Considerations of sustainability among many electric power industry external stakeholders, particularly investors, are now frequently intertwined with considerations of consequences or impacts and accountability, in some cases over long time horizons. While more conventional sustainability approaches and metrics (e.g., benchmarking metrics) will continue to be valuable for tracking and measuring performance, they alone may not provide information on the true effectiveness of company activities, as they do not account for the complex means by which a company’s sustainability decisions influence outcomes. Thus, electric power companies may need to adopt additional analytical approaches or perspectives to produce more actionable strategic insights. Impact-based analysis (IBA) and impact-based metrics (IBMs) may provide companies a greater understanding of the true effectiveness of their sustainability efforts over time. The insights from this research can help electric power companies grasp the fundamental conceptual and practical considerations of IBA and IBM.
This inaugural research effort provides abundant opportunities for future research and collaboration, including but not limited to, identification of IBA approaches and/or IBMs for electric power industry priority sustainability issues. EPRI intends to pilot IBMs for these issues and other thematic areas in the future. This research on IBA and IBMs accompanies EPRI’s research on context-based analysis and metrics, including the 2020 pilot on context-based workforce diversity metrics.