Energy Points Launches Application for Integrated Environmental Reporting

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Energy Points today unveiled EnergyPoints™ Integrated Reports, a new application that enables businesses to issue a single, integrated sustainability report that clearly conveys both the financial and environmental impact of the company’s energy and resource consumption. EnergyPoints Integrated Reports is based on the company’s proprietary analytics platform, which converts all resources (water, fuel, waste, electricity and natural gas) into a single, universal unit of measurement.

“Today’s sustainability reports are unintelligible and are not providing the context and insight needed by executives, investors and even insurance companies to make data-driven, informed environmental decisions. The problem is compounded when trying to communicate this to the consumer”

Environmental performance has emerged as a critical driver of shareholder value and customer loyalty, and is increasingly viewed by executives as being intertwined with commercial success. According to a new report from the Governance & Accountability Institute, 53 percent of the 500 companies indexed by Standard and Poor’s issued sustainability reports in 2011, up from 19 percent the previous year. The study also found that companies issuing sustainability reports attracted more investment dollars and offered shareholders better returns than competitors that failed to report¹.

Despite the increase in reporting activity, few organizations are able to translate the reports into actionable intelligence. Environmental performance reports often measure sustainability by using domain-specific engineering units, including kWh, mBTU, and tons of carbon. The lack of clarity and actionable insight make the reports hard to understand and render them useless as the basis for decision making.

“Today’s sustainability reports are unintelligible and are not providing the context and insight needed by executives, investors and even insurance companies to make data-driven, informed environmental decisions. The problem is compounded when trying to communicate this to the consumer,” said Ory Zik, founder and CEO of Energy Points. “Much like a CFO would manage different currencies after converted to US dollars, Energy Points converts all natural resource consumption into a universal metric. This provides a single, intuitive view that enables executives to make smarter sustainability and energy management decisions, while allowing the business to transparently and accurately express how they’re impacting the environment.”

A “Currency Converter” for Energy Consumption

Powered by the Energy Points Platform, EnergyPoints Integrated Reports converts all energy resource domains into a single, common unit of measurement based on the primary energy used to generate each resource. This provides businesses with a one-to-one comparison of resource consumption, regardless of the unit of measurement. Combined with existing financial data, EnergyPoints Integrated Reports enables companies to provide a single report that clearly articulates both the financial and environmental impact of all energy consumption.

EnergyPoints Integrated Reports addresses the five key challenges of measuring environmental impact in a way that is accurate and simple:

Confusing Units of Measurement – The units currently used to measure environmental performance are not intuitively clear to most people. In addition, they lack a frame of reference for cross-measuring. EnergyPoints Integrated Reports provides a common metric for measuring resource consumption across environmental domains.
Removing Resource Silos – Current sustainability reports separate each energy category based on environmental specialty and unit of measure. Energy Points provides a common basis for measuring environmental impact that can be translated across the board and used for multiple resources.
Accounting for Resource Location and Time – The majority of sustainability reports use averages which can lead to wrong conclusions. Environmental impact needs to be measured according to the resource scarcity in the location and time its being consumed. Water consumed in a desert has a greater impact than it being consumed in a watershed. Energy Points factors in resource location, life cycle analysis, scarcity, emissions and stress to generate the true value of consumed natural resources.
Energy Efficiency vs. Renewable Energy – Renewables and energy efficiency are traditionally kept in separate categories – despite having the same effect of reducing energy. EnergyPoints enables executives to account for renewable energy as what it is: a more efficient way to generate electricity, taking into account the energy invested in it.
Carbon as a Reporting Metric – Despite the importance of reducing greenhouse gas as a critical issue, carbon is a non-intuitive metric. Used as a management metric, carbon leads to ineffectual decision making. Energy Points accounts for carbon generation as part of its life cycle analysis, incorporating carbon as a factor in its universal metric.

For more information, please visit the Energy Points blog, where the company uses publicly available CSR data to demonstrate how industry leaders could better express environmental impact and energy consumption through integrated reports.

About Energy Points

For sustainable businesses, Energy Points enables the management and planning of resource consumption. The Company’s platform combines advanced analytics with complex resource scarcity data to translate all resources into primary energy, enabling a direct, one-to-one comparison of domains such as electricity, water, waste and fuel. Founded in 2011 by Dr. Ory Zik, who previously founded QuantomiX and HelioFocus, and co-founded by Roy Stein, previous EVP Operations of Grid Point, Energy Points is privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. For more information, please visit http://www.energypoints.com/

Find us on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Points

Read our Sustainability Made Simple blog: http://www.energypoints.com/blog/

¹ Governance & Accountability Institute “2012 Corporate ESG/Sustainability/Responsibility Reporting – Does it Matter,” Dec. 2012