Tracing footprints: Carbon reporting catches on in business world

By Dave DeWitte
The Gazette

Photovoltaic cells collect solar energy at the Indian Creek Nature Center in southeast Cedar Rapids. The current system was installed in July 2003. The nature center collects solar energy using photovoltaic cells on the roof, which is converted to usable electricity to power fans, computers, lights and freezers. The center sells some of its electricity back to Alliant Energy. Photo by Jim Slosiarek.

Reporting a company’s carbon footprint, Eric Woodroof says, is a lot like reporting your company’s taxes.

“How many of you enjoy reporting your taxes?” asked Woodroof, chairman of the carbon reduction manager program at the Association of Energy Engineers.

Nobody at Alliant Energy’s 2009 Energy Summit raised a hand at the Kirkwood Community College Continuing Education Center.

Enjoyable? Definitely not. But a growing number of companies are calculating and reporting their carbon footprint in a trend linked to concern over climate change. There are several reasons to be first in your industry to report the data, Woodroof said.

“Marketing is the biggest one,” said Woodroof, who is based in Atlanta. “Companies want to be first to use it in their marketing. If you’re first, you will always be able to say you were first.”

Carbon trading opportunities are another reason. In some industries, such as cement manufacturing, early reporters may qualify for “early action credits” that have significant economic value.

Alliant Energy strategic account manager Laurie Appleget (left) and Scott Reid, Harper Brush vice president of manufacturing, tour an energy-efficient lighting retrofit at Harper Brush in Fairfield in 2007. The project reduced energy consumption by 20 percent while yielding 20 percent more light. Photo courtesy of Alliant Energy.

Customers are demanding that suppliers become carbon-conscious, Woodroof said. “Wal-Mart is asking all of their Chinese suppliers to begin doing it,” said Woodroof, who has been to Taiwan and mainland China five times in less than a year.

To calculate its carbon footprint, Woodroof said a company must complete two of the three potential inventories of its greenhouse gas emissions.

SCOPE I consists of direct emissions from assets that a company owns or operates, such as its manufacturing plants, office buildings, trucks, cars and forklifts.

SCOPE II consists of indirect emissions from purchases of electricity, steam, heating and cooling.

The SCOPE III category, which is not essential, consists of all other indirect emissions from upstream and downstream sources. It could include such things as the carbon emissions generated by the companies that dispose of your company’s solid waste, and the carbon emissions of the companies that deliver the raw materials your company turns into its products.

A good place to find a protocol for carbon modeling is on the Web site of the California Climate Action Registry, www.climateregistry.org/

“It’s a great teaching tool and gives a lot of examples,” Woodroof said.

One of the most important concepts is the Global Warming Potential Factor. It works like a multiplier to calculate the climate change potential of different kinds of greenhouse gases. A pound of carbon dioxide, by far the most common greenhouse gas, has a Global Warming Potential Factor of one. The global warming potency of other gases differ tremendously. A pound of methane has a factor of 21, while a pound of the refrigerant HFC-23 has a factor of a whopping 11,700.

By comparing the Global Warming Potential Factors of various greenhouse gases, Woodroof says it’s easy to see that a company might be able to make a greater dent in the greenhouse gas problem by tacking one relatively small refrigerant leak, for instance, than switching an entire building to high-efficiency light fixtures.

Conversion tables also can be used to calculate the carbon impact of the electricity a company uses. The amount of carbon emitted in generating electricity varies in different regions by the kind of fuel and equipment used to generate power. In California, the carbon impact of generating a megawatt hour of electricity is 878.71 pounds. The impact is almost twice that amount in Iowa because most of the electricity is generated here from coal-burning power plants.

Woodroof says numbers such as megawatt hours and carbon pounds mean very little to the public or even most corporate executives. To make a persuasive case that greenhouse gas reduction projects be undertaken, he recommends translating them into functional equivalents.

He personally has sold projects by putting benefits in terms like “taking 240 cars off the road for a year,” or “the equivalent of planting 940 acres of trees.”

“Put what it’s worth in terms they can visualize,” he said.

Woodroof said the “240 cars off the road” comparison went over like a lead balloon with one company, which happened to be in the oil business. The 940 acres of trees comparison went over much better.

Alliant Energy gave 16 Excellent in Energy Efficiency awards at the summit to schools, businesses and other organizations.

“Climate change is at the forefront of everyone’s minds right now, and energy efficiency is one of the best ways to preserve the environment,” Senior Vice President of Energy Delivery Dundeana Doyle said.

Actions taken by the 16 organizations save enough energy consumption to reduce carbon emissions by 35,000 tons per year, Doyle said.

Recipients included Kirkwood Community College, General Mills, Nordstrom Direct and Rockwell Collins.