The energy you need to know how to report

Where a chain’s emissions sit

Emissions accounting follows three perimeters, defined by the international reference standard.

Perimeter	What it covers	In retail
Scope 1	Direct combustion: boilers, kitchen gas, company fleet	Relevant where there is a kitchen or gas heating
Scope 2	Electricity and heat purchased from the grid	The main item for nearly all stores
Scope 3	Value chain: suppliers, logistics, products, travel	The largest volume, and the hardest to reconstruct

For a chain of stores, most of what can be governed directly sits in Scope 2, and it is also the part that can be measured precisely, without estimates.

Location-based and market-based, the two numbers that must be disclosed

Scope 2 is calculated in two ways, and both must be reported because they answer different questions.

Location-based. The kWh consumed multiplied by the average emission factor of the national electricity grid. It describes the real physical impact of that consumption, where it occurred.

Market-based. It accounts for contractual instruments, that is, supply contracts and purchased Guarantees of Origin. It describes what you bought.

What a Guarantee of Origin actually does. It certifies that an equivalent amount of renewable energy was fed into the grid somewhere. It lowers the market-based figure, does not change the location-based one, and does not reduce by a single kilowatt-hour what your sites actually consume. It is a legitimate and useful instrument, but it does not replace efficiency: a careful auditor looks at both numbers, and so does a demanding corporate customer.

Why the aggregate figure is no longer enough

The group’s annual total is enough to fill in a table, not to govern or to defend a target. You need per-site data, at least monthly, for four very concrete reasons.

1. Setting targets by format, because a flagship and a corner store cannot have the same target.
2. Proving that an improvement is due to actions taken and not to the closure of a few sites.
3. Answering corporate customers and property owners, who ask for data on the individual building.
4. Standing up to an audit: whoever has only the total cannot reconstruct how they got there.

The energy audit

Article 8 of Italian Legislative Decree 102/2014, which transposed the EU Energy Efficiency Directive, together with its subsequent updates requires an energy audit of large companies and energy-intensive companies, every four years, with mandatory submission to the competent national body.

For a chain of stores the audit is not done site by site: clusters of sites homogeneous by format, size, and climate zone are identified, and representative samples of each cluster are analyzed. A monitoring system already installed cuts the work considerably, because it provides the measurements that would otherwise require dedicated instrument campaigns.

The less obvious advantage: whoever has monitoring running reaches the deadline with the data already in hand, instead of launching an emergency collection three months before the due date.

The mistake you pay for at year end

Reporting built backwards, chasing energy bills in December, costs more time and holds up worse. Bills arrive with different delays from site to site, some are estimated and will be adjusted later, supplier switches break the series, and reconstructing who validated what becomes impossible. Data collected continuously, by contrast, is already there when needed, and is traceable down to the measurement.

Who asks you for the data, and what they really want to see

Requests come from different parties, and each looks at a different aspect of the same data.

Who asks	What they want to see
Whoever verifies the reporting	The method and the traceability: where the number comes from, who validated it, whether it’s repeatable
The corporate customer upstream	Per-site data and the emission factors used, because they must consolidate it into their own Scope 3
The property owner	The individual building’s consumption, often with clauses already written into the lease
Banks and rating agencies	The historical series and the consistency between declared targets and measured results
The body competent for the audit	Real measurements on representative clusters, not design estimates

What you need to have in hand

The data ready before anyone asks for it.

1. Consumption per site and per carrier, electricity, gas, and water, at least monthly.
2. Square meters and opening hours per site, updated for the year’s changes.
3. Emission factors used, with reference year and declared source.
4. Supply contracts and Guarantees of Origin tied to each point of delivery.
5. Baseline and targets, with the calculation method written down and repeatable.
6. Data traceability: where it comes from, who validates it, where it is stored.