What does your energy data tell you about carbon, and what can you do with it?

Many businesses that use an energy bureau service already have the raw data for carbon reporting, often sitting in the same platform. The consumption figures that go into bill validation, budgets and accruals can also be used to calculate your carbon output, rank your sites by carbon intensity, and start building a picture of where your emissions are concentrated. The data is already there; the question is whether you’re using it.

What does carbon reporting measure?

At its core, carbon reporting takes your electricity and gas consumption and calculates the CO2e associated with it. The calculations use your energy supply contract’s emissions factor – what’s known as a market-based approach – so the output reflects your actual supply arrangements rather than a generic national average. Because reporting standards expect both views, we can also produce location-based figures using the published UK grid average alongside the market-based numbers.

The report we produce splits this across electricity and gas separately, because the profiles are different. Electricity typically carries a higher carbon intensity per kilowatt hour, but gas volumes can be significant depending on the type of organisation. For each utility, the report details a set of summary figures – total CO2 in kilograms, average CO2 per site, number of meters, and average CO2 per kilowatt hour – followed by league tables that rank your sites.

It’s within these league tables that we find the insight. For example, you get a top ten for the lowest carbon output and a top ten for the highest, both by total volume and by intensity per kilowatt hour. That’s an important distinction, because a large site will naturally produce more CO2 in absolute terms, but that doesn’t make it inefficient. The intensity metric, CO2 per kilowatt hour, tells you how carbon-heavy each unit of energy consumption actually is, and helps to reveal where the real problem sites are.

Who needs this, and why?

There’s a regulatory side and a strategic side to carbon reporting. The two do overlap, but they also attract different audiences within a business.

On the regulatory side, organisations of a certain size have obligations under ESOS (the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme) to audit their energy use and publish an action plan, and under SECR (Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting) to disclose their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in their annual reports. Carbon reporting data feeds directly into both processes, although each regime has a wider scope than electricity and gas alone. It can also contribute to wider sustainability and climate-related disclosures. Having this data produced consistently as part of your ongoing bureau service means you’re not scrambling to pull it together every time a reporting deadline comes around.

On the strategic side, the value is different. If your organisation has set internal sustainability targets, whether that’s a commitment to reach net zero by a certain date, a published reduction target on your website, or a set of goals agreed with investors or stakeholders, you need a way to measure progress. Carbon reporting provides that, establishing a baseline, with each subsequent report showing where you’ve moved, which sites have improved, and where the more difficult numbers are.

How do you set a baseline, and make it useful?

The first report we run is your baseline; a snapshot of where your portfolio currently stands in terms of carbon output. That baseline becomes valuable as you start to address, and reduce, carbon. We can also set intensity metrics at group level or site level, which means you can track progress for the whole organisation or drill into specific locations.

The practical application of the baseline and reporting tends to follow a pattern. We run the baseline, identify the highest-intensity sites, and together put efficiency measures or operational changes in place at those sites. Then run the same report three, six or twelve months later to see whether the numbers have shifted. If a site that ranked in the top ten for highest carbon intensity has moved down the table after a lighting upgrade or a change in building management, that’s a measurable result, and positive evidence to support similar activities elsewhere. If it hasn’t moved, that tells us something too.

How can carbon reporting bring value beyond the energy team?

One of the things I’ve found over 20 years in this industry is that the people who need to act on energy data are rarely the people who find it intuitive. A sustainability lead will understand a carbon intensity figure, but a finance director or a board member probably won’t, and yet they’re often the ones making decisions about where to spend money.

The league table format really helps here, because rather than presenting someone with a spreadsheet and asking them to interpret it, a ranked list of your ten most carbon-intensive sites, separated by electricity and gas, tells a much clearer story. It’s the kind of tool that works in a 30-second conversation: these are the sites producing the most carbon relative to how much energy they use, and these are the ones we should look at first.

The people making budget decisions need to understand the case quickly and clearly. If you’re asking for capital expenditure on efficiency measures, you need to be able to explain why you’ve chosen those specific sites, and you need the data behind you.

Where does this lead?

Carbon reporting on its own is useful, but it becomes more powerful when it connects to the rest of your energy strategy. The sites your carbon report flags as high intensity could easily be the same sites where procurement strategy, on-site generation or operational changes could make the most difference. It provides the evidence base for the next conversation, whether that’s about solar, battery storage, building management systems, or something as straightforward as making sure the heating isn’t running with the windows open.

Energy Intensity Reporting measures your energy use against business-specific metrics like floor area, footfall or production output to identify the sites that are genuinely inefficient, not just the ones that happen to be the largest.

Find out more here.

Chris Tarr, Head of Bureau Services, Equity Energies

Projected savings, payback periods and operational benefits will vary depending on site demand profile, tariff structure, system design and future market conditions.