Endeavour Energy has signed on as a customer of Salesforce's Net Zero Cloud carbon accounting platform.
The utility's need for more responsive carbon accounting was sharpened in March 2022, when it secured a $920 million sustainability-linked loan.
The loan pricing of which is tied to sustainability targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction, landfill waste diversion, net habitat gain, and mental health and wellbeing.
In response to the climate-linked finance deal, Endeavour Energy believes it’s close to becoming the first utility in the world to implement net zero cloud for its carbon accounting.
Sustainability and environment manager Gina Pavlovic told iTnews that an existing compliance-driven annual accounting process, with data requested and supplied in emails and spreadsheets, was no longer feasible.
“As we put sustainability … in the spotlight, what is really important is to start tracking [our] performance more regularly," she said.
The aim is to identify opportunities and take action quickly: “If you do lag reporting once a year, there’s only so much you can implement in the future.”
Pavlovic added that “one of our key criteria was that single source of truth – auditability of the data so that … we have a really good sense of the governance around it."
Reporting and data governance manager Matthew Parker told iTnews that building its own carbon accounting system internally would have simply been too much effort, compared to configuring a cloud platform.
While Net Zero Cloud is a new product that Salesforce is still adding to, “they're moving quite quickly, they're rolling out a lot of enhancements," Parker said.
The project will give Salesforce a “utility product that can work with carbon”, he said, with specific key metrics a utility needs in Australia.
Parker also noted that net zero cloud inherits a lot of key capabilities from the underlying Salesforce platform.
“We don't actually use Salesforce CRM, for example, but we do get all the capabilities that come with that platform. For example, if you want to build workflows, you can," Parker said.
“You get a lot more … than if you had just gone with a bespoke sustainability product."
Speedy rollout
Parker said the project has run to a short timeframe, with nine weeks devoted to phase one, and 12 weeks for phase two, of which around six weeks remained at the time of the interview.
He said a third phase is also expected to take around 12 weeks.
“Phase one was about how we configured and established the platform, and get the historical data for scope one and scope two [emissions] into the platform, while we build up data models in the back end," Parker said.
Endeavour Energy opted for a “vanilla” frontend so as to get to minimum viable product (MVP) online as soon as possible.
In phase two, the focus has been on automation – making the system “hands-off".
In the coming third phase, the emphasis will be on how the data is presented to users of all kinds in the company, getting more maturity in how scope three emissions data is accounted for, and getting “actions and insights” out of the data.
