Utilities

These 13 companies reflect a sector with a particularly poor performance. Cooling water is particularly relevant in this sector and those companies that do report cooling water are particularly hard hit by this impact. For example both Edison’s and Fortum’s Return to Cost Ratio would improve to about 1 : 10 if cooling water was excluded from the assessment (see Annex I of the survey for details).
MVM, the worst performing company of this sector, is at the same time the worst performing company of the entire ADVANCE survey. MVM uses its resources more than 150 times less efficiently than ACEA the sector leader. Part of the variation among the companies can certainly be explained with the heterogeneous nature of this sector. However, MVM even performs very poorly compared to the second worst performer of this sector (Union Fenosa).

An analysis of the environmental value drivers of Sustainable Value is particularly revealing in the case of MVM. MVM uses CO2 about 23 times, NOX about 16 times, and waste about 20 times less efficiently than the benchmark. This does not vary widely from the sector average. The poor performance is mainly caused by the dismal performance contributions of SOx-emissions and water use. MVM uses SOx more than 850 times less efficiently than the benchmark and water about 400 times less efficiently. We estimate that MVM’s overall Return to Cost Ratio (2003) would rise to about 1 : 70 and Sustainable Value to about -18 billion €, if the company was bringing its SOx-performance in line with the rest of the sector.

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