CRC league tables show huge variations in performance
The first CRC league tables published by the Environment Agency show a huge variation in performance between the best and the worst organisations. According to the Environment Agency, over 60% of more than 2000 organisations in the league table have taken action by installing smart meters and obtaining a certificate for good energy management from the Carbon Trust or other accreditation scheme. In sharp contrast, according to James Ramsay, head of CRC with carbon-management company Carbon Clear, is more than 40% of those organisations in the table that did not score any points, suggesting that they are not even monitoring their energy data.
Stuart Bowman, director for energy and sustainability with hurleypalmerflatt has been analysing the tables, which apply to organisations using more than 6000 MWh of electricity a year. He says, ‘The tables are very much like the first match of the football season. It’s hard to tell who will be at the top in the long run, but these initial results give us a flavour.
‘Those companies that have performed well have clearly invested early in the scheme and are high up in the league as a result. For the others, success in the future will depend on improving the energy performance of their operations.’
He suggests that companies that have deliberately chosen to invest only from the second year of the scheme will leap up the table next year.
Stuart Bowman notes that five of the first 20 organisations are from the healthcare sector, which he regards as proof of how material energy and carbon is in this sector.
He also comments, ‘It is also interesting to see that the 50 biggest emitters listed in the CRC league table are responsible for about a third of the emissions reported by the 2100 organisations in the scheme. Many of the largest emitters are supermarkets with large retail portfolios, bigger public-sector organisations and councils, and infrastructure or industrial electricity users. This is because these organisation have very large portfolios (such as in retail) and/or operations which are electricity intensive (such as operators of IT-based infrastructure or water companies).’
