2022 marks the ninth year of EPRI’s ongoing effort to identify and understand metrics appropriate for benchmarking the performance of electric power companies on industry sustainability priorities. The metrics outlined in this document reflects learnings from research begun in 2014 (3002004255) and evolving thinking informed by an annual reflection and refinement period in collaboration with EPRI’s Energy Sustainability Interest Group (ESIG). This process helps to ensure metric boundaries are up-to-date with evolving standards, guidance, and science, and reflect insights from metric use by companies over time. This document contains metrics deemed to be appropriate for benchmarking electric power company performance on industry-level sustainability priorities. Several major changes were made to existing metrics this year, most notably, an overhaul of the Habitat & Biodiversity metrics based on new learnings and engagement. In addition to refining two existing metrics within that sustainability priority, two new pollinator-focused metrics have been added. Finally, 10 metrics were removed across the Air Emissions, Community Vitality, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Safety & Health, Waste, and Water sustainability priorities.
Since 2014, several reports have been published to share learnings gathered through each reflection and refinement period. These provide insight into the research evolution, and may be useful in better understanding the context of the metrics captured in this document:
- Sustainability Metric Compilation for the Electric Power Industry: Results of Industry Interviews and Metric Database Development (3002004255)
- Metrics to Benchmark Sustainability Performance for the Electric Power Industry (3002007228)
- 2016 Metrics to Benchmark Electric Power Company Sustainability Performance (3002009923)
- 2017 Metrics to Benchmark Electric Power Company Sustainability Performance (3002011884)
- Metrics to Benchmark Sustainability Performance for the Electric Power Industry: 2017 Update (3002012060)
- 2018 Metrics to Benchmark Electric Power Company Sustainability Performance (3002013458)
- Sustainability Metrics Landscape Compilation for the Electric Power Industry: Results of Research with Electric Power Companies and Metric Database Development (3002013459)
- 2019 Metrics to Benchmark Electric Power Company Sustainability Performance (3002016760)
- 2019 State of the Metric: Summary of Learnings from Sustainability Metrics Research (3002016114)
- 2020 Metrics to Benchmark Electric Power Company Sustainability Performance (3002019251)
- 2021 Metrics to Benchmark Electric Power Company Sustainability Performance (3002021713)
In 2018, EPRI carried out a comprehensive landscape review of all existing sustainability metrics and catalogued nearly 5,000 metrics that are: (1) currently disclosed through electric power company sustainability reports or (2) requested through sustainability ranking and rating organizations (including but not limited to CDP, the Dow Jones Sustain- ability Indices [DJSI], and Sustainalytics). The metrics were then organized into a database that contains 72 columns, allowing the user to sort data based on their research need. The database was published in 2019 through ESIG (3002015192). The metrics identified through this effort were then reviewed by EPRI subject matter experts along with ESIG members and their colleagues to identify which metrics are appropriate to benchmark electric power company sustainability performance. Three metrics uncovered through that landscape review – “Effective energy efficiency investment rate” (Assets & Operations), “Weighted equivalent forced outage rate demand (WEFORd),” (Energy Reliability & Resiliency), and “Percent spend with Tier 1 suppliers that responded to a sustainability survey” (Supply Chain) – were tested through the Benchmarking Project as emerging metrics and are now published in this report.
The “Total CO2 emissions rate for electricity used to meet end load metric” (Greenhouse Gas Emissions) was identified in collaboration with EPRI greenhouse gas accounting experts, tested in EPRI’s sustainability benchmarking activities for two years as an emerging metric, and is now published in this report alongside the six Natural Gas metrics that were tested since 2018: “Fugitive emissions intensity,” “Distribution pipeline replacement rate,” “Percentage of distribution system still to be upgraded,” “Gas dig-in rate,” “Gas emergency response rate,” and “Leak repair rate.” Additional emerging metrics will be tested in the future as EPRI refreshes and evolves its list of sustainability priorities for the electric power industry. The findings from the 2020–21 refresh can be found in Sustainability Priorities for The North American Electric Power Industry: Results of 2020–2021 Research with Electric Power Companies and Stakeholders in the United States and Canada (3002020773).
In 2019, EPRI published a metrics update report (3002016114) comprehensively summarizing ESIG’s metrics research since 2017. That report overviews the inaugural effort to identify a succinct list of “core” metrics that represent the most widespread and commonly used measures of sustainability performance among electric power companies.
Finally, as noted in past publications related to this work, the following list of metrics is not intended to be used as an index to rank electric power companies. Instead, these metrics have been identified as technically appropriate and potentially insightful ways for a company to understand their performance on individual sustainability priorities, how that performance compares to peer companies, and how they may be used to inform goalsetting.