IT Sustainability for Business Advantage by Moore Brian.;

Author:Moore, Brian.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Published: 2013-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

To understand the IT implications of GHG reporting, a good place to start is to consider Scope 2, which applies to all companies and agencies, whereas many nonmanufacturing, nonutility companies have little direct Scope 1 emissions, and Scope 3 emissions are optional and have not yet been addressed by a majority of companies. Conceptually, accounting for Scope 2 emissions seems simple enough—it’s basically a reflection of how much electricity the company uses, and for small- or medium-sized companies that operate in just a few locations and pay just a few electricity bills each month, the reality is indeed fairly simple. They just need to collect the electricity usage from those bills each month and then apply the appropriate factor to determine how much GHGs were emitted to generate that electricity; this factor varies based on how the power was generated (e.g., natural gas versus different types of coal versus nuclear).

For large companies or agencies, however, this simple concept becomes quite challenging to implement. They have many sites in many locations, the bills go to many organizations in many divisions, the bills come at different times from different energy suppliers, the carbon factors for these suppliers vary by region and by supplier within a region, some sites are leased in agreements that hide the electricity bill, some sites lease space to others, and so on. Fortunately, the GHG Protocol provides a standard to report against so that it is possible for companies to use brute force in the form of manual entries from bills to spreadsheets, merging of spreadsheets, emails, reviews, re-reviews, and so forth, to compile the annual report of their Scope 2 emissions and most companies begin CHG this way.

However, while a largely manual method does meet the minimum requirements, there are important undesired effects related to cost, timeliness, and quality that suggest the value of a more robust IT solution. The cost effects arise from the “hidden factory” associated with the labor-intensive tasks of entering, compiling, and checking the data. Because these tasks are usually not anyone’s “day job” they are often unaccounted for, but in a large company they can be significant when the total staff hours spent is considered. The timeliness issue is inherent in the fact that it takes an all out effort to produce a single report once in a year in time to meet the reporting deadline. While this “answers the mail,” it does not provide data to manage progress throughout the year. Company management has no way of knowing whether the company is on track to meet GHG reduction goals set for the year, and site or business unit managers have no feedback on the results of any actions that they take to reduce energy use or on the impact of other actions that may be increasing energy use. The quality issue arises from the fact that lots of manual steps mean that there are lots of places for errors to be introduced and limited ways of catching those errors. In a

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