To calculate your Purchased Electricity emissions, you will need to see what data your organisation has available and choose a calculation method accordingly.
Facility Electricity Data
Usually, you can collect facility electricity data from your Landlord directly, or from your Site Management, Finance, or Operations teams.
Depending on your provider, it can take a while to be provided with final electricity consumption numbers as you may have to wait for a specific accounting period to end. For instance, it is not uncommon to wait for yearly consumption numbers. In this instance, you can also use your last year's consumption number as a proxy for the current accounting period. Just make sure to update your data again once you receive the actual data for the current reporting period.
You may have contractual instruments pertaining to your purchased electricity which might not be held by the same department that holds your consumption data. To find out more about where you may be able to collect information on contractual instruments, see 'What is a Contractual Instrument?'.
How do I know whether my electricity is from renewable sources?
Reach out to your energy provider to ask about this. Only select 'renewable' if you have a contractual instrument (i.e. renewable energy certificate, on-site renewable, or supplier specific emission factor). Optionally, you can attach your verification documents once you have uploaded the relevant template on the 'Change or add to existing data?' page.
How do I account for Purchased Electricity emissions from leased facilities and office spaces?
According to the GHG Protocol, leasing a space gives the lessee/tenant operational control unless specified differently in the lease contract. If the tenant has operational control, which is most likely the case, all electricity consumption is allocated to your Purchased Electricity emissions (Scope 2).
For lessors/landlords, the GHG Protocol allows the emissions from assets a company owns and leases to another entity to be either included in Scope 3 or excluded from the inventory.
National Averages
When specific data is unavailable, National Averages can be used to calculate emissions. National Averages represent the average values for a given type of activity data within a specific country.
National Averages will be shown automatically when you have uploaded Organisational Data and haven't uploaded any data for Purchased Electricity.
If you don’t want to use National Averages to calculate emissions you can upload a template with the value set to 0 for the respective time and facility.
Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Electricity Data
Data from electric and hybrid vehicle data can usually be collected from your Fleet Manager, Finance Department, or Procurements and Operations team.
If you are new to collecting data on your vehicle fleet, one way of collecting this data is surveying your employees on their average use of company vehicles on a quarterly basis. For the most granular emissions values, however, monthly data is always best.
Note: For hybrid vehicles (PHEV) combustible fuel (i.e. diesel or petrol) and electricity readings must be separated out. Data relating to petrol or diesel should be accounted for in Scope 1 Mobile Combustion, whereas and data related to electricity should be accounted for in Scope 2 Purchased Electricity.
Similarly, combustion engine vehicles should be accounted for in Scope 1 Mobile Combustion alone.
If you can't access data in the required formats, or have business activities not captured in our templates, please take a look at our advice here.