CRC Update

More than 4,000 organisations still to register - less than 12 weeks to the 30th September cut-off - more time for disaggregation - PFI: who’s responsible? - landlord and tenant - Early Action Metric - monitoring carbon footprint - buying allowances - evidence pack and audit - super-smart metering to save energy and save cost.

The total number of CRC full participants was estimated at 5,000 and according to the Environment Agency only 651 have so far registered. That leaves less than 12 weeks for the remaining 4,349 to complete the process by 30th September. Of course you may already have started, but if you’re waiting to clear up some minor query or you have some doubts about your particular case the Environment Agency urges you to register now and sort out queries and errors later. No doubt there will be increasing pressure on the system as we get closer to the cut-off.

Good news if you were planning for disaggregation. The Environment Agency has extended the initial deadline until 31st July, although all your SGUs still have to be registered on their own account by 30th September.

Some organisations operate facilities provided under PFI and the PFI company has claimed that the organisation which uses the facilities is responsible. The Environment Agency has now made it clear that the “counterparty to the supply contract” principle applies, so if the PFI company is paying the bill then the PFI company is the participant.

CRC remains an issue for landlords. Remember, if you bought more than 6,000MWh of half-hourly electricity in 2008 you are a full participant even if you sold that electricity on to your tenants. When we get to the reporting phase, the landlord is responsible for reporting the total carbon footprint from all energy sources, including energy used by tenants. Can you negotiate an amendment to the lease? The CRC legislation gives you obligations, but no additional rights vis-à-vis the tenant.

If you are a tenant and taking steps to improve your energy efficiency, will the landlord pass on the benefit of lower CRC costs to you? Again, can you re-negotiate the lease?

Your Performance League Table position and your total CRC cost are both affected by the Early Action Metric and it’s not too late to get the benefit. The earlier you put in voluntary AMRs (automatic meter reading) the better, because the benefit is calculated on the proportion of your total energy that flows through them in 2010/11. Don’t forget gas meters. You have until 31st March 2011 to achieve the Carbon Trust Standard. As long as you have it in place by that date you qualify in full. The Environment Agency has just approved CEMARS as an alternative to the Carbon Trust Standard. Other standards are under review.

Quite apart from the Early Action Metric and your league table position, the surest way to reduce your CRC costs is to improve your energy efficiency and cut your energy bills. Have I told you about the super-smart metering that gives you instant feedback and detailed analysis for close cost control? Give me a call on 07803 616877 and I’ll tell you more!

Once registration is complete the next task is to prepare for the annual report and for the purchase of carbon allowances in April 2011. You need to have an evidence pack, and 20% of all participants will be audited. Have you been monitoring your carbon footprint since April? Have you got detailed records and an audit trail?

If you would like to discuss any of these points in more detail please give me a call on my direct line: 07803 616877. Together with strategic partners, Cyber Associates can help and advise on CRC registration, obtaining benefit from the Early Action Metric, monitoring your carbon footprint and establishing an employee engagement programme to maximise your energy efficiency.

I look forward to talking to you!

Best wishes,

Anthony Day

PS NoWatt, our super-smart metering partners, have a window in August due to customer holidays. If you want a rapid assessment and installation we can help you to start saving money on energy in a matter of weeks. Call me on 07803 616877!

Carbon Reduction Commitment

Is CRC just another tax?

If you’re liable for the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) you should have heard from the Environment Agency by now. This measure will affect about 20,000 UK organisations - public and private - who pay for their electricity via a ‘half-hour’ meter. That’s any organisation with a peak load exceeding 100kW. About 5,000 of these will be spending £500,000 or more annually on electricity, and they will be full participants in the scheme. What does this mean? Any organisation with a half-hour meter will have to report its energy use and its carbon footprint. Not just for the department with the heavy electricity usage, but for the whole organisation including subsidiaries, branch offices and remote sites. Not just electricity consumption, but gas and fuel oil as well. Auditable records must be kept and there are penalties for non-compliance. Reporting starts now and in April 2011 the 5,000 largest users will have to pay for their CO2 emissions at £12/tonne, both for actual emissions in 2010/11 and forecast emissions in 2011/12. How much will that be for your organisation?

So is this just another tax? The government might say not, because in October 2011 it’s going to give all this money back - yes, every penny. What’s the point? On the basis of actual emissions in 2010/11 the government will construct a league table, ranking organisations according to how good they have been at reducing their emissions. When the government returns the levy the best performers will get more than they paid and the worst performers will get less. And the following year the targets will get harder.

This is all part of the obligation under the Climate Change Act to cut CO2 by 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. With UK emissions still growing, even standing still will be difficult. The oil price has been on the rise for most of this year, so energy is going to be expensive to buy and if you use it inefficiently the government is making it expensive to use!

Whatever the size of your organisation, have you got an environmental management system (EMS)? An EMS is a system of procedures and controls providing a framework for the management of energy, resources and waste. It will help you identify your energy usage and carbon footprint, to control them and monitor the savings achieved.

Cyber Associates have the skills and experience to help you design, implement and maintain an Environmental Management System for your organisation to ISO 14001.

More information at www.cyber-associates.com

Low Carbon Futures - The Prince's May Day Summit

Last Friday I attended the Prince’s May Day Summit. That’s the Prince of Wales’s third annual convention of businesses committed to a low carbon future, sponsored by Carbon Action Yorkshire, CE Electric UK and KCom Group. The event links London to regional centres all round the country, at least the first one did two years ago. We voted on issues, shared the results with the nation and spoke direct to the national audience. A bit like the Last Night of the Proms, actually, with big screens and reporters across the country. Not this time, though. This year we watched as the Prince and other speakers addressed what looked like a very small London audience. And we only watched - there was no feedback from the regions.

Strange - and disappointing - because since the Carbon Budget and Obama’s green grandstanding, low carbon and climate change are almost mainstream. I was at the regional session in Hull, an enthusiastic meeting ably chaired by Peter Hobday. If we hadn’t had the London link I’d have come away encouraged that more and more people were on side. In Hull the presentations were positive. They didn’t minimise the climate change risks and they showed us best practice and they showed us opportunities. They made us realise that the world is fundamentally changing, that established and accepted business models may suddenly cease to be relevant and unimagined models may suddenly steal your market. Think Amazon. Think iTunes store.

Case studies showed how companies are actively reducing their carbon footprint, and doing it for business reasons. Ariel low-temperature detergent was developed because more CO2 was released through heating water in the washing machine than in the rest of the production, distribution and usage cycle. Marshalls the paving people were the first to footprint all 500 of their products - the nearest competitor has footprinted nine - and they now know how and where to cut carbon further. Their customers know that this is a company which is serious about the environment. ASDA recycles, sources locally and deals with sustainable suppliers. KCOM engages with staff to support its green initiatives.

We learnt about scenario planning; not as a means of predicting the future nor as business continuity planning. Scenarios ask “What if?” What if your key materials double or quadruple in price? What if energy rises by a factor of 10? What if your major customer goes bust? Examining such scenarios helps your company be prepared. The value is in the process, not the result; the process of questioning unquestioned truths, establishing the consequences, weighing the risks and defining the options.

One statistic that I won’t forget showed that while material wealth has steadily grown in the UK since 1960, satisfaction has stayed at the same level. Apparently, we do not need material wealth for a fulfilling life. The problem is that growth has been the only goal for more than a generation; we have no alternative vision and people are scared to give up what they have.

So here’s the challenge. Let’s stop scaring people with global meltdown, climate catastrophe and the end of the world. Let’s draw up our low carbon futures and show people how they can be more relaxing, more fulfilling and maybe more stimulating than the ambitions we have now. At least I came away from the May Day Summit believing that we certainly have the people who can imagine these futures - and the people able and determined to make them reality.

Is the future of your business a low-carbon future? It’s got to be! If you want to talk about how, give me a call - 01904 654986.

They think it's all over

Latest reports from the IPCC, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that a 2 degree rise in world temperatures is inevitable – within 10 years. There is now so much excess carbon dioxide in the global system that it is too late to stop this happening; there’s nothing we can do. It’s time to face up to the consequences and prepare to adapt to them.

Ironically the prosperous West may benefit form the temperature rise in the short term. Higher temperatures will mean substantially increased crop yields in North America, Northern Europe and Russia. Elsewhere the opposite is true. In some parts of the Third World flash floods will wash the crops from the fields and destroy buildings, bridges and roads. Rising sea levels will make other places uninhabitable – already parts of the Maldives have had to be abandoned.

Too much water in some places; too little elsewhere as the Himalayan glaciers melt and the rivers they fill run dry. Up to a billion people will lose their water supply. Many species will become extinct and diseases will appear in places where they have never been seen before.

All this sounds apocalyptic. Too dreadful to be true. Turn the page – let’s not think about it. And what can we do about it anyway? And there on the next page is an advertisement from the energy company Total. “Total is pursuing the development of gas fields across the globe…” And burning more gas releases more CO2. Three degrees? Four degrees? Six degrees?

It needs government action. It needs big business to take action. What we can do is be aware of what is going to happen and be aware of how it will change our lifestyles. We need to do as much as we can to cut our individual carbon footprints. We can change public opinion. Enough public opinion influences government and changes business behaviour.

Within 10 years. That means it won’t just affect our children or our grandchildren. It’s going to affect us.

Footprints in the sky

Private air travel is growing dramatically. Charter passengers, including those using private jets, have risen from 3.5 million to 34 million in the 10 years from 1996 to 2006.

A private jet is attractive to those who can afford it because it saves time. You don’t need to head for a major hub like Manchester, Birmingham, Heathrow or Gatwick – you can leave from your local airfield. You can arrive 15 minutes before departure and embark without all those hours of security checks. At the destination your driver can meet you on the tarmac. It may be more expensive than business class, but for some people it’s worth it. London’s position as the leading financial centre in the world means that there are many wealthy people who will spend their money to save their precious time. Not just for business trips either: private jets make it perfectly possible to have weekends at the villa or on the ski slopes.

And what about the carbon footprint? The whole idea of one family jetting off in a private plane seems reckless, irresponsible, profligate. On the other hand, to paraphrase a well-known saying, the rich are always with us. And the rich would say that they create an enormous amount of the wealth of the UK that keeps people in jobs, funds the infrastructure through taxes and allows others to afford their own holidays in the sun. What these people don’t have is much time, so they spend their money to get the most out of it.

The wealthy people who take these flights can do so precisely because they are successful. They are the people who get things done and they are the people who will be crucial to taking the actions that will address climate change. We cannot afford to meet them head on. All we can do is present the evidence, suggest alternatives, map out the consequences. We all need to work together on this.

I hope we can reach consensus in time.

Save it!

We all know that we need to save energy to save the planet. What most people don’t realize is that everything we eat, use or wear involves the use of energy and indirectly causes carbon dioxide emissions. One of the things we take least notice of is water, particularly in the UK where many households still pay a fixed fee for their water, regardless of how much they use. Of course, commercial premises and more and more homes are on metered supplies, but the cost of water, at least at present, is ignored by most people.

One cubic metre of water requires 1kWh of electricity or other energy to pump it, filter it, purify it, and deliver it to the consumer. Every cubic metre of water therefore has a carbon footprint. Although Britain has been suffering from floods in recent weeks, droughts and hose pipe bans are becoming more and more common in the summer and if we do experience the weather extremes as predicted, water shortages can only get worse.

With this in mind I was interested to see the Interflush device at a conference at York University. This is a simple way of varying the amount of water which is used to flush the lavatory. Although there are some dual-flush units, most flushing systems deliver a full cistern of water every time. The same amount of water is used whether liquids or solids need to be flushed away. The Interflush adapts the traditional flushing siphon so that the flow stops as soon as the handle is released. At the level of the individual household, the savings are relatively small. However, we know that if each household fitted a single compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) electricity demand would fall by the equivalent of the output of a whole power station. Similarly, if every household adopted an Interflush the carbon footprint of the water industry would be cut by 250,000 tons of CO2 . The cost of water would be reduced for all consumers and the existing infrastructure would be able to cope with an increase in the number of consumers without upgrading.

Have a look at the website and see what you think!