this survey to our business as part of our continuous-improvement mindset. Moreover, we continue to improve and expand our diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to build deeper team member connections and an enhanced sense of community and belonging.

In 2022, we accelerated our global approach to measuring and driving ownership of our key sustainability performance indicators. For example, we took important steps forward in our zero-waste-to-landfill program. Next, we launched an ambitious effort to formalize our decarbonization goal, starting with the required planning and investment needed for its success.

These actions are critical as we continue to develop a holistic sustainability strategy and ensure its integration throughout our business. In addition, we created a new full-time position dedicated to environmental sustainability.

We continue to invest in our operations and advanced manufacturing to meet increased customer demand while keeping sustainability front of mind. In July 2022, we opened a LEED-certified, 55,000-square-foot expansion of our manufacturing facility in Franklin, Wisconsin. There, we assemble and produce key products, including the IntelliRupter® PulseCloser® Fault Interrupter, Scada-Mate® Switching Systems, and automation controls that benefit electric utilities worldwide.

Throughout our 112-year history, our customer focus and close customer relationships set us apart in the industry. Our 2022 launch of the VacuFuse® II Self-Resetting Interrupter is an example of how we collaborated with customers to solve industry challenges.

Together, we created an innovative, easy-to-use solution that tackles outages at the edge of the grid. Moreover, with automation at the grid edge, we reduce the need for utility trucks to be called out to address outages. This can help increase crew safety and potentially decrease utility CO₂ emissions.

Our values and guiding principles demand we address climate change and work diligently to mitigate the use of harmful greenhouse gases. I am proud of our initiatives to manage SF6 gas emissions, which have a high global warming potential.

Our efforts included decommissioning end-of-life product units for our customers and reclaiming the SF6 gas from this equipment to be recycled. We also continued reclaiming and recycling SF6 in our operations, while maintaining our ambition to transition our operations from virgin to recycled SF6 to increase circularity and prevent the depletion of natural resources.

On behalf of all our S&C team members, thank you for being part of our journey. With your help, S&C will continue to care for our planet, team members, customers, and communities.

Expert

Anders Sjoelin

Publication Date

July 27, 2023