Sustainability

The health, safety and wellbeing of our people and the communities we operate within, is at the core of our values and remains our highest priority.

We uphold the value of ‘Live safely’ through everything we do. This includes ensuring high levels of psychological safety by providing an inclusive working environment where people feel valued, trusted, authentic and feel able to reach their full potential.

Our health and safety management system defines a broad range of initiatives which support all our people returning home safely every day. It includes:

• Safe working procedures
• Identifying hazards and risks
• Learning from hazard reporting and incidents
• Equipping leaders with resources necessary to promote safe behaviours
• Development programs to build capability and address human factors that can lead to safety incidents.

Greater emphasis is now being placed on promoting mental health and wellbeing while maintaining our dedication to reducing serious and preventable safety incidents.

In addition, our Inclusion and Diversity Strategy is continually evolving through a focus on gender balance, Aboriginal engagement, flexible working conditions, cultural diversity, LGBTIQ+ inclusion and education, and advocacy for people with disability. Satisfaction with these initiatives is tracked through the annual Employee Opinion Survey (EOS).

As local and state governments and communities commit to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, we are also implementing strategies to reduce emissions from our operations. Our target is to achieve a 30% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.

Distribution line losses from our networks are the source of 89% of our carbon emissions. By enabling greater penetration of residential rooftop solar as well as large-scale renewable connections, the CO2 associated with each unit of electricity we distribute falls.

In addition, we’re reducing the environmental impact of our operations through improved network efficiency, environmental protection initiatives, waste and recycling and adoption of Zero Emissions Vehicles.

Meanwhile, the resilience of our networks to the impacts of climate change is a high priority. The regions we operate in are characterised by high bushfire risk and susceptibility to climate change impacts such as extreme wind and storms and rising sea-levels.

Our asset management plans provide a long-term approach for how we invest in and manage our infrastructure in this context. Increasingly, they depend on technology for control operations, despatch, communications and supply chain management, making a rigorous cyber security program essential for sustaining our businesses.

From a customer perspective, the benefit of this work is felt in highly reliable power supplies. We aim to reduce both the number of customers affected and the duration of any power outages occurring due to either planned works or unplanned reasons like animals or vegetation hitting the lines.

The electrification of homes, businesses and transport is impacting the supply and demand for electricity while emerging products and technology are offering new choices for all customers, and this influences how we manage our networks.

One of the ways we support customer choice is by enabling homes with rooftop solar systems to export any extra electricity they generate into our networks. We also have a role in connecting batteries, electric vehicle charging and new community energy projects like microgrids.

We’re also investing in industry leading technology and innovation. This includes neighbourhood batteries, new devices to pre-empt network faults before customers experience an issue, and advanced data systems made freely available to the market.

To ensure these opportunities are accessible to all customers, we support programs to build their energy literacy.

Every day, we engage with a wide range of people in line with our value to be customer and community minded. Stakeholder engagement is captured within our operational planning, including major projects and new energy solutions, as well as our extensive regulatory processes. This engagement seeks to listen to the needs, interests and preferences of these people and helps us to make better business decisions.

A tiered governance system oversees and manages our approach to Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) matters. This involves our Board, executive, senior management and operational personnel. Through the existing risk management, finance and other governance systems we ensure a high standard of compliance.

CitiPower and Powercor are owned and managed by Victoria Power Networks (VPN). The VPN Board of Directors has overall responsibility for corporate governance and the strategic direction including our performance in sustainability. Working with the executive and senior management, it also ensures appropriate policies, procedures and systems are in place to support:

• Sustainability management and governance
• Financial, risk and corporate governance
• Cyber, privacy and data security
• Responsible supply chain management
• Workplace behaviour and employee conduct.

All business risks, including sustainability related risks, are assessed, prioritised and managed under our internationally certified Enterprise Risk Management Framework.