What's the impact of $1Bn in green energy?

Natasha Salmi

22 Oct 2025 — 2 min read

How good for the climate is green energy, really?

Last week, we published a calculator for your personal AI usage's impact.

This week, we’re looking at what does make a real climate impact: green energy investments.

We’ve built a web app to estimate and visualise the climate impact of low-carbon and renewable energy projects at scale.

The idea is simple: with $1Bn to invest in energy, what impact can you achieve – and how does it vary by region and technology?

Geography matters more than you’d think

One key insight: location dramatically changes impact.

The same investment can have vastly different results depending on where it’s made. In coal-heavy grids, renewables replace high-emission energy; in places already powered by hydro, they displace other low-carbon sources.

How was it made?

We use open data from IRENA, IEA, Our World in Data, Ember, and national sources - combined with local capacity factors. Nothing proprietary, just solid public data assembled in one place.

Explore the full methodology here →

Give it a go!

Play with different scenarios. Compare geographies. Send it to your non-sustainability friends who want to know where climate action actually happens.

→ Testing tip: compare how onshore wind in Mexico stacks up against Norway’s – the difference might surprise you.

It's free, no login required, works globally.

Try it here →

Let us know if you have feedback

Hit reply if you have thoughts, questions, or just want to tell us our capacity factor assumptions are wrong.

See you next week!

Natasha and the ClimateAligned team

P.S. We included “homes powered” to help visualise scale. Got a better way to show impact? We’re all ears. 👂👂

AI Hack of the Week

We're always looking for new ways to optimise work with AI. Our recommendation for the week is:

Granola for meetings - hard recommend for this note-taking software. Zapier writes a good summary here: https://zapier.com/blog/granola-ai/

Explore our products:

app.climatealigned.co - Access our labelled bond data service with insights on 30,000+ bonds. Check out a free sample!

brief.green - Run AI-powered ESG assessments on-demand. Try it for free!

Want to learn more about what we do? Visit climatealigned.co

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