Can you please check which source of energy is used?
- James Ryan
- May 17
- 2 min read
Last summer, a European buyer sent me an email I had to read twice.
Not about price. Not about lead time. Not about certifications.
He wanted to know what kind of electricity the factory was using. Coal, nuclear, natural gas, solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, tidal. Or some mix. He even gave me an example: "70% coal and petroleum, 30% hydro and wind, that kind of breakdown."
I remember staring at that email and thinking — does he want me to call the power grid and ask? Is this a real question?
It was a real question.
I asked the factory. The factory looked at me like I had grown a second head. They asked their utility company. The utility company eventually sent back something. We translated it. The client used it for whatever sustainability report they were filing on their end.
A year later I get this question almost every quarter, from a different buyer each time. The first time it threw me. Now it's just one more line on the supplier intake checklist, right next to BSCI and ISO and the rest of it.
Two things I took from it.
One — the brands that look strange today are usually showing you what next year's "standard request" looks like. The European buyer wasn't being weird. He was eighteen months ahead of where the rest of the market got to.
Two — Chinese factories generally don't have this information ready. Not because they're hiding it. Because nobody has ever asked. When a buyer asks for it cleanly, the factories who can turn it around in 48 hours are already a different tier than the ones who can't.
I still think about that first email sometimes when a request shows up that I don't immediately understand. The instinct is to push back, ask for context, explain why it's hard. Better instinct: just answer it. The reason will reveal itself in six months.