Can you talk about you or your company’s efforts relating to renewability, sustainability or other environmentally- friendly activities?

TotalEnergies is a global multi-energy company that produces and markets energies: oil and biofuels, natural gas and green gases, renewables and electricity. Our more than 100,000 employees are committed to energy that is ever more affordable, cleaner, more reliable and accessible to as many people as possible. Active in more than 130 countries, TotalEnergies puts sustainable development in all its dimensions at the heart of its projects and operations to contribute to the well-being of people.

As part of its ambition to get to net zero by 2050, TotalEnergies is building a portfolio of activities in electricity and renewables. At the end of 2022, TotalEnergies’ gross renewable electricity generation installed capacity was 17 GW. TotalEnergies will continue to expand this business to reach 35 GW of gross production capacity from renewable sources and storage by 2025, and then 100 GW by 2030 with the objective of being among the world’s top 5 producers of electricity from wind and solar energy.

In Asia, TotalEnergies Renewables Distributed Generation has been active since 2018 and is one of the major international providers of fully integrated solar solutions for the commercial and industrial sectors. In 2022, the company established a 50/50 joint venture with ENEOS, a major energy player in Japan, to further develop onsite B2B solar distributed generation across Asia. Headquartered in Singapore, the joint venture aims to develop 2 GW of decentralised solar capacity over the next five years. These solutions will allow B2B customers to generate green electricity for their own use directly onsite and benefit from significant savings and a sharp reduction in their carbon footprint.

Why are in-house lawyers well-placed to drive change in their organisations?

By virtue of our role as in-house lawyers, we have our fingers in every department’s pie and therefore benefit from having a bird’s eye view of the entire business. This means that we are in an advantageous position of being able to identify areas that the organisation can improve on.

Other business functions also look to their in-house lawyers for advice or approval on projects they wish to undertake. This essentially gives us a voice and the power to emphasise on the importance of sustainability in such projects.

It also helps that in-house lawyers are typically the first port of call in an organisation for any changes to the applicable environmental laws or company’s policies. We are then in charge of evaluating these changes for the company and whether or how we integrate these changes can set the tone from the get-go on where the company is headed.