Enel X’s tips on creating a sustainable energy strategy: Part 2

A sustainable energy strategy should be incorporated into the governance framework of an organization.

In this four-part article, Enel X North America, Inc. offers its expert advice for organizations on how to make the business case for a sustainable energy strategy, align stakeholders, and set actionable emissions targets. This second part deals with energy-strategy governance, as well as data collection and management. Read Part 1.

Energy-strategy governance

To make the biggest impact, a sustainable energy-strategy plan should be incorporated into the overall governance framework of your organization. This will not only create greater accountability and improve progress towards the ultimate goals; it also ensures these issues are addressed at the highest level within your organization.

Aligning your organization’s stakeholders

To successfully integrate energy management into your sustainability strategy, you must first determine your business’s priorities. Many perceive renewable energy as the fastest way to reduce Scope 2 (“indirect”) GHG emissions, but large-scale adoption may increase energy expenses in many regions. Competing priorities within an organization often make it challenging to get sustainability initiatives off the ground, so buy-in from senior management is needed to resolve internal conflicts.

Stakeholder workshops are often a necessary first step to bring together the stakeholders from different business functions whose interactions may be limited but whose buy-in is necessary for success. Many obstacles and roadblocks can be avoided by aligning strategies to broader business goals.

The best way to ensure effectiveness is to secure board and executive management commitment. This can create cross-functional accountability and allow for energy impact assessment to be incorporated into overall business planning. Yet it does not stop at the board level—you need commitments from an entire business, including strategic sourcing/procurement, finance, IT, fleet management, facilities management, and beyond.

Empowering management

After identifying material issues and establishing actionable targets, organizations will likely need to evaluate their policies, procedures, and management practices to ensure success.

In fact, many reporting agencies such as Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) require organizations to disclose risks and opportunities, policies, governance practices, and the management incentives that are in place to support sustainability objectives. As investors weigh these factors in their evaluations, a right-sized road map can heavily influence financial performance.

Data collection and management

As the adage goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, and your energy strategy is no exception. Properly managed data is not only crucial to hitting established targets; it allows companies to show progress and continuously improve and refine their strategy.

Tracking your emissions

An effective sustainability strategy requires the collection and conversion of data from varying emission sources, as well as an accurate carbon inventory. Robust data-management systems that provide companies a verifiable audit trail are often a prerequisite for environmental disclosures, and we recommend that organizations evaluate their options in coordination with the requirements of various reporting schemes.

GHG Protocol

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol: Corporate Standard, created in 2001 by the World Resources Institute and the WBCSD, is the most widely used international accounting tool to understand and quantify GHG emissions. The GHG Protocol establishes a global framework and defines emissions by scope, enabling companies to differentiate between direct and indirect emissions. Keeping an accurate carbon inventory requires reporting companies to maintain up-to-date emission factor sets for different locations, sources and suppliers.

Leaders in sustainability, leaders in data management

Effective sustainability strategies should include a data-management system that maintains current information from multiple data streams, including but not limited to energy bills, utility meters, onsite and offsite renewable production, and water and waste invoices. When selecting a data-management platform, we recommend that organizations consider how they will quantify success and measure project benefits. Organizations that can tie cost savings or additional revenue to their sustainability programs are more likely to find success.

To learn more about how to create a sustainable energy-strategy program, click here.

For more information, contact Enel X.

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