Powering Progress Scorecard
Electricity Canada’s Powering Progress scorecard is a graphic compilation of Electricity Canada member data showcasing opportunities and leadership on sustainability initiatives. Current Affairs sits down with Averil Gougeon, Policy Analyst at Electricity Canada to discuss the data.
Hi Averil, thanks for joining us! What is Electricity Canada’s Powering Progress scorecard?
The Powering Progress Scorecard is a snapshot of national performance and it’s built from aggregated data across 42 indicators reported by Electricity Canada members from across the country. The scorecard is designed to drive continuous improvement, show leadership on sustainability, and increase both transparency and public understanding of how utilities are performing across environmental, social, and governance indicators.
We’ve always had a long form report on the sustainability indicators, but the scorecard is meant to be a digestible snapshot of our members hard work in the sustainability space rather than a long form written report.
What are the steps to pulling all of that data together from Electricity Canada members?
It is quite the process! You can tell as you read the sustainability scorecard that the indicators are pretty diverse, and members do lots of legwork to provide this data to Electricity Canada. There’s a lot of internal cross-departmental coordination. When that research is completed, our team verifies and validates submissions and checks in with members for any anomalies or outliers. That process helps us maintain data integrity for the project and then after validation, we aggregate the data nationally and analyze it to identify key trends. Then we jump into the design component of how we can translate these findings into something accessible and digestible to the public.
What do you want people to take away from each section?
There are five sections to the scorecard: community relationships, reliability, fair and safe workplace, environment, and electrification. Each section represents a different dimension of sustainable development. When it comes to environmental, social, and governance, no single section sort of is more important than the others, because they provide a good holistic picture of utility sustainability performance.
The first header is community relationships, which highlights how utilities invest in communities through capital projects, partnerships, and different policy commitments.
Reliability focuses on outage performance and then how utilities are managing climate related risks that would affect the service continuity.
Fair and safe workplace covers governance practices, health and safety performance, and diversity inclusion policies that would support a strong workforce.
Environment tracks, emissions, spills, air quality, and other indicators related to environmental protection and performance.
And electrification is where we look ahead and highlight how the electrification of transportation and heating is changing our grid. That’s where we see the greenhouse gas emission data sit because electrification is creating opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions economy wide. It also gives information on EVs, for when people are changing from fuel vehicles to electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles.
For our members, this is fleet specific and shows how they're committing to the same electrification that the general public is.
In the next five years, where do you see the biggest opportunity for advancement in environment, social and governance?
That's a tricky question because sustainability is an area where the priorities and opportunities are constantly evolving and so are advances in technology. How utilities might analyze data, manage assets, and how they're thinking of operating their systems more efficiently, maybe using more renewable energy all factors in.
Looking forward, one of the biggest opportunities for the electricity sector is that enablement of electrification. So, encouraging electrification across the Canadian economy and ensuring that the new infrastructure that's being built is reliable, resilient, and hopefully renewable. To make that successful, planning over the next five years must be proactive by thinking about the grid but also aligning that with what long-term sustainability goals are going to look like.
Overall, what does the scorecard say about our member companies?
It's a good news story that shows our members' commitment to overall sustainable action and a commitment to being transparent throughout their journey.
This round we saw overall decreases in figures like outages and interruptions, meaning an overall increase in reliability, and a 13% decrease in scope 1 emissions from last year. Meanwhile, more fleet vehicles are being electrified and overall spending on infrastructure is increased.
I think it's important to recognize and thank our members for continuing to submit that data year over year. It's impactful. It's useful. And it’s a great way to share with the general public what we're doing and for the utilities to be able to benchmark their own progress.
Read the full Powering Progress Scorecard on our website.
Other stories:
- Electricity 2026 Spring Hill Day on April 14
- Electricity Canada response to the Spring Economic Update
- CAMPUT 2026
- NERC Wildfire Workshop
