AES Corporation's Just Transition to Clean Energy

In his foreword to the 2023 Sustainability Report for global power company AES, CEO Andres Gluski promised that the company would close its last coal-burning electricity generation plants by the end of 2025, setting an ambitious goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions from electricity sales by 2040. Yet moving away from coal to renewable energy had to be done carefully and thoughtfully--what labor activists had dubbed a "just transition." Winding down AES's coal activities would impact small communities that had relied on this economic stream for decades. Employees would have to either reskill and move elsewhere within the organization, or leave AES altogether. And renewables were not a surefire win. Even as the climate-change crisis intensified, political backlash to clean energy in the US was growing. To successfully make a just transition to clean energy, Gluski needed to balance AES's renewable energy goals with its responsibilities to a wide variety of stakeholders--its employees, customers, investors, and the communities it produced electricity in.