Serving 1.1 million customers over 2,000 square miles in southern Ontario, Alectra Utilities is the largest municipally-owned utility in Ontario, Canada.
Alectra Utilities is aggressively pursuing 2050 net-zero goals, and has leveraged Copperleaf® since 2014 to embed climate resilience considerations across its business—making sustainability as ubiquitous and central to its operations as safety, affordability, and reliability. Alectra Utilities uses the Copperleaf Decision Analytics Solution to convey the urgency of climate resilience to all stakeholders, including regulators, investors, customers, and its own employees.
By expanding its value framework to consider impact to environment and community, Alectra Utilities has gained insight into not only the benefits and risks associated with pursuing a specific investment, but also the lost opportunity cost if an investment isn’t pursued.
Alectra Utilities has been recognized by ClimateWise for surpassing its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target, decreasing emissions by 23% from its 2016 baseline, and demonstrating progress toward its goal of a 38% decrease by 2025.
The use of tools like Copperleaf allow us to identify and prioritize where those investments yield the most amount of value for our shareholders and our residents and businesses that we support in our service area.
Our biggest challenge is determining the best balance between aging equipment and new technologies—
with limited resources. Adding to that, working within a heavily regulated industry where customers are encouraged to limit their use of our product makes the balancing act that much more interesting.
What Alectra has found is that by expanding the [Copperleaf] Value Framework, we capture the full range of investment value over the entire useful life of that particular investment.
Innovating in asset management
Tom Wasik, Vice President of Asset Management at Alectra Utilities was named a 2022 Innovation Champion by Energy Central for playing a major role in turning the company’s ESG goals and net-zero targets into actionable plans through several successful projects.
Copperleaf enables Alectra Utilities to compare different asset investment alternatives on a common economic scale to balance present-day affordability with long-term sustainability.