Enviance Blog

PG&E reduces reporting efforts by 80% with Enviance

If you live on the West Coast, chances are you’re one of 15 million people that rely on PG&E for their gas and electric needs. You have gas in your home thanks to a portion of the 6,214 miles of steel pipelines PG&E maintains, and electricity is delivered from one of their three power plants which churn out 6,800 megawatts (MW) of power.

What you probably don’t realize, from an outsider’s perspective, is the massive amount of stress a company experiences when managing all of that energy, gas, data and infrastructure, to get you the energy resources you need.

Linus Farias, senior environmental engineer at PG&E, recently illustrated some of the key environmental compliance issues his company faces during a webinar with Enviance.

Farias and his team, like many other utilities in the United States, are mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to report once a year on their GHG emissions. Additionally, under Assembly Bill 32 they must report, on an ongoing basis, their emissions associated with electricity generation, retail electricity generation, and other areas. PG&E goes a step further, by also voluntarily reporting their emissions to The Climate Registry, Carbon Disclosure Project and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

When PG&E began searching for a solution to handle their Green House Gas (GHG) compliance needs, they realized they would need a single repository of data, a solution that could be implemented quickly and had the ability to track changes, identify reductions and forecast their GHG emissions.

The solution that met all PG&E’s criteria was deployed within a few months, and the use of cloud-based features helped decrease their initial reporting level of effort by 80% during their first AB32 mandatory report after implementation.

PG&E’s high ease-of-use solution, and ability to provide access to emissions information in the system across the entire organization in real time, placed PG&E in the best possible situation to better serve their customers while mitigating their effect on the environment.

Watch the Webinar here.

 

Sincerely,

The Enviance team

It's Back to School Week at Enviance! Our 5 hottest Educational Resources!

 

With the start of a new school year upon us, what better time to talk about Education? Throughout the years, we have maintained an ongoing effort to produce educational resources in topics relevant to the Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) community to help disseminate best practices and contribute to Industry growth. We have received a tremendous response from clients, partners and friends that have been relying on our resources to keep up to date with the latest Industry trends.

If you haven’t been an avid reader of our selection of White Papers and don’t know where to start, worry not! We put together a list of our Top 5 White Papers to share with you this week!

Ever wanted to know what your peers and even competitors are reading to keep informed? Follow our links below and learn more about what is helping them effectively and efficiently manage EH&S requirements.

TOP 1 RESOURCE: THE EMISSIONS TRIFECTA: Combining Title V, Air Emissions Inventory and GHG Reporting

The Emissions Trifecta White Paper is our most popular white paper of all time. It discusses how streamlining emissions data (Title V, Air Emissions Inventory and GHG) into one comprehensive, centralized system that has been designed to capture and report the data required for a variety of different regulatory environmental programs saves companies time, money and personnel.

TOP 2 RESOURCE: SUPPLY CHAIN ENVIRONMENTALISM: Using Environmental ERP to Manage Environmental Impact for Competitive Advantage and Profit

This white paper introduces a new approach to managing the supply chain which defines Supply Chain Environmentalism as the enhancement of competitiveness through either cost reduction or product differentiation, or both, achieved by reduction of environmental impacts (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, etc.) in the supply chain.

TOP 3 RESOURCE: THE BIG PICTURE: A Method to Compare Facilities' Environmental Performance

The Method to Compare Facilities Environmental Performance white paper explains how you can compare facilities' environmental performance by using environmental compliance and sustainability data, such as emissions and water in a summary mode to produce "smart scores". 

TOP 4 RESOURCE: The Value of Public Perception: Transforming Environmental Efforts From Compliance-Driven to Risk Management

Many companies fail to understand that their environmental footprint creates risk to their business that's on par with losing their largest customer. The need for the role of environmental management to transform from simply meeting compliance requirements to pervasive risk management has become more evident in recent years.

TOP 5 RESOURCE: CASE STUDY WEBINAR: Streamlining Compliance by Automating Data Collection and Inspections with System Integration and Mobile Technology

Find out how a real company facing real environmental compliance challenges was able to efficiently overcome them by designing and implementing new processes and systems.

In this webinar, you 'll learn how one company went from needing 8 Environmental Managers about 6 days a month to input data to requiring only 4 to 6 hours of review time a month instead of data entry work. See how this company captured environmental field data faster, responded quickly to environmental incidents with workflow processes and saved time and money in personnel and violation fines. 

What’s your employee’s time worth? A case study in efficiency

Enviance is proud of its customers’ accomplishments and we love to share their success stories. Throughout the year, we host webinars highlighting great results and best practices in the field. Most recently, Patriot Coal, a leading producer and marketer of coal in the eastern United States, and CH2MHill, a leading global provider of engineering, construction, and operations services, took center stage to discuss how Patriot uses the Enviance system to meet compliance obligations from the EPA and Department of Justice, plus other bottom line benefits, in Patriot Coal Saves Time and Money, Automates Water Management.

In the webinar, Patriot shares some impressive results, including a massive reduction in the time it took to input inspection data, which amounts to roughly 40,000 data points per month. Prior to Enviance, Patriot’s environmental data collection and inspections were done by hand, and took eight environmental managers six full days a month to input. After installing Enviance, the process was automated by the cloud-based system, reducing the time to just 4 to 6 hours of review a month. In the year after deploying Enviance, Patriot inspected 33% more outlets, and cut effluent limit violations from 120 to 3.

To hear the full story and view the webinar, please click here.

Blog update - have you noticed our new look?

You may have already noticed we made a few changes to the blog. We gave the homepage a facelift and are adding new regular features like climate policy updates and interactive polls to better educate, enlighten and engage our readers. Based on the success of our Earth Day Blogathon, we also are incorporating more guest contributors, interviews and video chats to share the thought leadership and perspective of industry luminaries.

We invite your feedback. Please let us know if you have any ideas we should address or if you are interested in contributing to the blog. Thanks for reading and we look forward to hearing from you.

The Enviance Team