The business completed a materiality assessment in 2021 which highlighted that their customers care about climate change, climate resilience and sustainability.

This assessment led to the appointment of a Sustainability Lead for the organisation and Jeffy Palamattam commenced in 2022 to rally movements in the sustainability field. Jeffy shares that it’s part of his role to work with staff to ensure Electra has a sustainability focus in its operations and is investing into its network to support decarbonisation across the region.

“Our first step was to complete our Environmental and Sustainability Policy. Our first version, completed in early 2023, will be updated later this year, 2024. The objective of the policy is to give direction on how we want to approach sustainability as the business.”

As part of the journey, Electra are developing work programmes across each of the ESG categories. Currently, under the Environmental category, they have four streams of focus: Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Reductions; Waste Minimisation and Circular Economy; Environmental Management System development and Education and Awareness.

Electra is a large organisation, employing over 120 staff, so implementation will be staged as the business needs to balance sustainability priorities with the other imperatives including keeping staff and the public safe around the network, keeping the lights on, and making electrification easy for customers.

“Our next step was understanding and measuring where we currently are with sustainability so we could start to track our progress. We have now measured our Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions data for FY20, FY21, FY22 and FY23.”

“This gave us a picture of where our emissions come from and has allowed us to begin the process of drawing up a clear roadmap around emissions management. We are also in the process of measuring our waste. This means looking at all the waste we produce, whether it be recyclable, compostable or being sent to landfill. Once we have a clear idea of our waste categories and quantities, we can set reduction targets across this stream as well.”

Jeffy Palamattam highlighted that Electra are working on enabling commercial ventures like a large scale solar to be developed in our network area.

“The organisation is excited to be working on a solar project, as it assists New Zealand’s decarbonisation goals and ensures we can meet the growing energy demands of our region.”

Electra have actioned initiatives in alignment with their Environmental and Sustainability Policy.

“On the ground, we have implemented a more robust recycling programme in all office locations. Initiatives like worm farms have been introduced to divert organic waste from landfills with end products that staff can take for their personal gardens.”

“Changing our design principals and specification of materials used in building and maintaining the network is creating improvements in the circular use of material.  Examples include recycling our pillar boxes with GYRO Plastics. Old pillar boxes are cleaned, broken to pellets, and made into new pillar boxes.”

“We now use plastic anchor blocks for our electricity poles, changing from cement anchor blocks, which are heavy and not always recyclable. The plastic anchor blocks are made from HDPE which will be recycled at end of life by Second Life Plastics in Levin to make electric cable covers. We currently send all our old concrete poles to GoodRock recycling, who crush concrete and use it for other construction projects. And lastly, we work with Phoenix Recycling to recycle all our metals. ”

Electra are moving their pool car fleet to Electric Vehicles (EV’s) and this has decreased operational expenses as running vehicles on electricity is cheaper than vehicles on petrol/diesel. Around 10% of their current overall fleet are EV’s.

“The challenge in the fleet conversion is around Utes and Trucks. We are waiting for a fit-for-purpose low emission Ute to become available in New Zealand. We are not sure what sort of technology this might be, as we need to consider that our vehicles are required to always be operational, even during a power outage or a large storm.”

"There are currently 26 public EV chargers in our network and for the financial year ending 31 March 2024, these chargers supplied 489 MWh, which is around 3 million kilometres of EV powered travel. This does not account for charging done at residential or business spaces. It’s work like this that allows us to be an enabler for New Zealand’s decarbonisation journey.”

Electra recently achieved Toitū certification. This was a proud moment, and a direct result of having completed a comprehensive greenhouse gas inventory, which is audited and certified.

“I have found the process of achieving certification interesting, it highlights that we are on track and helps us set future targets. We are lucky to work with a number of specialised consultants which include Lumen who completed our greenhouse gas inventory and also Oxygen Consulting in Auckland who assisted in our materiality assessment.”

Valuable sustainability resources shared include the Ministry for the Environment workbook 2022 which is a great starting point for measuring GHG emissions. Other useful online resources include Green Halo,  EVDB, and Energy Efficient & Conservation Authority (EECA).

“Sustainability is a constantly changing field and while policy is important as it ensures we are heading in the right direction; I also need to stay across the research and reports for our sector. I have learnt a lot from other electricity distributors in the country and attend monthly meetings where we all share knowledge to accelerate our progress within the industry.”

“I’m also passionate about learning and as an engineer, you are trained to find facts and figures that back up your decisions, so I invest time doing research and reading published articles.”

Electra welcomes working with businesses to explore electrification or Solar Photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage to find practical solutions to replace coal or gas-powered energy generation. Planning work needs to be completed around grid connected PV, as systems over a certain size could impact the network if not designed cooperatively. 

“Our experience is that the returns on PV on commercial spaces is relatively quick. Electra first installed PV at our Bristol Street, Levin office, starting with a small 2.5kWp system, then we added another 15kWp in April 2024. Modelling predicted this will result in a 27% reduction in electricity usage from the grid. This indicates that the payback period from electricity savings should be approximately 5-years. PV works well in commercial spaces because businesses mostly operate during the day, when the sun is shining, and PV is generating electricity.”

“The increase in PV on the network has been exponential in business and residential properties. We currently have around 7MW of residential PV installed across our network, of which nearly 2MW came online in the past financial year.”

Electra is well down the path of completing a detailed sustainability roadmap, and the business is confident that together with their underlying strategy, they can implement actions that will meet reduction targets and are passionate about working with other businesses to achieve these.