Australia demands Measurability in Emissions

9 May 2008

Australia’s National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System (NGERS) released new emission reporting standards that comes into effect on 1 July 2008.

It is estimated the cost to integrate the new requirements with corporate computer systems could cost up to $6.5 Billion USD.

These new requirements have been developed to meet the government's stringent new greenhouse gas emission standards yet with only weeks to go the reporting guidelines have yet to be finalised and the federal government's online database for reporting greenhouse data still needs to be upgraded for the new requirements.

Boral, a major Australian transport company who have deployed the Prolificx V300 box across their fleet stated "despite Boral reporting energy and greenhouse data for more than 10 years, it is extremely unlikely we will be able to set up and implement new systems before July 1”.

Boral's general manger of environmental services, Richard Strauch went on to say “in the absence of any guidance around auditing requirements we are not able to understand the level of accuracy of data required”.

The reporting requirements for those companies in the voluntary Energy Efficiency Opportunities programme — designed to improve energy use by big energy-using businesses — will be aligned with those under NGERS, meaning businesses will need to report data only once.

Bruce McCabe, the managing director of IT consultancy S2 Intelligence, predicts that by 2015 Australian businesses would have spent A$7 billion modifying business applications operations to capture information on power consumption and greenhouse emissions.

"These challenges are set to become widespread in coming years as new reporting requirements extend to medium and even small businesses, meaning most business accounts will have to collect data on energy use and carbon footprint," McCabe says.

Boral warns that a proposed requirement to break down its energy and emissions data into industry classifications, both at state and site level, differs from that used by other Australian reporting systems and increases the compliance burden.

From July 1 2008, hundreds of large Australian companies have been informed they must start to keep records of their emissions and energy use under the NGERS regime. Companies will have until October next year to report on their emissions for the 2008-09 financial year.

Prolificx’s parent company Imarda Ltd has noted an increase in companies looking to Telematics technology to measure and track fuel costs and the cost of carbon in their business.

Imarda CEO, Selwyn Pellett stated “once the emissions trading scheme comes to play in 2010 businesses will have to put a price on carbon as it will add cost to the bottom line. Emission tracking technology will increasingly become standard in vehicle tracking and engine management systems to ensure the required reporting can be achieved”.