The carbon risk imperative

Climate action continues to rise as a global obligation that is shaping buying, investment, and capital markets decisions. To that end, sustainability reports and emissions targets are on the rise. In fact, two thirds of fortune 500 companies have set Net-zero targets. However, there is growing concern that there is a large gap between promises and action. 

Emphasis is being placed on tracking and governing that progress. This is largely due to the lack of substance and associated confidence that those promises will actually be delivered upon.

The opposing pressures to making green promises while not being caught “greenwashing” can seem like a catch 22 within the current realities of carbon accounting. Carbon accounting has historically been fraught with fuzzy math and sweeping, self-reported averages, leaving well-meaning companies at risk. 

As climate action continues to rise as a global priority, carbon is becoming the biggest on-balance sheet liability for corporations. Solving the energy data access issue can enable those same corporations to bring critical insights to their energy procurement strategies and help them reach their net zero or clean energy adoption goals.

Now it’s time to adapt your carbon accounting standards to understand and ultimately reduce your carbon liability.

Carbon averages and estimates leave you at risk of Greenwashing

When you only understand your emissions based on averages for a given year or month (relying on utility bills, as an example), you lack visibility into the time and location of that energy consumption.

To understand this, let’s look at what is typically happening when a company claims to be “100% Renewable.” In many cases, what they’ve done is tallied up their carbon emissions for the year and purchased unbundled Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to offset their emissions. The problem with that is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, so they are in reality still emitting carbon, often in a different time and place than the offsets they purchased.

When you attempt to audit the data from this approach, you miss critical information because the data lacks granularity. When data is based on monthly averages that don’t provide visibility into what clean energy they are procuring and how it is offsetting their load. Not only can this open the company up to accusations of greenwashing, but it also fails to deliver on the tangible progress promised by the company.

Spreadsheets for emissions tracking lead to additional costs, errors, and difficulty

Currently, even the biggest companies rely on teams of analysts manually compiling massive spreadsheets, just for establishing their Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions inventory (i.e. electricity usage). This has worked well enough for annual sustainability reports, but will it scale for quarterly statements and eventually hourly?

No longer can companies rely on spreadsheets. It’s too cumbersome and too error prone. Automated data collection and analysis is a must. Enter Cleartrace’s verifiable decarbonization platform.

Imagine the good you could do with good data

Now, imagine if you could understand your energy consumption down the hour and meter. That’s where Cleartrace comes in. We’re on a mission to help organizations understand and intelligently decarbonize their operations.

Cleartrace’s platform plugs into your existing reporting systems to illuminate previously hidden energy data and create a unified data layer for your company’s energy landscape. We reveal the hourly mix of the energy produced or consumed and provide immutable, auditable and assurance-ready proof of a corporation’s carbon footprint. Every hour, new, data-rich digital assets are created from the continuous stream of energy and environmental data feeding into our platform.

That data unlocks opportunities to not only help companies stand -by their claims of renewable energy consumption, but also allows companies to proactively manage their decarbonization strategy and mitigate their climate risk.

Auditable Carbon Accounting with Cleartrace

Audit-Ready Data

Your data provides digital proof of compliance with corporate mandates associated with renewable energy and decarbonization strategies and programs.

Create Enterprise Value

Protect your reputation and PR efforts with permission-accessed, auditable, transparent data.

Plan Your Journey

Cleartrace can help you understand your current state and then help you evolve your energy procurement to meet your goals.

Ready to prove and manage your progress towards decarbonization?

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