By Alex Liu
ESG Manager
Reaching 100% renewable electricity operation is a milestone few large companies, especially manufacturers with R&D centers, have reached or likely ever will. Doing it five years ahead of schedule is rarer still. And doing it as total energy consumption more than doubles is just about unheard of.
Yet that’s exactly what Delta Electronics Americas has done: In 2021, the company set a goal of RE100—100% renewable electricity—by 2030. Today, in 2026, RE100 is a Delta Americas reality. (Delta Americas, which includes Canada, the US, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, got there first, but the rest of Delta Electronics is well on its way: in 2025, renewables powered 91.1% of all company operations worldwide.) This achievement is even more stunning once you consider that, in 2021, Delta Americas counted on renewable sources for less than 10% of its electricity.
Delta has prioritized the environment since founder Bruce Cheng gave Delta its mission: “To provide innovative, clean, and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow.” But to make RE100 happen, the company had to rethink how it sourced, contracted, and managed energy organizationwide. And it had to treat energy strategy as a core business discipline, not a side initiative.
Why is RE100 Still So Uncommon?
Despite growing commitments, only a small fraction of global companies has reached full renewable electricity across their operations. That’s because RE100 is a finish line, and a demanding one, not a simple pledge.
What makes it challenging is not just procuring renewable energy, but doing so consistently, across regions, while managing cost, reliability, and operational complexity. For most organizations, these tradeoffs become friction points. For Delta, they functioned as design constraints along our committed path.
How We Did It: A Multipronged, Scalable Approach
RE100 required that Delta create a diversified strategy that prioritizes speed, flexibility, and resilience to ensure sustainability while supporting company growth and meeting evolving energy demands. Strategic components include internal carbon pricing (treating emissions as a cost), solar panels, lithium-ion battery energy storage systems and solar PV inverters, long-term power purchase agreements, utility-based green energy programs, and renewable energy certificates. Not coincidentally, in 2022, Delta Americas’ headquarters in Fremont, California was certified as a LEED Zero Energy building.
The result is clear: Delta Americas’ Scope 2, or indirect, greenhouse gas emissions are now at zero.
Importantly, Delta achieved this progress while growing the business and dramatically increasing overall electricity use.
That distinction matters because sustainability that scales with growth is the true test of success. Sustainability that works only if you slow down or truncate operations is no strategy at all.
Sustainability and Efficiency Are the Same Conversation
At Delta, sustainability isn’t a separate initiative from efficiency. Rather, sustainability is efficiency’s natural outcome.
Every improvement in power conversion efficiency, every reduction in losses, every smarter way of coordinating energy supply and demand shows up twice: once in operational performance, and again in environmental impact. Delta carries that mindset directly into the solutions designed and deployed for customers.
This is especially true in the era of AI, whose power demands are orders of magnitude greater than anything that’s come before.
What This Means for AI Infrastructure
AI factories are redefining what “efficient” even means. Massive power density, thermal intensity, and continuous utilization leave no room for waste, whether electrical, thermal, or operational.
The systems thinking, energy transparency, and disciplined efficiency that enabled the Americas region to reach RE100 are the same principles Delta brings to AI infrastructure power and cooling solutions. When efficiency improves, performance improves. When losses go down, sustainability goes up. These goals are especially tightly coupled in AI.
One Battle After Another
Delta has made terrific sustainability and efficiency strides in the few years since 2021, both in its buildings and operations and in its products. But RE100 isn’t the end of the story. Within the next three years, Delta Americas aims to reduce its reliance on nonlocal renewable energy certificates to less than 15%, shifting further toward locally sourced energy, deeper community partnerships, and solar and battery technologies investment. And Delta is on track to reach companywide RE100 by 2030.
Achieving RE100 shows what’s possible when a company treats sustainability as an engineering problem, not a branding exercise. The same approach is shaping how Delta thinks about grid resilience, AI infrastructure, and the energy systems that will define the next decade.
Want to Learn More?
To see how much your data center could save with only minor improvements in efficiency, check out our Power Efficiency Savings Calculator
Learn more about Delta's ESG initiatives
Read the RE100 achievement press release
Download the “Rise of the AI Data Center” white paper
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