This post should provide you with some help and guidance about putting together your CRC footprint report. There are a number of other posts in the CRC help series, click on the CRC tab (above) to see the full list of articles. If you are in urgent need of completing your report before the 29th July deadline, our CRC software and in-house experts will be able to help, click here.
The purpose of the CRC footprint report is to identify CO2 emissions that you are required to declare to the CRC registry. In each following reporting year of the phase, you will also declare CRC emissions on an annual basis.
Footprint year
Under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, participating organisations must submit a footprint report on the last working day of July following the footprint year of each phase. The next footprint report is due on 29th July 2011.
The report for phase one covers the period from 1st April 2010 to 31st March 2011, while the footprint report for phase 2 is due at the end of July 2014. An annual report is due in each subsequent year of the phase. Have a look at the timeline below to see how the scheme is due to run for the next few years:
Calculating CRC Emissions
The Environment Agency strongly suggests that you calculate your CRC emissions outside of the CRC Registry and keep record of everything for your evidence pack in case of audit.
Varying levels of CO2 is attributed to different energy supplies when consumed, and the Department for Energy and Climate Change publish a list of emissions factors for specific use in the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme. At Carbon Calculated, we maintain these formulas in our calculation platform, ensuring that our ECM software and software built and provided by third-parties is always running on the right data and producing the most accurate results.
In order to calculate your CRC liability, you must initially understand your organisation’s total energy use emissions; this is all electricity, gas and other CRC fuels consumed throughout the organisation. The Environment Agency have then provided a structure for removing excluded emissions sources:
Various excluded energy sources (transport etc) must then be removed from the calculation, along with any parts of your organisation covered by Climate Change Agreement (CCA) exemption (note, not CCA exclusion). At this point you arrive at your total footprint emissions:
You must then use the 90% rule outlined below to ensure that enough emissions are being declared; this is an opportunity to save some expenditure on CRC allowances by only declaring what you absolutely have to.
Once you have calculated at your total regulated emissions with the 90% rule, any emissions attributed to CCA exclusions, or EU-ETS installations are then taken off to arrive at total CRC emissions.
If you have EU-ETS sites or climate change agreements (CCAs) within your organisation, it is important that you understand the rules regarding these as various emissions can be included or excluded.
90% Rule
At least 90% of your organisation’s total footprint emissions must be regulated by the EU-ETS, CCAs, and/or the CRC. This is known as the residual percentage and enables you to calculate total regulated emissions.
When you have arrived at your total footprint emissions, you need to ascertain whether at least 90% of your total footprint emissions are made up of core energy supplies or regulated by the EU-ETS or CCAs. If more than 90% are regulated in this way, you do not have to include any residual fuel supplies in your footprint report. Essentially, you must declare all core energy supplies, EU-ETS or CCA coverage; so if this is 91.47% of emissions, this is what you must declare. This also means that you can remove the residual energy supplies that account for 8.53% of total footprint emissions.
IF EU-ETS, CCAs and Core Energy Supplies equal less than 90% of total footprint emissions, then you must include some residual supplies on your report. You must make list of your residual supplies, a residual measurement list, and choose which fuel supplies should be included in the declaration. It is not necessary to include all supplies of a particular type, but you must include all supplies from an individual site. For example, if you have site A, B and C that all had petrol consumed during the footprint year; you could choose to include all the petrol consumed on site B (and exclude A and C’s supplies), but not just half the petrol consumed on site B.
Once you have used the 90% rule to include or exclude residual fuels, you will have calculated your organisation’s total regulated emissions.
Declaring CRC emissions
CRC emissions are calculated by removing emissions covered by EU-ETS and CCAs from total regulated emissions. These core and residual supplies will have to be reported in each annual reporting year for the remainder of the phase, unless they become covered by EU-ETS, CCAs, or transferred to another organisation. It is important to keep careful record of supplies and exclusions in your evidence pack in case of audit.
You must then enter all your information into the CRC registry, an online system accessible through your organisation’s government gateway account.
You must supply the following information to the CRC registry:
- Core supplies (excluding EUETS and CCA covered supplies)
- Residual supplies (excluding EUETS and CCA covered supplies)
- CCA exempt emissions (all emissions from exempt subsidiaries)
- EUETS emissions (split into core and residual/non-core)
- CCA excluded emissions (split into core and residual/non-core)
- Quantity of Electricity Generating Credits you are eligible to claim
- The supplies of ‘Other Fuels’ to your organisation
Useful Links:
CRC Software from Carbon Calculated
Environment Agency CRC report guidance
CRC Registry
Contact Carbon Calculated
