Employee Q&A: Sourcing Renewable Energy in Asia Pacific

Our people making a difference is a series featured throughout Owens Corning’s 2023 Sustainability Report.

While attending university, Cheria Liu recognized that there was a growing need to help companies reduce their environmental impacts and decided it would be a great career path for her. With her degree in environmental engineering, Cheria originally focused on water conservation and other elements of sustainability. Upon arriving at Owens Corning, though, she began working on sourcing renewable energy for our plants in the Asia Pacific region, and she has found it to be a rewarding experience. Cheria has been with Owens Corning since 2020, and already her in-depth understanding of energy sourcing has made her a valuable asset as we seek to achieve our energy goals.

On Owens Corning’s unique position within renewable energy 

An interesting thing about Owens Corning is that we sell composite products to the wind business, and their end products generate renewable power, which we then purchase. So there is a whole value chain there. Demand for wind power in Asia Pacific is only starting to grow, though, because there are fewer requirements to purchase renewable power than in the U.S. Within our own value chain, however, we are encouraging companies to purchase renewable power as well. We can use our influence and encourage all our partners and vendors to be more engaged in these sustainability efforts.

On the collaborative nature of our energy sourcing efforts 

We have a regular touch base with our global Energy teams. They give us updates on how the global side is doing, and we share our progress with them. They also give us feedback on how we can do it better, and of course we need the leaders’ alignment on this as they support us with matters. There is also a lot of cross-functional work, because these projects need a great deal of collaboration with other teams, like the Operations team and the Legal team. So I think our broader company supports cooperation because they already support sustainability projects overall.

On the differences in sourcing within the Asia Pacific region 

We have two strategies for achieving our goal of 100% renewable electricity in Asia Pacific. We are doing solar power rooftop projects for all the plants here in China, India, and Korea. Sourcing renewable energy is totally different in the three countries, so we have different strategies for each. For example, the ability to source solar power and wind power is very limited in Korea. In China, we will go to the solar power panels first, and we will have some PPAs to achieve 100% step by step. These different strategies require collaborations within the entire company, and I feel that all our employees are cooperating to achieve our goals.