New service helps telecommuters measure their carbon footprints

An innovative new partnership will make it possible for companies to track their home-based workers’ energy use and carbon emissions so they can develop up-to-date and accurate corporate carbon reports.

The new service is a joint effort between AlertMe, which provides technologies for smart energy monitoring and management, and AMEE, which verifies carbon-related data to help companies, governments and consumers calculate their carbon footprints and energy consumption. The home-based carbon tracker is designed to help businesses meet their carbon reduction commitments.

With growing regulation of carbon emissions reporting, including the introduction of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) in April 2010, many companies are currently manually gathering data and compiling reports on their enterprise carbon footprints.  Such manual efforts are not only prone to error, but are time consuming and can cause logistical and coordination bottlenecks.

Those calculations become even more difficult for businesses with a significant number of employees who work from home full or part time.

With the new carbon tracker service, home workers will set up an AlertMe Energy Kit to monitor and report on their home energy usage. This information will be sent to AMEE, which will calculate the equivalent carbon footprint. That data will then be fed back to the company in a format that’s easy to understand and track, and which can be combined with the rest of the company’s carbon footprint information.

Home-based carbon data can be viewed live, per-home or collectively. It can also be stored and reported in any format to meet with standard reporting frameworks, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and CRC, or to provide visual graphs that represent the organisation’s carbon usage over time.

Home workers will also be able to monitor and control their energy use by accessing the AlertMe dashboard through any internet connection. They can use that information to better monitor and manage energy consumption, reduce their carbon footprints and save on electricity bills. By installing AlertMe’s SmartPlugs, home-based workers can even track the consumption of individual appliances in the home (such as a computer for work use).

“With the growing popularity of home-working, the ability to monitor and report on home-workers’ carbon footprint is crucial,” said Pilgrim Beart, founder and CEO of AlertMe. “The carbon tracker will allow companies to fully understand their organisational carbon footprint, be transparent in their sustainability and auditing programmes and will provide invaluable information on the impact of home-working on the environment. And most importantly this solution is simple for homeworkers to use removing the manual processes which have held this area back in the past.”

AMEE’s platform aggregates and keeps carbon and environmental data up-to-date, ensuring that companies get accurate, timely information. The company’s clients include DECC and Energy Savings Trust.

“Home-working, particularly technology-enabled, is going through a new wave of growth,” said Gavin Starks, founder and CEO of AMEE. “We’re pleased to be helping businesses understand the impact on the environment, as they continue to seek ways to identify sustainability best practices.”