A Day to Pause for the Planet

This year, and every year, Earth Day takes place on April 22^nd, providing each of us with a moment in our busy schedules to reflect on the contributions we make individually and collectively to a more sustainable world.

For 2023, Earth Day’s theme is ‘Invest In Our Planet’, highlighting the importance of giving time, resources, and energy to solving environmental issues.

We know that addressing climate change requires action from people, businesses and government. For Energy Assets this means helping our customers to tread more lightly on the planet, while at the same time mitigating our own impact through coherent sustainability strategies. Here’s how we are making progress and helping our customers do the same.

Sharing the journey

For us, one of the most significant developments of the year so far has been the launch of EA Net Zero, a new business unit dedicated to supporting industrial and commercial organisations on their low carbon journey.

Our collaboration with energy suppliers, businesses, developers and publicly funded bodies includes applying artificial intelligence and machine learning, both to eradicate energy waste in buildings and optimise network capacity. At the same time, we’re helping accelerate electric vehicle adoption by increasing investment in charge point infrastructure and using our inhouse utility network designs skills to integrate renewable embedded generation schemes into residential and commercial developments.

And, through our vendor assessment criteria we’re also encouraging environmental and social best practice across our supply chain.

Shaping internal culture

As well as looking outward, we’re also shaping our internal culture, evolving and measuring the results of environmental and energy reduction strategies and actions. For example, 97% of waste across the Group was recycled in 2022, thanks to our recycling, waste reduction and traceability scheme. We’ve also seen year-on-year reductions in direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions since 2020, thanks in part to transitioning our vehicle fleet to electric or plug-in hybrid cars and bearing down on energy consumption across our building portfolio.

And when the energy meters we own and manage for many thousands of organisations become obsolete, we use the proceeds from scrapping to support training for our people, along with additional facilities, to foster a culture of reuse and repurpose. In this way, we encourage our people to transfer some of the best practices they see in our workplace to their home environments – and equip them with the knowledge to hold us to account for the decisions we make and the actions we take.

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