Technology Tools for Cutting Carbon

Some companies have developed their own tools to track and manage their carbon output. When Citi Realty Services established goals for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, it decided to look at how it could manage energy consumption more efficiently in its buildings. The initiative started as a way to go green, but it ends up saving money, too.

Citi is part of the Climate Leaders Initiative, whose members volunteer to disclose their greenhouse gas emission. When the initiative began more than six years ago, there wasn't any software that could collect and analyze energy consumption data on a global basis. So Citi built its own business intelligence tool. Today, the company collects energy data from its suppliers (including electric utilities, gas, steam and fuel oil) for more than 16,000 properties it owns or leases worldwide. It also gathers information on water consumption, recycling and waste production. The numbers are crunched to create a report on Citi's carbon emissions using conversion formulas from the World Resources Institute. But they're also analyzed according to such metrics as kilowatts per square foot and building occupancy; the company's real estate managers then look for ways to reduce their energy use.

"If we have a region that operates at a very low consumption rate, we'll want to find out what they're doing, how they're doing it and share across other regions so we can begin to find best practices," says Chris Magliano, senior vice president of the Global Sustainability Group, within Citi Realty Services. For instance, "We're looking at a specific lighting retrofit project that was completed in a building and the impact of that on the facility's energy consumption." Other Citi facilities are preparing to pilot alternate energy sources. The data also suggests smaller fixes, most of which don't cost anything, says Magliano. At one point, Citi cut several hundred kilowatts of electricity usage by getting staff in a Manhattan facility to give up space heaters under their desks. The office thermostat was set to keep computer equipment on one of its trading floors cool, but workers' feet were freezing. Property managers adjusted the building's climate control systems so the machines wouldn't heat up, but employees could be comfortable-a counterintuitive choice that wouldn't have made sense without the data to back it up. "The tool let us go back and verify the effect of changes that we made," says Magliano.

Citi does not report how much money it saves from its energy-efficiency initiatives. Lois Grobert, Sustainable Real Estate Operations Manager, Citi Realty Services, says there's no business reason to convert local savings to dollars. Energy expenses are also hard to define because they're often embedded in building rental charges, says Magliano. Nevertheless, says Grobert, "there's no downside to saving energy."

Citi has promised to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 10 per cent from 2005 levels by 2011. But interpreting its progress isn't completely straightforward. In the first two years Citi reported its emissions-2005 and 2006-the company's total energy consumption and its carbon emissions increased. Energy consumed per building occupant-a way to measure the rate of energy use-declined less than 1 per cent, while carbon emissions per occupant remained the same.

Grobert says Citi has made progress, but that different numbers tell different stories. For instance, she explains, energy consumption rose during the year because the company opened more offices.

"We cut this data many different ways to see where our progress and where are challenges are," she says.