Act Now To Minimise Your Risk Under The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme: Business Reason 4

Posted on 09. Apr, 2010 by Ross in Corporate Policy, United Kingdom

Will the price for carbon credits still be £12 per tonne of CO2 emitted in five years time, or will it be £50?

Will you be able to buy enough credits under the capped phase to cover your emissions in the initial bidding, or will your have to top up your credits from the carbon markets?

Will your company’s carbon emissions be enough to sit near the top of the league table, or will your performance sink you into a PR cesspool?

Will the price of electricity rise by 8% over the next five years (according to optimistic government projections) or by more than 25% (as predicted by most industry analysts).

Will the government be able to supply the country with enough power over the next decade in the face of existing plant decommissioning and reliance on renewable energy, and can you afford back-up power generation to keep your company running if not?

There are plenty of questions surrounding the medium-term impact of both the CRC Energy Efficiency scheme and the energy markets, but there is one certainty: greater energy efficiency minimises all of the risk associated with the above scenarios, and will help your business to cope with the challenges associated with worst-case scenarios.

It will also help your case in more qualitative scenarios as well, such as environmentalists rallying shareholder groups to force your company to take more action, or being sued in the future by climate-change refugees for not having taken enough action.

That marks the end of our obvious reasons to act now to implement energy efficiency projects if your business is a CRC scheme participant. However, there’s one more big reason why you should consider acting right now to start cutting energy, costs and carbon, and it might save your company hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Intrigued? Wait for next week’s super-secret reason to act now. No-one else is talking about it, but we are!