In October 2023, Delta Institute’s associate board, the Delta Emerging Leaders, hosts our 12th annual BOOST event. We are grateful to have longstanding philanthropic support from the local community through sponsors like the Peoples Gas Community Fund, who has sponsored this work for five consecutive years! We talked with them to share more about their approaches to innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability:
BOOST is a platform devoted to showcasing emerging entrepreneurship and innovation — why is this important to your organization/business?
Supporting and investing in innovative ideas is central to our company’s goals. We have invested millions of dollars over the past decade in various initiatives and research and development projects to produce technologies that will make our work more efficient and lead to a clean energy future. At Peoples Gas, we know a cleaner energy future will require solutions from many industries and partners. We are working hard with our partners across the energy industry, and leveraging the experiences of our peers and colleagues across the globe, to advance new and emerging technologies to help our company, customers, and communities reduce their carbon emissions and meet climate initiatives.
Your sponsorship is helping support environmental sustainability in the Midwest. Are there other ways in which your organization/business is committed to sustainability?
We’ve made significant investments to better serve our customers and our communities, including investments in our energy delivery infrastructure and investments in energy efficiency, which help the environment while providing savings. Since 2015, energy upgrades and improvements made through the Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas Energy Efficiency programs have reduced carbon emissions by 612,000 tons. That’s the equivalent of removing 131,000 cars from the roads or offsetting the energy use of 72,000 residential homes. We have also helped numerous customers reduce their energy use through our Energy Efficiency programs.
We believe natural gas infrastructure will play a crucial role in helping businesses reduce their carbon footprints with emerging clean energy technologies such as renewable natural gas and hydrogen. We have collaborated with Green Era to construct and operate a facility on the South Side that will take food waste and produce renewable natural gas and rich compost. We continue to support the research and development of hydrogen and are working to create an energy infrastructure that will allow us to reduce emissions while maintaining reliability and affordability.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about why you decided to support BOOST and Delta Institute?
Like the Delta Institute, Peoples Gas and our parent company, WEC Energy Group, serve communities throughout the Midwest. Delta Institute’s mission of solving challenges here at home, so we have a more resilient, equitable and innovative tomorrow, aligns directly with ours. We are thrilled to be a part of Boost and uncover entrepreneurs and innovations that will make tomorrow better for our industry and our region.
Thank you to Peoples Gas Community Fund for supporting BOOST for the past five years! Click here to learn more about their work.
You can also learn more about our other partnerships with other sponsors like American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, United Airlines, and William Blair.