Clearloop will offer short-term agreements that enable companies to compensate for their carbon emissions impact by paying to fund new solar panels in communities with the dirtiest electric grids. The agreements would offset companies’ carbon footprints, either product-by-product or service-by-service. This is former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen’s second renewable energy-centric venture since his time in public office.

A new business venture by former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and two partners takes on global warming by helping companies fund solar panels in communities with dirty-power electric grids. Bredesen believes this idea will make it easier to reduce the health and environmental impact of carbon emissions by sidestepping the years-long renewable energy contracts that some larger companies agree to as they seek recognition for trying to curb climate change. He said many companies “would like to do something but need to lean on somebody else’s expertise to simplify it.” If a company wants to reclaim the carbon emissions released to produce a coffee cup, for example, there will be an offsetting solar panel built somewhere tied directly to that cup.

A new way of thinking is making its way into corporate sustainability strategy. Why just purchase renewable energy anywhere when you can choose strategically to displace greater CO2 emissions? Read how one company—clearloop—is setting the standard.

In Tennessee, for instance, startup Clearloop is rewriting the playbook to offer renewables-based emissions offsets at the product level, rather than the industry norm of providing renewable PPAs on a straightforward MWh basis against the organization’s overall electricity consumption. As more investors recognize that better siting of new wind and solar projects means deepened reductions in grid emissions, more clean energy development opportunities — and employment — will emerge, too.