Introduction to Report

Reclaiming and reseeding distributed land.

When you understand how we operate and how we tackle environmental, economic and social challenges and opportunities, our approach to business becomes much clearer - and what drives our success as a sustainability leader becomes more obvious.

TransAlta is well known as a supplier of electricity and related products and services. But our value to the communities we serve is far greater than our capacity to generate power. Our success is also determined by the way we use resources, manage our impacts on the land, invest in communities and protect the safety of our employees and our neighbours. These measures of sustainability - of balancing environmental, economic and social needs in everything we do - are core principles of our company.

Through our commitment to sustainability, we are not only improving our performance - we are gaining an international reputation. TransAlta has been named one of the world's 100 most sustainable companies, in a new global business ranking launched in early 2005 at the World Economic Forum. We are among six Canadian representatives on the list. The top 100 companies were selected from a pool of more than 2,000 firms representing large global indexes. These include the S&P 500, MSCI World, FTSE 350 and Eurostoxx. Companies were rated on a range of criteria that included strategic governance, environmental initiatives and human capital/labour relations practices and selected on their ability to manage strategic opportunities in new environmental and social markets.

The following pages of our 2004 Report on Sustainability walk you through some of the achievements that have earned the company a worldwide reputation as a sustainability leader. We encourage you to use this report as a tool to understand and measure our performance.