GHG Inventory Season: When Does It Start?
Published: August 3, 2011
Kevin Vranes
For most large corporations, there’s now a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory “season.” In effect, the annual May 31 deadline for reporting to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has created a spring season for GHG inventory work. The season proceeds along the following timeline.
January/February. Companies begin pulling their energy-use data. For electricity and natural gas, the data are provided by billing service providers (BSPs), an internal utility invoice tracking system, or an internal resource who directly transcribes the utility bills. Other numbers (for example, data on transportation fuel use) can come from a variety of far-flung locations.
March. Final data from the end of the previous year are wrangled, and regional sites and managers are polled for outstanding data needs such as transportation fuel use—again.
April. Data are sent to consultants or processed internally, and the numbers are crunched. Regional sites are asked for their transportation and refrigeration data—again.
May. The rush is on to finish the inventory. The results are parsed internally, and an energy manager or sustainability director fills out the CDP’s online questionnaire. If a company hires a third party to audit its inventory, this is also done in May, so numbers need to be finalized early in the month.
Given the magnitude of these data collection and processing tasks, companies that are thinking about reporting to the CDP for the first time may want to keep this timeline in mind.
Because most of E Source’s GHG clients are companies that have hundreds to thousands of sites, we usually work with BSP data. Every year, electricity and natural gas data quality has continued to improve, and this year’s data were as easy to work with as any we’ve ever seen. Roughly 90 percent of an inventory is straightforward to collect, process, and analyze, but the remaining 10 percent is plagued by recurring bottlenecks.
The problems tend to arise in areas that companies often don’t centrally track—namely the use transportation fuels and refrigerants. Most companies have fleet vehicles and many also operate distribution networks. To arrive at the most accurate GHG numbers, usage for each fuel type needs to be tracked. Pulling these data continues to be challenging for the central energy manager. Just to review the issues with tracking refrigerant usage would require much more space than is available here. Check out my recent blog post for part one of a three-part series on refrigerants in corporate GHG inventories.
E Source has several resources that can help companies prepare for the GHG inventory season as well as information about tracking the usage of transportation fuels and refrigerants. Contact us for more information.
Welcome to the fifth issue of The Bottom Line! This e-mail newsletter provides corporate energy managers, energy procurement professionals, and leaders in sustainability with a first look at industry trends and insights that directly impact your bottom line. Our goal is to provide you with actionable information to help streamline your efforts and improve results in three main areas: energy efficiency and conservation, energy procurement and supply management, and greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement and mitigation. |
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About the Author
Kevin Vranes
DIRECTOR OF ENERGY SUSTAINABILITY PRODUCTS
Kevin Vranes has more than a decade of experience working on GHG and climate-change issues. He has worked with numerous corporations and utilities on GHG management (inventories, auditing, and reporting), carbon risk, supply chain emissions and life-cycle assessments, and project analysis. Kevin was a senior legislative staffer in the Washington, D.C., office of Senator Ron Wyden, where he worked on energy and environmental legislation, including the Energy Policy Act of 2005. He holds a PhD in geophysics (physical oceanography, climatology, and atmospheric sciences) from Columbia University, and he was a Public Policy Fellow of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
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