National Grid 2007 Annual Report Download - page 9

National Grid Electricity Transmission Annual Report and Accounts 2006/07 7
Community
involvement
National Grid Electricity Transmission’s role as a
good corporate citizen supports our strategic
ambitions,
and is delivered through a sustained and
consistent approach.
In all our community investment, we aim to develop
our business, support our employees, support
communities and enhance our reputation. Our
approach is based on two principles: ‘Investment in
our Communities, Investment in our People’, and
continues to be centred on three key themes:
energy and environment; education and skills; and
community development.
Sharing of best practice across our business and
working collaboratively with key partners and
stakeholders enables us to maximise how
communities benefit from our activities.
Responsibility
We are committed to operating in a responsible way and this
underpins our commitments to performance, growth, talent and
relationships as discussed above.
As an asset intensive business, our operations have an impact
on the environment. The most significant of these are climate
change and historically contaminated land. We also take
actions to minimise other environmental impacts of our
operations, we are committed to strong governance and high
ethical standards. We take the issues surrounding electric and
magnetic fields seriously and we are committed to protecting
human rights.
Climate
change
Climate change is possibly one of the greatest
challenges facing society in the 21st Century.
National Grid’s public position statement on energy
delivery and climate change sets out our approach
to delivering energy while playing our role in
minimising any impact our operations may have on
the climate.
National Grid’s overall target is to reduce carbon
emissions by 60% compared with a verified
baseline, ahead of the Government’s target of
2050.
We plan to reduce emissions relating to our own
energy use, saving at least 5% in energy
consumption, and use the resultant cost savings to
enable us to procure all of the electricity we use
from renewable sources by the end of 2010.
With our skills in balancing supply and demand, we
believe there are no insurmountable technical
problems to accommodating the quantities of
intermittent renewable generation that the market
will bring forward. We are therefore investing in our
networks to connect renewable generators and to
reinforce them, ensuring large-scale renewably
generated power can get from where it is generated
to where it is used.
The key performance indicator we use to monitor
our performance in this area is the percentage
reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions.
Historically
contaminated
land
National Grid Electricity Transmission has an
inherited portfolio of historically contaminated land
including older substations on our transmission
networks.
The main focus of our
remediation programme is on
managing the environmental risk and returning any
land no longer required for our operations to
beneficial use.
Protecting the
environment
We are committed to continuous improvement in
our environmental performance.
Our objective is to help protect the environment for
future generations. In addition to aiming to actively
reduce our contribution to climate change, we are
committed to:
1 being efficient in our use of natural resources;
1 keeping our waste to a minimum and increasing
the economic value of any waste we produce;
1 acting to prevent environmental incidents; and
1 improving, where we can, the environmental
status of the land on which we operate.
We have implemented environmental management
systems certified to the international standard ISO
14001 in all our businesses to help us deliver
improvements in these areas.
Key performance indicators that we monitor in this
area comprise the number of significant direct
environmental incidents and the total value of fines
from prosecutions.
Corporate
governance
We believe strong corporate governance is
essential to operating responsibly and achieving our
goals. National Grid’s approach to corporate
governance is described on pages 77 to 87 of its
Annual Report and Accounts 2006/07.
Business
ethics
Not only are we are committed to ensuring that all
our behaviours are lawful and that we comply with
our policies and licences, we expect all of our
employees to live up to our core values of respect,
integrity and ownership.
Electric and
magnetic fields
We take the issues that surround electric and
magnetic fields seriously and in all our operations,
as a minimum, we aim to comply with the
regulations, guidelines or practices relating to
electric and magnetic fields in force in the UK.
Human rights National Grid’s public position statement sets out
our commitment to protect human rights within our
sphere of influence and ensure our own operations
are a force for good, wherever we operate.