Businesses all around the UK are becoming more and more conscious of their environmental impact – in particular, their carbon consumption.
Progress is generally slower than hoped for, but there have been some important wins. Recently, the BBC reported that the UK has seen success in cutting three-quarters of carbon emissions from the generation of electricity since 1990 and that the use of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, has jumped from 10% to 40% in the past 10 years.
One of the key ways to make more of a positive impact is by understanding your carbon footprint, so you can try and reduce it. Carbon monitoring is one of the most effective channels to do this.
If you would like to learn more about Carbon Monitoring and how it can impact your business, you should check out the following blog posts:
If you’re thinking about undertaking carbon monitoring, a key question you might be asking is: How long do I need to monitor my emissions for?
The answer will largely depend on your objectives and intentions. However, you need to view carbon monitoring as a long-term strategy rather than a one-off tick-box exercise if you want to see results.
How long should I undertake carbon monitoring?
If you choose to work with Utili-Tay on carbon monitoring for your business, we allow our technology to collect data for a minimum of three months before we evaluate it and provide our recommendations.
This is because we need to get an overview of the day-to-day energy use across all areas of your business. This helps us to spot regular patterns and occasional surges, which together could result in a lot of wasted carbon and unnecessarily high bills.
Once we have a true understanding of your energy use, we can put together a plan to set goals specific to your business to reduce it.
What are your carbon monitoring goals?
It’s important not to stop after this initial monitoring period. Whether you are monitoring your carbon emissions to meet short-term compliance requirements, or to achieve longer-term sustainability goals, if you don’t continue to track your energy usage, you have no way of knowing whether you have made improvements.
Any goals you set need to be specific and realistic. You can’t know your ambitions are achievable if you aren’t measuring them!
Our reviews are quarterly, which allows enough data to be collected before having timely conversations to ensure that tweaks and adjustments can be made, along with the expansion of successful strategies.
The more closely you monitor your results, the more you can celebrate your progress. This will help you make investments to further improve your company’s climate contributions, such as energy-efficient technology. Plus, more improvements and innovative ideas will continue to appear as you make small,
trackable changes.
Why are you undertaking carbon monitoring?
Carbon monitoring may be necessary for your business for a variety of reasons.
If your business is subject to carbon emissions regulations, then ongoing carbon monitoring is going to be essential to ensure you remain legally compliant and are submitting relevant information to the appropriate authorities.
Regulations are constantly changing across all industries. We recommend being proactive and getting to grips with your carbon consumption sooner rather than later so you are ready if legal requirements change.
Stakeholders, partners, and customers alike are all going to start demanding more information about your carbon improvement plan and climate commitments. Ongoing carbon monitoring will help you demonstrate your commitment to transparency and accountability, and critically, help you prove that you are taking tangible action to create a greener future for your business.
In conclusion, how long should I undertake carbon monitoring
We hope that this blog has helped answer the question: How long should I undertake carbon monitoring?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, as your goals around monitoring your carbon consumption will be individual to your business. But as a general rule, you will need to begin with a minimum of three months of carbon monitoring, and then continue to review your data to see if your objectives are being achieved, plus any other measures you could take to improve future performance.
At Utili-Tay, we are committed to helping lead you towards a greener future. When you choose us for your Carbon Monitoring Services, you not only get access to our cutting-edge technology, but you will also have an advisor who will help you to set realistic goals to cut your carbon consumption and make long-term improvements to your business.
Contact us today to find out how Carbon Monitoring can benefit your business.
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